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Choppy Video with Netflix

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Choppy Video with Netflix

Silverlight forums > Getting Started with Silverlight Question
After reviewing the complaints about Silverlight and Netflix's Instant Watch movies on this site, and as of today's date, it appears that the same thing is still occurring at Netflix in that they still seem to play dumb and claim they haven't heard about any problems. They then refer you to Silverlight tech support. Originally, when I encountered a choppy video problem with Silverlight 4 on my Shuttle 2.6 GHz. running XP Professional, 512 MB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 2400 AGP graphics card, I decided to try upgrading to 2GB of RAM and a Sapphire HD4650 graphics card but nothing improved. I then started researching the complaints and they were coming from a wide variety of types of hardware, browsers and bandwidths. I am using a 16Mbit/sec connection so I was pretty sure I wasn't under running the buffers. The tip off for me came from a couple comments I saw from the Silverlight tech support which basically said that they hadn't figured out the best way to dynamically adjust their buffers under a wide variety of platforms. The best suggestion I found on the web to deal with this is to manually set the buffer rate in Silverlight by holding down [Shift][Alt] and left click the mouse pointer in the movie window to bring up a Silverlight menu where you can select Stream Manager and manually select the Buffering Rate between 500 and 3800. You need to do this every time you start a new movie. I end up just setting it at the lowest 500 and the choppy video seems to go away. I might be compromising the performance of Silverlight but at least the movie is watchable where it was too annoying to watch with periodic choppy video before.
Tuesday, January 04, 2011 2:24 PM Reply | Quote | sloflyer10 30 Points

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Top related threads Netflix videos and sound streaming is choppy...Why? Choppy Video on Netflix Another Choppy Video Problem (?) Choppy sound. Netflix Problem

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Sorry, my post wasn't a question but was more of a statement of the experience I had finding a temporary fix for a problem that seems to be plaguing a number of people using Netflix and Silverlight. I've been using MS O/S's and software since the company first began in the early 80's. Can't say I've seen a worse problem in the fundamental implimentation of a program that affected such a broad number of users in the last 30 years. MS and Netflix need to get their collective acts togeather and figure out a solution instead of pointing fingers at eachother or the end user. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.
Thursday, January 06, 2011 10:42 PM Reply | Quote | sloflyer10 30 Points

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Hi,

Choppy Video with Netflix

I'm sorry I not clearly understand you.

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What is your exact problem(issue)? Could you explain your question in another words? Thanks.

Regards
Thursday, January 06, 2011 1:44 AM Reply | Quote | Daoping Liu - MSFT 12,565 Points

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Sorry, my post wasn't a question but was more of a statement of the experience I had finding a temporary fix for a problem that seems to be plaguing a number of people using Netflix and Silverlight. I've been using MS O/S's and software since the company first began in the early 80's. Can't say I've seen a worse problem in the fundamental implimentation of a program that affected such a broad number of users in the last 30 years. MS and Netflix need to get their collective acts togeather and figure out a solution instead of pointing fingers at eachother or the end user. You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.
Thursday, January 06, 2011 10:42 PM Reply | Quote | sloflyer10 30 Points

You sir are my hero! The settings took a few seconds to take affect, but it solved my playback issue on Netflix.

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Friday, January 28, 2011 9:08 PM Reply | Quote | John.R.Ellis 0 Points

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I end up just setting it at the lowest 500 and the choppy video seems to go away. I might be compromising the performance of Silverlight but at least the movie is watchable where it was too annoying to watch with periodic choppy video before. Can you do me a favor: try going to http://www.iis.net/media/experiencesmoothstreaming and playing the video there. Do you get a better or similar experience to when you play back video on the Netflix site? If you use the slider in the top right corner to limit your maximum bitrate, is there a max bitrate that appears to work well for your machine? thanks! - Tom Tom Taylor | Microsoft Silverlight

Saturday, February 05, 2011 9:12 PM Reply | Quote | Tom Taylor [MSFT]1 250 Points

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Hi everyone,

Choppy Video with Netflix

I know this thread is about a month old but I've been experiencing the same problem with Netflix as a lot of other people with the choppy video playback.

