[fogcity]

Can't you just browse with keyboard & touchpad or Remote and play Netflix movies directly on your Macbook, which as you said is connected to your TV via DVI or another cable - so its a 2nd monitor, in Safari or Firefox browser running Silverlight plugin? What do you need the second laptop or XBMC Flicks on Macbook for?

First off, I'm using an old Macbook as my media center, because it was "free" and because XBMC running on it was in most respects a more responsive and better interface than a Roku or WD TV Play.

I am also using that Macbook to play Netflix and yes I can walk over to that laptop, or tunnel into it using VNC, and bring up a browser and find the movie and set it fullscreen or whatever. But that doesn't pass the girlfriend test. She wants the media center computer out of view, she doesn't get why you'd be walking back and forth across the room when you have a remote control, and isn't gonna get comfortable with VNC any time soon.

Meanwhile we both have primary laptops that are still in active service as our primary computers, and we both are comfy with sitting on the couch and navigating netflix.com on those laptops. We just want to watch the content on our TV.

Yes, we could just plug a long ass HDMI cord into either laptop and start playing the movie, and have been doing this, but this barely passes the girlfriend test as the long cable has a tendency to look messy as well. Plus it just seems weird to not be able to tell the media center Macbook to play the movie. Besides, I have a computer already tethered to the TV. Why keep plugging another one into the system and unplugging it afterwards? Seems like an engineering fail to me.

Using Flicks primarily makes sense for streaming Netflix content over LAN via XBMC DLNA Server, otherwise any web browser plays Netflix movies without issues when a PC or laptop is directly hooked to a TV - why use XBMC for that?

OK this I don't entirely understand. I thought Flicks just gives you the ability to choose Netflix content from within XBMC, and when you hit Play it launches a browser which plays the movie in the browser. From that point, you are looking at Silverlight playing in Safari or whatever and XBMC is doing nothing other than maybe waiting for you to be finished. No? What am I missing?