Netflix HD: choppy streaming

Question

Flash 10.1 added new HW decoding in the gpu that helps play HD.

1. Does silverlight match that 10.1 capability or is behind?
2. if behind, any ver/date for matching flash 10.1?

When watching Netflix streamed on Acer Revo AR3610-U9022 Atom dual core 330 with ION, movie tends to be 1fps for long minutes (and then magically snap out of it).

CPU at that time i not taxed at all. while it might be that atom + ION is simply not enough...

1. can anyone confirm that a silverlight update like the flash 10.1 may in theory help?
2. anyone thinks that turning off hyper threading may help (even though cpu is not taxed)

Answer 1

I doubt there is an issue with the processor. There must be some huge bug in how Netflix and MS's Silverlight work on the Atom processors. Either their code suspects a wrong processor or some non-reading in any metric like taskman is causing the delays (might be some SSE instruction that fails. I suspect the system would work OK if it could buffer the entire program. Any small amount of network interaction with netflix seems to be part or all of the issue. I know IE9 preview 7 and Adobe 10.1 and Silverlight 4 do not fix the issue. Every other post suggests for some reason HD content is encrypted in Silverlight.

I doubt MS will bother to fix Silverlight and simply wait for Netflix to get fed up and change over to HTML 5. Pretty sure if MS simply looked at the way the Atom works they'd fix it in a day.