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I knew the problem couldn't be with my hardware since I have a 2007 iMac with a Core2 Duo running at 2.4 MHz and 4 GB RAM. My friend has a 2008 Mac Pro with eight cores running at 2.7 MHz and 10 GB RAM and he's experiencing the same problem. Both machines are running the latest version of Snow Leopard. Both of us also have Windows machines with the same issue. The only thing all these machines have in common is our ISP, Rogers Cable in NB, Canada. I went to the video you mentioned and let it run for a while. It gives the same problem as Netflix. It'll play just fine at around 24 fps and, every once in a while, it'll drop down to 0 fps or a very low fps for a few seconds, then it picks up again and plays fine. What I noticed is that the bit rate goes up every once in a while but it tends to want to stay at 350 kbps most of the time. At the same time that's happening, I'm monitoring the download speed on my end and it fluctuates between 2 and 4 Mbps most of the time but sometimes it comes all the way down to 0. My ISP is advertising a download rate of 10 Mbps and I do get it if I go to speed test websites but I don't get that constantly on video streams. Now, with Flash sites, I don't get the choppy playback but I also understand that Flash doesn't dynamically adjust the streaming rate the way Silverlight does. With Flash, if your connection slows down, it'll just stop playing altogether when it his the end of the buffer and that's exactly what happens when I play movies on Flash sites a lot of the time. Basically, my point is that it seems to be an issue related to the ISP rather than Silverlight or the user's hardware. It's quite possible that most if not all of the people experiencing problems with Netflix and other Silverlight based movie sites either have an ISP that does poor traffic management or the path between their ISP and the video server is clogged up somehow. That is just my two cents.
Monday, March 07, 2011 2:55 AM Reply | Quote | Saboin1 0 Points

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Tom, sorry it took awhile to get back to you but I just tried what you requested and the video seems to run fine for me at 2750 kbps with no choppy video or dropouts unlike what I have been experiencing with Silverlight. I noticed running the video in full screen mode is more demanding on the bit rate requirements so that is the mode I was testing it in. I noticed the fps would occassionally drop from 24 down to the low 20's to high teens and a couple brief moments all the way down to 10 but this had no noticable appearence in watching the video. I also reduced the max bit rate down to 650 kbps and noticed a degradation in the resolution and vibrance of colors in the video but no choppiness or frozen frames. I think the guys comments below on this thread about it being the bit rate from the isp has nothing to do with the problem, at least in my case.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011 7:44 PM Reply | Quote | sloflyer10 30 Points

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Choppy Video with Netflix

I have been also having issues using Silverlight to stream Netflix movies. I also tried the video link above and had the same results. The play was a little choppy or slow at 2750 kbps, but not nearly as bad as Netflix videos are. When I changed the bitrate to the lowest (350kbps) there were no problems.

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I also tried the [shift]+[Alt]+right-click during Netflix playback. I was able to adjust the bitrate, but this had very little affect during playback. At the highest the video was extremely choppy, and the lowest it was very choppy...not much difference between extremely and very :).
Sunday, May 08, 2011 11:30 AM Reply | Quote | dhwjr8682 0 Points

What everybody keeps missing is that MSC does not bother to use the AGP cards for the video, they rely on the processor instead. I have two machines one, 2.2Ghz, 2GB the other 2.0Ghz, 1GB when I use the info screen neither one attempted to use the AGP card. This is the real problem and it is all MSCs fault.

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Not that Netflix is innocent, they should have verified what MSC was giving them, instead of relying on what they said they would get. So those of us with not the absolute fastest computers suffer. Come on MSC do what is right, not what is easy.
Monday, May 16, 2011 6:20 PM Reply | Quote | FredYates 0 Points

Thank you sloflyer10. Now my granddaughter is happy that she can watch her movies again! I showed her how to change the settings using the Shift/Alt method. Somebody needs to fix this problem and stop passing the buck.

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Happy Nanny Too!

Sunday, May 22, 2011 8:07 PM Reply | Quote | KK Rocket 0 Points

thank you. this fixed it. it seems the choppy video happens when the buffer fills. until this post i was refreshing the page whenever this happened
Monday, August 15, 2011 8:59 AM Reply | Quote | bucktooth 0 Points

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All,

Choppy Video with Netflix

I have also used Stream manager to fix choppy video with NetFlix. I was able to set the buffering rate to 1050 and everything played much better.

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My question, is there a way to make this persistent. A registry fix or local policy option so stream manager always buffers at this rate?
Thursday, September 08, 2011 1:59 PM Reply | Quote | MichaelTorian (Partner) 0 Points

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Some basic questions, Experiencing very choppy video on netflix and on the and the smooth streaming IIS site. Transfer starts at 2000kbs and then tapers off to about 350 kbs or below after about a minute. How ever while this video is playing I can open another window and pull 3.5 MBS on a flash window. So my network location seems strong. I am maintaining an upload of about 1 MBS as well. I understand that Silverlight renders on the main CPU and not the video card....Is there any way to tell the PC (xp or Win 7) to favor silverlight for CPU priority? Is it a background process? During streaming I would be happy to shut down or ignore other processes, but Task manager is a very clumbsy way to do this.
Friday, October 14, 2011 7:22 AM Reply | Quote | damselfl 0 Points

