Anyone here ever stream Netflix through their PC?

[BGCarrera32]

I finally got my hdmi-to-TV issues with my PC resolved (bad HDMI cable), but have run into another problem:

Netflix will stream through/to my PC just fine, but after about 15 minutes will start to hesitate on the video, as if the PC is running out of memory or video memory. Its acting as if its not dumping the previous several minutes of video. The video will chop, refreshing about every 5-7 seconds, audio is unaffected. Basically you can't watch at this point and it doesn't fix itself.

It does not seem to be browser sensitive per say, but IE seemed to stream several minutes longer than Firefox. Could be a fluke, not sure.

Any settings I need to check or have you run into this before? Not finding anything in the Netflix help area.

Thanks!

[onewhippedpuppy]

Works fine for me on my computer. Any chance it's your internet connection? It almost sounds like the stream can't keep up with the video.

[campbellcj]

It sounds like a network bandwidth issue to me. Can the same PC stream from other sources such as Youtube without stuttering?

[mixer911]

I just tried my netflix,no problem with netflix
try a hard reset
maybe something running in the background?
security settings?

[BGCarrera32]

No stuttering on YouTube or anything else...that's what's puzzling.

Got 15 minutes into "Battle of the X Planes" between Lockheed and Boeing last night and the vid started chopping.

Grrrr...

[john70t]

When paying $10 per GB for "high speed" internet, it's an expensive way of watching poor-quality movies.

Your ISP Is Screwing You: As Your Service Costs Go Up, Their Backbone Costs Go Down | TechCrunch
"Netflix argues that the cost to deliver an incremental Gigabyte is “less than one cent, and falling.”

Perhaps an invisible hand is at work?

[mixer911]

Originally Posted by john70t

When paying $10 per GB for "high speed" internet, it's an expensive way of watching poor-quality movies.

Your ISP Is Screwing You: As Your Service Costs Go Up, Their Backbone Costs Go Down | TechCrunch
"Netflix argues that the cost to deliver an incremental Gigabyte is “less than one cent, and falling.”

Perhaps an invisible hand is at work?

Yes but a great babysitter on the iphone.
Are we there yet ?
Money well spent.

[campbellcj]

What kind of result do you get on an internet speed test such as Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test ?

Note there is a quality/bandwidth setting on the netflix web site under your account settings. You might want to try notching that down and see if it helps. I'm not sure how well their system auto-detects throughput and changes the quality setting, or if it even does that at all. (Hulu for example has an auto quality mode.)

[John Rogers]

I play video all the time and several years ago used a "home theater pc" to bump up all the cable channels to 1080P and never had any display issues. I had the video and the browser set to not cache or save anything so little memory was sued and nothing was saved to disk. Some searching found these things:

1. Are you using Firefox to watch Netflix? Go into about:config and change CGDisableCoalescedUpdates to False.

Otherwise, if you're watching Netflix at a different resolution than your Desktop resolution, do the following:
1. Open nVidia's control panel
2. Expand Display and go to Adjust desktop size and position
3. Change "When a resolution lower than my display's native resolution..." to "Use NVIDIA scaling with fixed aspect ratio"


Another post had this from the forum: Parallels Forums
responding users said it worked.

Uninstall Windows Media Player, Window Media Format runtime environments and Netflix Movie Player completely.

If you are running Windows Media Player 10 or lower, please skip to step 10 to uninstall the Netflix Movie Player.

1.) Go to the Start Menu
2.) Click on Control Panel
3.) Click on Add or Remove Programs
4.) Uninstall Windows Media Player 11
5.) Restart Computer
6.) Uninstall Windows Media Format 11 Runtime
7.) Restart Computer
8.) Uninstall Microsoft User-Mode Driver Framework Feature Pack 1.0
9.) Restart Computer
10.) Uninstall Netflix Movie Player
11.) Restart Computer
- Locate and rename the DRM folder.
12.) Open My Computer
13.) Click Tools, then Folder Options
14.) From the Folder Options window, click the View tab, and select the Show hidden files and folders button
15.) Next, uncheck the Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) box
16.) Click OK
17.) Open My Computer
18.) Open the C: drive
19.) Open the Documents and Settings folder
20.) Open the All Users folder
21.) Right-click the DRM folder and select Rename (Please rename to RMD)
- Download and reinstall Windows Media Player
22.) Visit http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...1/default.aspx to reinstall Windows Media Player.
23.) Restart computer.
24.) Windows media Security component upgrade:

You will need to reinstall the Netflix Movie Player when you try to watch another movie.