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Kansas Eiffel

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Aug 2, 2024, 2:54:41 AM8/2/24

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I can stream Netflix just fine when I play it using my Chrome browser. But, when I try to play Netflix using Safari (version 10.0), I get one or two frames of video, and then a black screen. I still have all of the controls and slider and I still get sound, but the video is just a black screen.

I just now tried it again using Safari, and got code S7363-1260-48444350 when trying to play a video. The code referred to an incompatible monitor. I tried again, and got the same issue as before, where I get a few frames of the video, and then the video goes black, but I can hear the audio and I still have control of the playback (e.g., play/pause, volume, etc.).

When I unplugged my external monitors and used only the laptop screen, the video played. So, I now know that the problem has something to do with my external monitors being connected to my laptop, even if I'm trying to play the video on my laptop screen.

Simple solution (os High Sierra) but Netflix have so far ignored my message! Forget all their solutions particularly concerning Silver Light, as that is no longer needed. This only began for me with Safari 11.0.1. I was able to connect using FireFox without issue so it had to be Safari settings.

Thanks, but I've already done an Internet search to find a solution to my problem. I've re-installed the latest version of Silverlight, and that hasn't helped. Also, Chrome works just fine with Netflix, which I think also uses Silverlight. I've also tried restarting the computer and the other typical non-specific solutions.

- I do get the display error thing (thunderbolt > VGA displays attached). Checked with develop tab if netflix works in safari 10 (don't see another version of safari in the list). However, if I select 'firefox: mac' and allow the silverlight plugin (that I just installed) then it works.

If the issue is the HTML5 player (since in older safari versions with silverlight, it does work), how do I force Netflix to use silverlight? It seems it always reverts back to HTML5, even if silverlight's installed.

I have a Netflix account and I have peeked under the hood at its video player running inside Google Chrome. Netflix calls its video player "Cadmium" and the javascript exposes all the functions and event handlers you might expect, such as play, stop, pause, mute, etc. I'm building a little Chrome extension that would enable me to call these Cadmium player function, but the hard part for me is figuring out how to create an instance of the player so I can start calling. The javascript is large, complex, and somewhat obscure. Once I can create an instance of that player, I'm thinking that making calls into the functions will be easy.

In Chrome dev tools I can set a breakpoint inside that block, and execution hits the breakpoint when I click the Mute button on the netflix video player. The Netflix js is (unsurprisingly) heavily obfuscated via method renaming. I tried stepping through the code in the debugger and ended down a hundred rabbit holes, never able to find my way to the top of the stack, so that I could make that same call (at top of stack) to simulate the user clicking the mute button. I also tried the approach of programmatically clicking the mute button on the UI player, which would meet my needs equally well, but they have serious defensive mechanisms in there, spinning me like a top.

Since there are over 100K lines of javascript, and I'm uncertain which chunks exactly would be relevant for this post, I would like to suggest that you load Netflix in Chrome, open dev tools, play a movie, and inspect the pause or mute button. Interacting with those video player controls takes you into the maze of javascript which I'm trying to see how I can tap into to control aspects of the player programmatically (just from dev tools is fine for now). Another important thing I need to figure out is how to query the video player to determine the current elapsed time of the playing video.

In this exemple the player will play the video at 10000ms.But you will need to inject the script directly in the html page, if you are making an extension using this in the content-script injected by manifest v3 (for my case) will not work.

Even before millions were confined to their homes by a global pandemic, improvements in internet connections and service offerings had led to an exponential increase in the use of streaming video around the world. With few options left for entertainment, streaming services are taking off. In this commentary, we examine the carbon footprint of these services.

Streaming services are associated with energy use and carbon emissions from devices, network infrastructure and data centres. Yet, contrary to a slew of recent misleading media coverage, the climate impacts of streaming video remain relatively modest, particularly compared to other activities and sectors.

Drawing on our analysis and other credible sources, we expose the flawed assumptions in one widely reported estimate of the emissions from watching 30 minutes of Netflix. These exaggerate the actual climate impact by up 90 times.

The relatively low climate impact of streaming video today is thanks to rapid improvements in the energy efficiency of data centres, networks and devices. But slowing efficiency gains, rebound effects and new demands from emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain, raise increasing concerns about the overall environmental impacts of the sector over the coming decades.

Update 11/12/2020: The energy intensity figures for data centres and data transmission networks were updated to reflect more recent data and research. As a result, the central IEA estimate for one hour of streaming video in 2019 is now 36gCO2, down from 82gCO2 in the original analysis published in February 2020. The updated charts and comparisons also include the corrected values published by The Shift Project in June 2020, as well as other recent estimates quoted by the media.

Looking at electricity consumption alone, the original Shift Project figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 6.1 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity. This is enough to drive a Tesla Model S more than 30km, power an LED lightbulb constantly for a month, or boil a kettle once a day for nearly three months. The corrected figures imply that one hour of Netflix consumes 0.8 kWh.

With 167 million Netflix subscribers watching an average of two hours per day, the corrected Shift Project figures imply that Netflix streaming consumes around 94 terawatt hours (TWh) per year, which is 200 times larger than figures reported by Netflix (0.45TWh in 2019).

The assumptions behind the Shift Project analysis (largely based on a 2015 paper, whose assumptions have been significantly revised in 2019 and 2020) contain a series of flaws, which, taken together, seriously exaggerate the electricity consumed by streaming video.

This difference stemmed from a stated assumption of 3Mbps apparently being converted in error to 3 megabytes per second, MBps, with each byte equivalent to eight bits. The Shift Project corrected this error in their June 2020 update, but did not revise any of their other assumptions, discussed below.

The Shift Project analysis overestimates the energy intensity of data centres and content delivery networks (CDNs) that serve streaming video to consumers by around 35-fold, relative to figures derived from 2019 Netflix electricity consumption data and subscriber usage data.

My original February 2020 analysis showed that the Shift Project assumptions for data transmission energy intensity (0.15-0.88 kWh/GB) were much higher than more recent estimates (0.025-0.23kWh/GB). However, the latest research shows that these data-based intensity values (kWh/GB) are not appropriate for estimating the network energy use of high bitrate applications such as streaming video. Instead, experts advise using time-based energy intensity values (kWh per viewing hour). Therefore, my assumptions for data transmission energy use have been updated with time-based energy intensity values.

Taken together, my updated analysis suggests that streaming a Netflix video in 2019 typically consumed around 0.077 kWh of electricity per hour, some 80-times less than the original estimate by the Shift Project (6.1 kWh) and 10-times less than the corrected estimated (0.78 kWh), as shown in the chart, below left. The results are highly sensitive to the choice of viewing device, type of network connection and resolution, as shown in the chart, below right.

The IEA estimate is also substantially lower than other estimates quoted in the media, including 22-times lower than the Despacito claim (cited on Channel 4, the BBC, Fortune, and Al Jazeera, assuming a global average grid mix) and 11-times lower than the claim by Save On Energy that 80 million views of Birdbox emitted 66ktCO2 (cited in the New Yorker, Euronews, Forbes, Die Welt, and the Daily Mail). My estimate of 36gCO2 per hour is over 2100-times lower than Marks et al. (2020) who estimated that 35 hours of HD video emits 2.68tCO2, or 77kgCO2 per hour.

But as the chart above shows, this figure depends heavily on the generation mix of the country in question. In France, where around 90% of electricity comes from low-carbon sources, the emissions would be around 2gCO2e, equivalent to 10 metres of driving.

Using country average emission factors may still overestimate emissions, particularly from data centres. Technology firms operating large data centres are leaders in corporate procurement of clean energy, accounting for about half of renewable power purchase agreements in recent years.