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The resetting of the buffering rate works great. I did not need to do it on any of my faster computers but it was the only thing that worked on an 8 year old Desktop (Win xp, 512 MB RAM, 1.8 ghz single-core CPU, ATI 9200 with 128MB VRAM, G level wireless to router, 16Mbps Internet Connection). I had added RAM, overclocked the CPU, upgraded the video card, updated all drivers and bios etc. which accomplished nothing. Often I was dropping 20 frames per sec and rendering only 1. A key point about the procedure is to reset set the movie back to the start after you reset the Buffering Rate. That sets the lower rate for the movie. If you just reset the rate part way through, the system will take a while before it adjusts itself.
Friday, November 18, 2011 3:58 PM Reply | Quote | itaylor 0 Points

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Alright, so I am having the same choppy video problem on nexflix with the latest version of silverlight. However, what makes my problem unique is that it only happens on Firefox and not on Safari (I'm using a mac book pro with Lion). Firefox verion 12.0 and the latest verion of silverlight plugin. I tried going into the silverlgiht plugins, but for some reason there is no option to restrict the bandwidth when it comes to the mac version of silverlight. Any idea what I should do?
Sunday, May 13, 2012 5:27 PM Reply | Quote | MasterP123 0 Points

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Choppy Video with Netflix

Layman solution Go to start - search programs/files

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Type in Silverlight and select Microsoft Silverlight Select Playback tab and disable hardware acceleration and download of protective contents. Select OK Also disable HD during movie playback You only need to do this once and problem solved! Hope it works for you too !
Thursday, March 07, 2013 8:02 PM Reply | Quote | ard9000x 0 Points

This issue is doing my head in - hours wasted so far. I'm using Lovefilm Instant which also uses Silverlight.
The quick first question is this: I've read lots of threads where people say "right click" or

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"press CTRL+SHIFT+S" to access stream manager to change the settings. IT DOESN'T WORK!

I've tried it with hardware acceleration on and off, I've tried it full screen and windowed, I've tried it at native resolution as well as 600x800. Every single time, the jerkyness happens at almost exactly the same points in a pan, but it's not a regular stutter like 24fps pulldown. It might be fine for 1.5 seconds then judder for 10 frames, it might stutter for a frame twice in one second. My PC, laptop and girlfriend's Macbook can ALL play other full HD content smoothly and without issue, the PC doesn't even struggle with Youtube 4k videos, and I don't have this trouble with any other non-Silverlight provider. Flash, mp4 etc - it all plays perfectly smoothly. Seems pointless emailing Lovefilm because the many others that have say all the things they've tried, including clearing cookies and cache and updating and trying different browsers. Then after 4 weeks they just get a standard answer like "please clear your cookies" or some other nonsense. There's one particularly good thread here http://www.avsforum.com/t/1307504/netflix-streaming-jitter which talks about Netflix, but the symptoms are identical. It seems that people have some success using "stream manager" in Silverlight 5.0 and below, but since 5.1 I can't find anyone whose managed to access the advanced menu - just hundreds of people asking the same question as me. I'm going to put some keywords here to help others find thing thread as everyone seems to have a different term for it - jerky jerkiness jitter jittery judder juddering strobing stutter stuttering panning.
Saturday, June 01, 2013 12:51 PM Reply | Quote | alanparker 20 Points

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Choppy Video with Netflix

I've had this problem for many months. It's not just Netflix, the problem occurs with all streaming services that use Silverlight. Silverlight does not use the computer's GPU, so it places all the strain on the CPU.

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I've got a Acer Revo with a puny AMD CPU, yet with the HD GPU it can happily play 1080p content at 50Mbps. It struggles with SD video content with Silverlight. Netflix (and Lovefilm) have been forced by the Film & TV companies to ensure video is streamed using DRM. Silverlight seems like the only available option at the moment. Windows 8.1 (aka Windows Blue) has DRM video playback built into Internet Explorer 11 (using HTML5). Which means that the GPU is used to render the video stream rather than the CPU. I believe Microsoft and Netflix have been hard at work to ensure that DRM video is fully supported with IE11 & HTML5. For now we'll just have to wait until IE11 is ported to Windows 7 and Windows 8.
Monday, July 22, 2013 12:46 PM Reply | Quote | Gazzie (Partner) 0 Points

You press [Shift]+[Alt], and then left-click in the movie window to display the Silverlight menu where you can select Stream Manager.
Monday, September 02, 2013 1:30 PM Reply | Quote | Phil Champ 0 Points

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