Yep, still using MCE 2005 with no plans to go to Vista. I would very much be willing to help. No programming skills, but I'm pretty good at breaking things. Let me know what I can do.

Billy

I too am still using MCE 2005 with no plans on upgrading to Vista. I am also a Netflix subscriber.

I'd really love to get this running on my machine. Let me know if there's some way I can help.

How come NetflixMC and VMCNetflix do not talk to each other.hmmmmmm

macblob:

How come NetflixMC and VMCNetflix do not talk to each other.hmmmmmm

What would be the point in that? Most people use one or the other, not both. They have slightly different feature sets.

when do you think we will be able to play with the betas??

For MCE 2005.. I have no clue. I am still looking for someone to step up and be able to create the front end.

how about for vista users??

alonzotiga:

how about for vista users??

Its hard to say right now. I am still in the early stages.

ok, take your time, cant wait to check it out when its ready

I vote for both, I have 3 Vista Media Centers and 2 MCE 2005.  My PCs running MCE 2005 will not run vista properly.  Is there somewhare I can download the current MCE 2005 version from, I cannot find it?

Netflix is planning to replace the Adobe Flash Player with Silverlight by the end of this year and you can already opt-in to the Silverlight beta.

None of the existing Media Center plug-in developers mention this in their roadmaps at all and I have seen very little discussion of it.

Are there plans to develop this product for Silverlight?

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Josh

Not a surprise considering the Mac netflix player is silverlight based. Silverlight should be able to handle higher quality video than the flash player without any additional performance hit. We do know that Netflix streaming in HD is on the horizon (rumor has it xbox 360 first). Should be interesting to see how this affects the various MCE netflix plugins. If none of them support it in a reasonable time frame after it is released, then we're probably going to lose a lot of users to alternate solutions (streaming through their blu-ray players, a roku box, xbox 360, etc.).

Who knows, maybe MS will create a Netflix plugin for VMC after the Xbox version launches and is proven reliable/functional.  I guess we can only hope and wait.

 

jennyfur:

Not a surprise considering the Mac netflix player is silverlight based. Silverlight should be able to handle higher quality video than the flash player without any additional performance hit. We do know that Netflix streaming in HD is on the horizon (rumor has it xbox 360 first). Should be interesting to see how this affects the various MCE netflix plugins. If none of them support it in a reasonable time frame after it is released, then we're probably going to lose a lot of users to alternate solutions (streaming through their blu-ray players, a roku box, xbox 360, etc.).

I would agree with all of what jennyfur  said other than the current plug-in is not flash. It’s an ActiveX plug-in accessing the Windows Media Player COM objects. I have been looking into the Silverlight solution.  As far as vmcNetFlix and MyNetflix road maps I can’t speak to. But what I can speak to is once Netflix goes full production with the Silverlight client, it is most likely they will remove their current plug-ins content server. They are using a different source for video content for the Silverlight plug-in. This means that vmcNetFlix will stop working because it no longer can download the movie files. MyNetflix will still work as to it never downloads the videos but rather just loads the old Netflix plugin into full screen mode. What is broken and will break for all others once everyone is forced to use the Silverlight client, is MyNetflix won’t be able to put the video into fullscreen automatically.

So can you download the movie files from the new content server… Sort of. The new movie files are wrapped with PlayReady DRM. I can’t even get the video to play in Vista with the PlayReady runtimes installed. The other issue to overcome is that video and audio is streamed to Silverlight as two different files. This means one would need to merge them into a single file again, which you can’t do because of the DRM in place.

So as I see things right now. Plug-ins that work like vmcNetFlix will stop working. Plug-ins the work like MyNetflix will work the same other then no auto fullscreen support. Watching Netflix on MC Extenders is out.
Just my 2 cent.