What’s Your Favorite Netflix Add-In for Windows Media Center?
It’s time to turn to the community to find out the answer to this one. As far as we are aware there are three unofficial Netflix add-ins available for Windows Media Center: MyNetflix, NetflixMC, and vmcNetFlix. Which is your preference and why? Of course, if you know of others, feel free to recommend them.
UPDATE: Looks like this post inspired the guys at Missing Remote to create an in-depth review of all three add-ins. Below is a snippet of their findings.
Performance & Usability
vmcNetFlix: Quite simple & effective. Everything worked smoothly & quickly…and did i mention it works on Extenders?!? The interface is very clean, easy to browse through, and then just as quick to start streaming as using Netflix’ website itself. An on-screen keyboard helps login & find just what you need. Viewing the various categories is simple & fast, and the artwork loads quite quickly. Viewing the individual movie details you can see all the power of the app, with the ability to stream, download, add to queue…basically anything you could want to do.
MyNetflix: This one is a bit different, in that it actually does use the Netflix Movie Player within the Media Center interface. If vmcNetFlix does the same, it does so in a much more transparant way than MyNetflix. Within MyNetflix, you can actually see the player load just as if you were using it from your browser. It all ends up playing ok, but it’s a little clunky to see the Netflix webpage prior to you movie playing. And of course, this is a major limitation as to why this will NOT work on Extenders. The interface is gorgeous however, and very responsive. The ability to manage your queue is simple & effective.
NetflixMC: The only of the the 3 plugins which does not require the Netflix WatchNow player to be installed, this is also the least refined of the apps. It shares the 2′ Configuration tool like MyNetflix, which allows you to login, set your speed, and even adjust the menus you see. A nice feature, but one that is overshadowed by the sluggish WPF interface. As you can see by the screenshot, it has Beta written as part of the background, so I’m sure there’s more to come, but I found the “beta” tag to be a bit unnecessary.
May 7th, 2008 at 9:40 am
I’ve always used MyNetFlix I love the support for watchnow queue
May 7th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I love MyNetflix and didn’t even know about the others. Anthony Parks has done a great job with his software.
May 8th, 2008 at 7:31 am
My understanding is that Anthony’s plug-in only supports Media Center on Vista? Is that not correct? There are still a million of us out there that think Vista is awful and still running XP (i.e. MCE 2005).
May 8th, 2008 at 5:20 pm
vmcNetflix is my favorite. They updated the plugin a few weeks ago and you can now stream Watch Now from your Xbox! The program still has some beta issues, but being able to use Netflix on an extender is pretty cool.