[bengalih]

Hi, I am happy to see that there is lot's of activity on this plugin.

But here is a (maybe really stupid) question: How come that there isn't some sort of "native" plugin, rather than using the IE interface?

The reason I ask is because every time I try, I have weird IE-related issues (yes, navigation is one of them, but for instance, after I play something, there is no way to get back to XBMC, or the whole thing crashes, etc.).

How come XBMC went this rout, instead of doing something like MCE, Boxee, or even Plex (although the Plex plugin doesn't work with SilverLight 5)?

It has been mentioned many times even on last page...

I have seen a couple of posts making a similar comment, but have not seen a clear answer.

Netflix is a very important player in the online video streaming world and XBMC is a very important player in the front-end world. I would have thought the integration would be better.

Anyway, I'll keep trying to get this to work and use MCE for Netflix until I am successful.

See my post here it pretty much tells the story.

As it is Plex support for Netflix is problematic (see recent threads like this one), Boxee only provides support on their Boxee Box (not on PC version), and WMC does nothing more than provide a glorified Silverlight wrapper (via an IE shell as well...same way XBMC does it). Granted the browsing of titles on WMC looks a lot sharper, but that's when you get when you PAY developers to work on it (AFAIK that plugin was a joint venture between MS and Netflix, so they had a lot of insight into how to put it together well).

XBMC team would work to create an integrated plugin if it wasn't for the DRM issues from Netflix. As it is, the only way to watch on PC is via Netflix's Silverlight plugin. So basically it comes down to writing two pieces:

1 - A browser to see the video content
2 - A clean launcher/wrapper to the Silverlight plugin

XBMCFlicks does #1 pretty well. It looks as good as any other plugin for XBMC. There are still a few bugs with parsing movie information or downloading covers, etc...but I don't think there is much more to ask for on this front.

#2 is a little lacking....most of the development time went into #1. I'm sure someones else could write another launcher independent of XBMCFlicks and we could still use the playercorefactory.xml to launch from XBMCFlix into that 3rd party wrapper. But, that is not an easy proposition as it isn't just standard XBMC add-on fare, it would be a standalone app. The XBMC development team isn't going write that, and they are also not going to try to integrate Silverlight directly into XBMC because of licensing/open source issues.

With the exception of the few small bugs left, there is actually not much else that you could want for Netflix on XBMC. One of the biggest issues was lack of remote control, but I think I have remedied that for the most part with my XBMCFlix-o-mate.

BTW - did you know that with the $500+ dollars and countless hours you have spent on your XBMC installation there is nothing you can do to get 5.1 Dolby Digital Sound from it? This is true for any PC application, even the native Netflix browser player. You can get better Netflix playback from your Xbox 360, PS3 or $50 roku then you will ever be able to get (in the foreseeable future) from your PC. Netflix themselves aren't very serious about playback on PCs....why should anyone else be? Until that changes PC users are the red-headed step-children of Netflix...so get used to it!

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I asked the same thing. What I'm trying to get working is wmc straight to Netflix launched from inside xbmc!

If what you are trying to do is launch WMC's Netflix app from within XBMC, that is very easy to do.

See here for the info.

I will warn you though that although the Netflix interface in WMC looks slick, and natively supports a remote control it has some problems.

For one, it's episode handling is horrible. If you are watching a show with multiple seasons (hundreds of episodes) you have to scroll through them to get to the one you want each time you go in, and sometimes between each episode.

But, the worst thing (that caused me to move off WMC to XBMC for Netflix) is the crashing issues. Many many people report that anywhere from 5-50% of the time WMC will lockup on the very last frame of a show. This requires you to forcibly kill the ehshell.exe (WMC main process). If you are in the middle of a season of shows, this now mean killing the app, relaunching, and then browsing all the way back down to the episode you want (i.e. WMC does not automatically place you at the next episode in the series). Here is one of the many threads on the Internets about it.

If you are lucky enough to not have these issues, and you don't mind the horrible episode handling, then launching WMC from within Netflix is certainly an option.