Slashdot Mirror
Uproar Over Netflix's New Instant Viewer
almechist writes "Many Netflix customers are up in arms over the new instant-watch player powered by Microsoft's Silverlight. The official Netflix blog is full of complaints from users who decry not only the new player's quality but also the way it's being distributed, with many claiming they were deceived into downloading it. Once you opt for the new player, the old Windows Media based player won't function, not on any computer associated with the account. The new player is supposedly still beta, but NF members are strongly encouraged (some say tricked) by NF into the so-called 'upgrade,' which is permanent — there is no way to opt out. The marked decrease in video quality seen by those who have switched is perhaps not surprising, since the old player could utilize bit streams up to twice as fast as the new one, but this information is nowhere given out by NF. So far NF has been answering all complaints with variations on 'tough luck pal, you're stuck with it,' but many customers are so disgusted they're ready to cancel their NF membership. This could be a public relations disaster in the making for Netflix."
Really. No one wants DRM. The process of taking your computer from you is slow and incremental.
no, really. cancel your membership. now. everyone. then they will change. consumer whining does nothing. comsumers taking their money elsewhere does everything.
I was one of the early adopters. Within a week of the release of NetFlix streaming on the XBox, my PC feed became useless. It would keep stopping to buffer, and eventually stop indefinitely. When I called NetFlix to complain, they suggested I try the Silverlight player. The quality was roughly on par with YouTube, but the buffering problems went away, so I went with it.
I'm wondering if the problem is not so much poor software quality as it is a bottleneck in the feed itself. Perhaps the servers can't take the load, or perhaps they simply don't have enough well-placed bandwidth. Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
well from the summary, it sounds like it's server side, because other computers on the same account can't use the old player anymore either, so a simple uninstall and reinstall wouldn't work.
it's also, if you notice, not exactly a NEW problem.
And if you look deeper, you'll see that the quality has been increased quite a bit over the past few months.
add in that the compression used in the new streams is much better than the old one, allowing for better quality over lower bandwidth.
but then, why use facts at all.
why do i feel that this is more of a post by some disgruntled linux user who "can't get teh fee service that i pay nothing extra for to work on my selected OS" than any real news....
oh wait, it's because that's what this is and it's on /. for a reason.
fuck off freetard.
This isn't the first time Netflix has canned a popular feature in favor of an inferior solution for unfathomable reasons. Anyone remember being able to have multiple queues on your (shared) account with someone? Thrown out, in the name of "efficiency" to much booing. Now they're signing up with Microsoft to force Silverlight onto the world, reminding me of Medica's website -- which is completely inaccessible in anything but Internet Exploiter thanks to them deploying Sharepoint for everything. Ironic, for a company that's federally mandated to be accessible to the disabled. If your accessibility software isn't "Microsoft Compatible", I guess you're S.O.L. Sorry, a little off topic there... point is... Yeah, it's underhanded, but not intentionally so.
Here's what really happened:
1. Management got a phone call from Microsoft, or an MSCE Certified Bonehead, who said "Switch to Silverlight, they will wuv you 4ever!"
2. Management, knowing absolutely jack fricking crap about their tech infrastructure, says "We can't go wrong with Microsoft, make it so!"
3. The developers get the order From On High, and beg and plead with their supervisors... "please god, don't do it."
4. God (aka the department manager) says to the developers "So it is written, and so shall it be... for I like my job, and fear retribution."
5. The developers rolled out a crap implementation (beta) and it pleased Management, who decreed it shall become the Law of the Website.
6. The change was implemented half-arsed, rushed through testing, and the web developers and database people really didn't want to spend a lot of time revamping the entire
engine just to support the latest management whim, so the "undo" bit was left off. Minor oops!
7. The users came forth on the Anointed Day and screamed and flailed, and conspiracy and deceit was cried throughout the Thousand Forums.
8. Management... hears nothing.
9. The poor bastards making $10 an hour in Support do though, and several take up the habit of smoking (what? Well, whatever was convenient, of course).
Epilogue:
10. In about 4 weeks, enough meetings from stressed Support managers will percolate to the board room that "there's a problem of some kind."
11. Management will spend another two weeks in meetings, phone calls, emails, and putting their thumbs up their arse.
12. A decree will come down... "Fix it." It will be vague, badly-defined, and cause all who hoped for resolution to cringe.
