LOL, no biggie. I don’t use MCE, I don’t like it at all really. So, I’m unsure of the HD on/off toggle on MCE.

I do know it is on browser and it is not in boxee.

BTW–head on over to my Revo forums. More good things to chat about there than here in the comments section.
http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum/

Anyway, I like to use the Media Center Netflix player rather than a browser. The HD icon to toggle between HD and SD is only available when using a browser, correct?

What are the steps needed to overclock the Revo to 1.92? I might be willing to give that a shot…

Well, I posted that info a few weeks back. Besides, you can just click the HD icon on the Netflix player and uncheck HD and it will automatically play at 1500 SD. No need to do so manually in the menu.

Yeah, hopefully they do update the player soon. Though, OC’ing the revo to 1.92 allows it to play in 3800 bitrate in a browser with ease.

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/t/89031.aspx?PageIndex=1

“ALT+SHIFT+Left Click gives you a menu you can choose from to see the bitrate”

Mine was defaulting to 3800 and was unwatchable. Next I tried 2600 and there was still some lag. 1500 is the one that works for me.

Hopefully this is just a band aid and there will be another Netflix player update that will allow the Revo to stream Netflix in HD.

All flash and silverlight players work differently. As in some will use more resources and CPU than others. Like the Youtube flash player may hit the Revo’s cpu, actually this applies to all PC’s, more than say Hulu’s Flash player. Same goes for Neftlix’s Silverlight player vs another sites player.

Yes, the current netflix player is a huge cpu hog and is hitting low power cpu pc’s pretty hard right now. Even those with video cards that support gpu acceleration. It’s not the Revo’s fault. There is no update or ram increase that will fix it. This is all about CPU and resource usage. All pc’s are experiencing this except if you have over a 2.33 dual core machine it can take the extra CPU hit and play smoothly.

Over the past few weeks, Net flix has updated their player multiple times. Sometimes it updates and the revo plays butter smooth in HD….then I’ll see another update come through and it’s laggy again. So, until NF nails their player to use less CPU in HD, the Revo and other low power CPU pc’s will continue to struggle.

Hope that helps explain things.

Last night I decided to watch upstairs on the Revo and had all kinds of problems. Finally ended up using Firefox and toggling off the HD and it finally worked.

Seems pretty clear that the Revo just can’t handle the HD Netflix. Is this correct? Any hope for some kind of software fix? Would upping the RAM to 4GB help?

There is now a toggle to “enable” HD playback. Just hover over the “HD” button on the viewer and uncheck the box that says “allow HD”
This will globally force videos to only stream at a max of 1500, instead of the previous default of 3800.

This isn’t a real solution so much as a band-aid, but if they aren’t going to resolve the HD streaming anytime soon, it’s still very welcome!

Yeah, I figured that one out messing with the Silverlight Config in either browser. I’ve had to just set it at 1500 and leave it. Otherwise, I can’t even use Netflix anymore.

I typically watched NF in Boxee. But since NF is forcing HD on us, boxee does not have a way to throttle the bitrate manually. Aaaarrghhh!

http://www.pauljroberts.com/forum

I found that if your video starts playing at a higher bitrate (2600+), you can manually adjust it down to 1500 and then move the timeline slider back just a few frames forcincg the player to re-buffer the video. This will fix the “never recovering” issue, but you’ll still be stuck watching in Standard def. Shame really.

Yeah, NF worked in HD great the first few days. Then after that it went to crap! Super Laggy and I have to use the Silverlight Config to manually set the bitrate to 1500 (SD) in order to even watch it anymore. If not, you’re forced into HD stream and it never recovers….. They’ve changed something after the initial release.

Silverlight 4.0 was released yesterday too, but it made no improvements.

It’s not the revo. Many people are having the same issue. My revo played them just fine the first few days, but then it too started to skip badly.

If you play the video in IE or FFOx and hold the Shift+Alt keys then left click the mouse, you will get the Silverlight Diagnostics box to open. You can get an on screen view of the Playback bitrate and the down load bit rate. Even if you manually lower the download bitrate to 2600 or higher to 3800, it will auto play to that same rate no matter what. To add more to this, your ISP connection speed also dictates what both rates will be, which can cause more stuttering if it does not detect it correctly.

You’ll notice that HD kicks in at 2600 playback bit rate. The problem lies with the fact that lately Silverlight plays back at the same bit rate as the download rate. This leave no time for the buffer to build. Also, silverlight is supposed to auto throttle this setting, but it does not always do so. I have had it work just fine and smooth on one movie and terrible on others.

The bad thing is, HD playback is automatic, so it will always try to play at that rate. Which lately, is terrible. So, I’ve had to use the Silverlight Diagnostics to manually set the download buffer rate to SD quality (1500) so that it always plays in SD and I can now watch NFlix again! The SD quality was the normal setting for PC / Mac until the HD option kicked in 2 weeks ago.

I think NF has some tweaking to do.

I attempted to play through:
- Google Chrome
- WMC
- Boxee

all of which had the exact same issues. I dunno if it’s the Silverlight 3 update or what, but my internet connection was fine, and the CPU usage was consistently less than 40%… So I’m not sure what the problem was.

I will have to try running through Firefox later tonight.