Netflix streaming in HD on the PC expected this year
By Ben Drawbaugh 
posted March 21st 2010 12:32PM
posted March 21st 2010 12:32PM
posted March 21st 2010 12:32PM
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Netflix in Media Center already was the best Netflix interface around, but its useless unless it allows HD.
I watch Netflix in Media Center. It's gotten better, quality wise. When it first started the resolution was so low it was pretty much unwatchable Lately it seems acceptable, though not DVD quality. I actually think the limitation is my DSL line which goes up to about 1200mbps. I would love HD feeds, especially if they can manage 720p with my existing line. If they could manage 1080p, wow. Who needs BluRay. That would be worth getting a faster line.
Of course, if they could just show a lot more of their entire catalog in 480p that would be killer. That's DVD resolution which I pretty happily watch, you know, on DVDs, all the time. This business of mailing discs back and forth, as much as it beat the heck out of Blockbuster 5 years ago, has got to go.
@ArtInvent
Typical 1080p signal from a BluRay disc starts at 20Mbps. So to match that quality, Netflix would have to stream at 20Mbps, and you'd need something north of DSL. Way North. Like the Yukon Territory. :)
@ArtInvent "I actually think the limitation is my DSL line which goes up to about 1200mbps. "
It is. Netflix is willing to stream 720p to the PS3. I can't get better than 480p because my line isn't fast enough. My DSL line tests out at 2600mbps (which is BS because I pay for 7000mbps and live a mile from a CO). I can see plenty of artifacts, so I tend to agree with the limitation.
That's the long way of saying, you don't want 720p on your 1200mbps line.
@nrb
Sad, but true
I'm guessing it's mostly techinical. Standard def Netflix streaming via Windows PC has been terrible. Google "netflix silverlight tearing" for details. On a good quality system and 25 Mbps downstream, it's muddy and can't even vsync.
I think people need to adjust their thinking on what HD really means in the broadband space. To much focus is places on HD resolution (1280x720 or 1920x1080) as opposed to the real measure of quality: compression rate. Take a 720p stream @ 2Mbps or so in h.264 codec. Can that really be considered HD? Not in my book. Even the worst TV providers deliver at 10Mbps minimum in MPEG2, a little less for h.264. With over the air HD being delivered up to 19.2Mbps in MPEG2, we have a long way to go before "real" HD is delivered on broadband at the quality and resolution of OTA, cable, fiber, or satellite.
@The Digital Pimp Umm... wrong? FIOS, U Verse, Time Warer, All Offer 25Mbit+ COnnections and alot of people use them.
1080p Looks great on my ps3, Almost indistinguishable from blu-ray copies, That i myself have compared.... So.... I doubt it caps at 2MBps
@ivealwaysgotmail From what i can find it caps at 3.8MBPS, regardless, Its exceptional quality, and i have watched uncompressed blu ray footage through the same setup.
@ivealwaysgotmail
Trust me, I know good broadband. I have a 25Mbps connection (FiOS). My point wasn't about access speed. It was about how the files are encoded. My point is that the metric for HD can't be in the 2-4Mbps range that is being delivered. That's not HD quality. While the PS3 is something north of that range, my point is that a lot of downloaded content touting itself as HD isn't really. I resolution, yes. In quality, no. If people can't see the difference, then the compression engineer has done a great job, and the file is being transmitted at a good bit rate. But don't think that just because something says it is "HD resolution" doesn't mean is it "HD quailty." Dig?
@ivealwaysgotmail
That's the point I am making. At 1/4 the bitrate of a BluRay disc, it's not really HD quality, though I admit, some people don't see the difference. My point is people may be paying a lot more for a lot less quality.
@The Digital Pimp
I can't figure it out. I know OTA is supposed to be the best HD you can get this side of Blu-ray but in reality 'm not seeing it. My OTA signals macroblock like crazy with any motion. Its far worse than the macroblockling I see on my Netflix streams over a 8-12 Mbps Comcast connection. Granted the Netflix streams are nothing to get excited about (the backgrounds wiggle and shimmer with artifacts like they the screen is crawling with bugs) but somehow most of the HD streams do look better than the SD ones with respect to compression artifacts... which is the opposite of what one might expect.
Aside from Blu-ray, the best HD I've seen on my TV has been the one Vudu HDX movie I rented. But that's way too expensive to use more than on a lark.
What about extender support?
It's a lost cause trying to explain to my wife how to exit MCE to the XBox dashboard, plug the memory card in, login in my profile, and find the netflix icon among the mess of advertisements that is the NXE.
@DoctaDJones I agree, but somehow I doubt it.
I hope by PC support they also mean OS X support. I'd hate to be in the dark again.
As for the low bitrates and 2.1 audio, I don't mind. We are paying a minimum of $9 for streaming after all.
@EM1
Ditto dude. I have a Mini with Boxee on my big screen, and I hope they don't forget us Mac folk. Again.
I hope it will work with PlayOn so I can stream it from my Windows desktop to my Linux HTPC.
My Win7 HTPC salutes you Netflix! It's about time we get some HD goodness for the HTPC crowd.
@minimalist
That is great question. What you are seeing is one of the problems with Digital vs. Analog OTA. Digital is much more susceptible to obstructions, atmospherics and the like, where analog signals were fine before. As a digital signal degrades, you get packet loss, and it just gets ugly from there. Kinda like satellite when a bad storm is rolling through.
I tried to put up a digital antenna where I live (about 45 miles from most of the antennas) and I could only get a decent signal on one channel. But, I have seen OTA on sets within range that look fabulous. HD at 20Mbps is the way it should be.
I got the Wii and I've stuck with it. But I've been more and more tempted by the 360 as I've seen the content my friends can get on it, especially Netflix HD.
I would feel a lot better if I could get HD Netflix on my htpc. I've actually just recently started using Netflix streaming on the pc as they've just in the last couple months finally had some content on there worth streaming.
1200 Mb/s on DSL??? Yeah, right!
Good point about mere resolution not being the quality benchmark for HD... it realistically should be the bit-rate (yes, I realize that is kind of set by the codec and how it's configured, but I find bit-rate is a better metric to comprehend). And therein lies the issue. Somehow I think more folks have 10Mb/s service than any single other standard (I'm talking broadband, not all connections, I bet there's still a ton of analog modems out there).
A BD disc runs ~40-45 Mb/s. CableLabs specs 12-15 for what the cable guys should be doing.
So for all who have a nominal 10 Mb/s connection, how can you "see" smooth HD? Seems to me, it has to be reduced to something like 6-8 Mb/s. Not to mention that many folks have calculated cable delivered HD around 8 or so.
At the bottom we have 3 and 7 Mb/s DSL. At the top we have FiOS, which seems to run 35 Mb/s for new subs.
Quite the range... so some questions I have are:
1. curious about a streamer (i.e Netflix) have more than one encode, detect the connection and deliver what is appropriate?
2. would it even be possible to dynamically encode during delivery?