3 Ways To Stream Netflix Movies From Your PC to TV

Last year, Neflix started offering the ability to stream movies over the internet to your PC. Of course, for Windows Media Player enthusiasts, the next logical step was to port Netflix into Media Center by way of a plugin. Luckily, there's a pretty active developer community for WMC, so we ended up with not one, but three, Windows Media Player plugins from which to choose: vmcNetflix, MyNetflix, and NetflixMC.

But which one is right for you? Let's compare:

MyNeflix

• System Requirements: Vista MCE, .NET 2.0, Netflix WatchNow player
• View Netflix queue
• Manage Netflix queue
• View history
• View recommendations
• Browse movies by title, genre, or top 100
• Browse "Watch Now" movies
• Play movies in full screen
• Nice interface, very responsive
• Does Not Work With Extenders
• Download MyNetflix

vmcNetFlix

• System Requirements: Vista MCE and Netflix WatchNow player
• View Netflix queue
• Manage Netflix queue
• View history
• View recommendations
• Browse movies by genres; sort by title or year
• Browse "Watch Now" movies
• Keyword Search
• Play movies in full screen
• Support for x64 and x86
• Support for Netflix Instant Queue
• Support for Episode Listings
• Prevents standby/sleep mode while downloading
• Clean interface, easy to browse, runs smoothly
• Works With Extenders
• Download vmcNetflix

NetflixMC

• System Requirements: Vista or MCE 2005 and .NET 2.0 or 3.5
• Browse movies by genre
• Browse "Watch Now" movies
• Fast, Real-time "Watch Now" search
• Bookmark "Watch Now" movies
• TV Series episode selection
• Image caching stream speed settings
• Menu Personalization
• A bit slow, still a “beta” app
• Runs on extenders but WILL NOT play WatchNow videos
• Download NetflixMC

So which one should you choose? The quick answer here is that if you have Windows XP, you only have one choice: NetflixMC. For Vista users, both MyNetflix and vmcNetflix are nice, but the extender support that vmcNetflix has makes it the clear winner. You can download vmcNetflix here.