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> back to flash? Flash never was an option.
Isn't that how streaming to PCs works if you don't opt in to Silverlight? If not, substitute "flash" with whatever the current option is.
Netflix on demand has always been silverlight based.
How long is it going to take, how many hundreds of millions of wasted dollars, how many failed companies, before people realize that if you're going to charge people to watch video, you should show it in reasonable quality, not godawful low-bitrate VC-1? And it isn't as if good encoders are expensive or something like that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Player frame rate has zero impact on flash video playback 2. Established CDNs for flash delivery has been in existence for years(Akami,Influxis..) 3. Flash's video capabilities include playback of H.264,mp4,mov,3gp...(from HD to mobile!) 4. Red 5 is free as beer. I dont think its a feature based choice. Looks more like a marketing deal with MS for wider adoption of the format.
You're missing the key feature: DRM. The studios won't sign off unless they trust the DRM.
I mean, you have a large number of complaints that Netflix is forcing people to use software made by "evil M$". You have people complaining that PPC isn't supported. You have people complaining that they wasted time supported Mac at all. You have people complaining that their decade old CPUs aren't supported, and others complaining they need to get beefier encoding to allow for better quality.
What's wrong with the Silverlight player? Runs fine on my Mac, except for a strange interaction between it and the NVidia chipsets that causes it to tear video (apparently it doesn't happen on ATI-based Macs.) There's a workaround you can use with Firefox that fixes that, at any rate. Certainly seems to suck less CPU than Flash, which can peg both cores of my MacBook Pro just playing a YouTube video full-screen.
The previous player ran very well on a five year old Dell laptop.
What's wrong with the Silverlight player? Runs fine on my Mac, except for a strange interaction between it and the NVidia chipsets that causes it to tear video (apparently it doesn't happen on ATI-based Macs.) There's a workaround you can use with Firefox that fixes that, at any rate. Certainly seems to suck less CPU than Flash, which can peg both cores of my MacBook Pro just playing a YouTube video full-screen.
I tried it the other day on my macbook pro (2.5Ghz), and it skipped several video frames every minute or so. The audio was fine, but the skipping was jarring and unwatchable. The previous player ran very well on a five year old Dell laptop.
I also tested it briefly on Safari 4 and it seems to be better.