13. In the end, a lone Developer will smote the demon upon the mountain-side, adding an "undo" feature... and probably getting fired later for not getting approval. But it will save thousands of complaints and hundreds of cancelled accounts.
Isn't Real Life fun?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
While I am remiss over the lower quality streams when compared to the old windows media player stream the added mac compatibility as a result of using silver light goes far in making my mixed os household a lot happier.
So far I have not experienced any of these buffering problems and I hope they get fixed soon for the users experiencing them.
If anything I think users should be pressing netflix to be more aggressive in adding more movies to the instant watch service - I can only watch 30 rock so many times. Expanding the program's feature set by adding things such as subtitles or alternative language audio streams would also be welcome.
Seconding this. I've been using the Silverlight-based player, and it's been ace on OS X. The quality isn't stellar, but it's not bad enough to bother me either. It's a lot better than say, Youtube, but not as good as Quicktime streaming. It's maybe a little worse than DVD for me, which is perfectly fine by my standards.
Only problems I've had with it were occasional movies with audio out of sync, but it's a rare problem. (I've had it happen two or three times out of at least 50)
The DRM doesn't really bother me in this case. I'm renting these movies, not buying them. The DRM isn't depriving me of anything. (I'm really anti-DRM for things one owns, but seriously, for rental services, DRM makes perfect sense to me.)
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
The real reason for this change is that there are tools that rip the old Windows Media stream and let you save the instant movies on your computer. So far I haven't seen a similar tool for the Silverlight streams.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
I read that part too and decided to leave well enough alone. People are trained to click on upgrade buttons.
At least they've got a player to whine about....
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
Since most Netflix members still use the service to watch DVD's I highly doubt it.
It looks like a flag is set for the account when you "upgrade."
So just cancel your account and sign up for a new one. Not like you get any special deals for your long-term loyalty.
Back in June of 2008 Netflix was going to shutdown the feature for managing separate queues. They sent an email and I canceled my account that day. Not sure how many of us there were, but they reversed course quickly. If you're pissed about the silverlight player. Close your account and email them a note to say why you did it. Maybe this will be a non-issue in the morning... Here is a link to the original plan on Ars Technica: Netflix killing extra queues
Really?
The old Netflix Instant Viewer required you to download a bunch of crap as well.
The new one is the exact same way, and provides better video quality to every user I've talked to. What exactly is the issue here? It honestly sounds like a paranoid anti-MS rant. I suppose there might be some bugs, though anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that the Silverlight-based system is more stable.
The angry comments on the blog come primarily from users who have PPC macs -- users who weren't supported under the old system either. Although this comes down to being Microsoft's fault, the VC-1 codec is currently the only DRM'd solution that the movie studios see as being viable. Like it or not, DRM is going to be the reality for streaming video for some time to come.
Unfortunately, Microsoft have chosen not to support PPC machines with the codec, primarily because there are very few PPC machines powerful enough to decode VC-1 video in real-time. It sucks for PPC Mac users, but you should be able to see their logic.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I just logged in to check, and the quality is fine. About as good as standard TV.
I think it is sort of funny that netflix gave this service to existing customers for free. and now people are bitching about the quality of this service that i see as basically icing on my dvd subscription cake.
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
How could the 'rewinding' be any worse? From what I've seen, wanting to rewind for even a second requires a complete buffer dump and redownload of the content (IE I get to wait for ~10 seconds minimum for it to buffer again).
I often get a 'wait one' moment and want to go back ~10 seconds or so and see something again, so it really annoys me.
Keeping ~10-30 second of buffer data even after playing would be useful.
As would a non-browser player program, I'd like to get rid of the frames and such and have a 'force on top'- basically a PiP on my computer.
I've also had a number of audio synch issues like Draconix.
This stuff gets really annoying; I want to pay, I really do. That's why I got the netflix membership. Couldn't they make my viewing at least as pleasurable as downloading the video from some torrent site?
I don't read AC A human right
.torrent + utorrent + VLC = WTF is NetFlix?
If I could watch the instant content in Linux, I would already be a customer.
For now though, my torrents provide me the latest content, DRM-free, and they usually arrive faster than the mailed DVDs.
It's not platform independent and it's performance, for me, has been a bit shit compared to the alternatives (including Java) and it supports a company that abuses its monopoly.
