Netflix HD on Atom HTPC

[ultrajim17]

Hello,

I built an Atom-powered HTPC last year. It's a Zotac ION Atom 330 (1.6GHz) board with 4GB of DDR2, a 1TB 5400rpm drive, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Recently I discovered that streaming HD Netflix movies doesn't work. (I'm not sure if it ever worked for HD.) It plays briefly then becomes a slideshow. Pausing it to let it pile up a buffer doesn't help. I tried updating Nvidia drivers, turning off Aero, shutting down indexing and superfluous services and so on to no effect. This is true in WMC or IE9/FF5/Chrome. (Anecdotally it seems like the quality is a bit worse in WMC, though.) It plays non-HD content fine. (I'm running HDMI video to my LCD, optical audio to my receiver.) It's got the latest version of Silverlight.

When attempting to run an HD movie, 2 of the 4 logical cores go around 50-60% usage, so it doesn't seem like they're getting completely pegged. The disk drive & my network/internet connections should all be more than adequate. Interestingly enough, when I try to play the same movie on my Xbox 360, it works flawlessly, and the picture quality is vastly superior to either WMC or web browsers (before they start slowing down, that is).

I know the Atom is relatively weak, but I think it should be able to handle this. It can handle playing Blu Ray movies off of the Blu Ray drive. The problem with the Xbox 360 is that it's an older model and is incredibly noisy, so I'd prefer to fix the HTPC. If I were to upgrade the HTPC but it will still never be as good in terms of quality as the Xbox 360 (which doesn't seem fair), then I'll just give up and get a new box 360 S. Otherwise, is there anything else I can do to troubleshoot and improve Netflix HD performance? (I haven't tried other streaming services; I don't know of any off-hand that do HD for free that I can test with.)

Thanks,

- Jim

[richard1980]

Netflix streaming requires Silverlight, and from what I understand Silverlight still doesn't do hardware acceleration correctly...which means the ION isn't being used. If I had to guess, I'd say this is simply a case of your CPU being too weak. You can play your Blu-rays just fine because you are actually able to take advantage of the ION.