# Solved: Microsoft silverlight HD lag



## Pizzaroll (May 7, 2010)

Ok, so, I subscribe to Netflix purely for their watch instantly feature. Hell, I've never even ordered a dvd from them. For a very long time I was satisfied. They've used the Microsoft Silverlight player for as long as I've subscribed, and I've never had any problems... until about a month ago. When Silverlight got the 3.0 update it made it possible to stream movies in HD. Unfortunately, it wasn't made as an option. When Netflix movies start playing they test your internet speed, and if your connection is fast enough, the movie will automatically start to buffer in HD, and after about 30 seconds there will be a smooth transition to HD. I've looked through all the options on Netflix, and in Silverlight, and there is no way (that I could find) to disable HD playback. Why, you ask, would I even want to disable hd playback? The second that Silverlight starts to play in HD, I get all kinds of horrid lag. The audio will continue with no problem, but the video jumps and skips frames. It's like playing with one of those motion flip books but with several pages missing here and there. It makes viewing movies on there impossible. I called up Netflix tech support, hoping to get some tech support.... you know, considering that I'm a paying customer and such. Unfortunately, as is with all things involving technological corporations (and specifically those run over the internet) there was no support to be had. "Ryan with tech support" was just as flummoxed as myself. I've searched long and hard, and so far the only solution I've found has been to download massive torrents to eat up my bandwidth so that there wouldn't be enough left to stream in HD. This didn't work for me. I had torrents downloading at 1.2 mb/s and uploading at 300 kb/s and still, that damn Silverlight player refused to stop playing in HD. I've tried to uninstall and reinstall an older version. That didn't work either. So at this point I'm thinking that there must not be too many people having this problem, otherwise it probably would've been fixed by now. I have an ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card with up to 1919MB Hypermemory. I also have 4gb of ram, and a 1.2 ghz AMD Athlon 64 x2 processor. I have a hard time believing that my specs aren't up to par to stream HD movies, mainly because I never have any problems playing saved HD videos, nor do I have problems playing 1080p on Youtube. Any suggestions that anyone could give me (no matter how off the wall) would be greatly appreciated.


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## Pizzaroll (May 7, 2010)

Well, I solved the problem just a few minutes ago. I've been using Google's Chrome browser, and I decided to try different browsers to see if that would solve the problem. I got the best results from Internet Explorer which experiences almost zero lag.


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## QKCsMommy (May 26, 2010)

I have the same exact problem. The videos use to play fine but just recently all the HD shows and movies lag very badly! If someone can solve the problem...please do ASAP!


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## Pizzaroll (May 7, 2010)

I stopped having the problem with the silverlight player lag in HD when I watched a movie on internet explorer rather than google chrome, but it only seemed to work for that one movie. Since then I've continued to have the lag issue. I've tried a couple other browsers, firefox and safari, and neither has solved the problem.


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## QKCsMommy (May 26, 2010)

Yea i also tried different browsers and none worked for me. The only way I got mine to work for a little bit was to feed off of someone else's internet so the movie wouldnt automatically buffer into HD since the connection wasn't all that great. My internet connection is great with everything except for the Netflix HD. Kinda sucks....


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## Pizzaroll (May 7, 2010)

Well, it's not your internet causing the problem. Actually, the fact that you are even able to get HD streaming means that you have a good connection. I also know Netflix isn't at fault because there are plenty of people who are able to watch HD on Netflix without any lag. The only other thing I can figure is a problem with our pcs, which I also have a hard time believing. I have a cpu graph that shows me at only about 6 percent cpu usage when streaming HD. I also have 4gigs of ram and an HD gpu. What kind of processor do you have? I'm curious as to whether this could be caused by a certain chipset.


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## Pizzaroll (May 7, 2010)

Well, I'm still not sure what's causing the lag while playing movies in HD, but I just logged in to Netflix and it looks like HD is optional now, rather than automatic. So, as far as I'm concerned, problem solved.


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