I can't think of one good reason to support a company that forces something like that on people.
The codec-standard being used doesn't have a huge amount to do with video quality. The implementation matters a lot more than the codec.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
You can certainly find commercial H.264 video encoders that produce horrible results.
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
What x264 has going for it, are the same things Xvid and Lavc (ffmpeg/mplayer) have going for them... Lots of people spending lots of time, dedicated to improving the encoder, for everyone's benefit. Whether you love or hate open source, perceptual coding is really the canonical example where proprietary software just can't compete. Actually LAME, Musepack, et al, fall into this category as well, on the audio side of the spectrum.
Of course, the most prominent counter-example would be Theora, which has turned into a bottomless pit of embarrassment, but several-dozen to one isn't bad odds at all.
But I digress.
Netflix does a lousy job at video encoding. They could do a much better job, while sticking with VC-1, but they instead chose not to invest the slightest effort into it. Switching to x264 would help a lot, but switching to Xvid, or Lavc MPEG-2 would do almost as much, really.
In conclusion, where'd my bottle of whiskey go?...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Yes, how DARE customers expect a quality product.
It's like they think they should be valued for the fact that
they allow companies that take their money to continue to thrive.
Imagine the GALL of a customer expecting to be treated with
respect by people they give money to.
That's not "entitlement".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You can rent a physical good, like a disk or a cartridge, but you can't rent information.
At least, not until they have brain implants put into all their customers that delete the memories after the rental period is over. I'd give it 15 years or so.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Yes, how DARE customers expect a quality product....Imagine the GALL of a customer expecting to be treated with respect by people they give money to.
Note, in my OP i specified existing customers. If i recently became a subscriber because of watch instantly, i would be annoyed if the service declined (which i have not seen any evidence of personally - although i have had A/V sync issue specifically with animated content which i contacted netflix about with no reply).
As for respect? I have had pretty good experiences with netflix in the past. It does seem totally ridiculous that people can't 'back out' of the silverlight upgrade. I think perhaps netflix underestimated how quickly watch instantly would be adopted.
Let me just add, 95% of the shit we all bitch about (myself included) on slashdot is evidence of entitlement. We aren't complaining about not having food, or being jailed or executed for voicing our opinions online. We are bitching about not being able to play our movies or music everywhere we want or crappy software. Sure, if you pay for a product, you should get what you pay for. But remember that we are lucky to have access to the technologies that we have.
1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 377 610 987 1597 2584 4181 6765
OH puleeze...it's their service. They don't even have to HAVE streaming. If you don't like it then drop it.
The new player works in both Firefox and IE and is a MAJOR quality improvement over the previous player. It starts faster, the picture is dramatically better. The previous version never had blockiness but at ANY quality setting it looked like it had a blur effect applied. Their hacked together scripts NEVER detected the correct bitrate for me, requiring me to manually set the bitrate. Except of course that sometimes the appropriate bitrates didn't even appear as an option when I used the key sequence to change it manually.
The new player has no issues, it auto scales to available bandwidth and recalculates on the fly every 6 seconds with no video interruption. Unlike the old version, you can jump around in the video timeline fairly quickly. With the old version it required 2mins plus of buffering.
For the people talking about ripping streams, the rippers don't work with the current version of media player and the DRM refuses to work without it.
That's a good thing. This is hype over a non-issue. The quality of the silverlight player is dramatically better than the old crap. The old crap only worked in IE with WMP and was blurry as shit.
Seriously folks -- how about some perspective here huh?
This is a service you pay for and guess what? You get to watch movies online, anytime you want! Yet you bitch and moan that some cog in the engine changed to make the service better!
Oh "I'm going to cancel my subscription, that'll show them" and "This is going to be a PR disaster" -- YEAH since all 19 of you neck bearded know it alls will rock Netflix Corporate and they'll be sending hand written notes with chocolates in them to your home address with a year's free subscription included.
Get off it. WIMP always sucked butt. Silverlight is better and at least runs on a Mac too. DRM, ShmeeRM -- if you want to avoid that well, make your own movie I guess or develop a work around like going to the library and checking out a book!
Lucky for us, the necessity of physical media is quickly going the way of the Dinosaur. Why would we ever need a physical disk to insert into our digital players? It makes no sense.
SearchIRC - Now with live chat directory!