Netflix barely plays without stutters on the 1.5Ghz CoreSolo Mini. It wouldn't even get past the loading screen with Darwine.
I run Netflix regularly on an old Atom system--in low-quality mind you--so I am not sure what the minimum requirements are, especially if you set your buffer to the minimum possible.
That said, I don;t know what the performance ration is for Darwine, for any kind of complicated task. It's a shame that it was axed before it came of age.
I ran XP using VPC at a reasonable speed on my G5 systems, but I never tried to do video or media content streaming with VPC. Most of this has to do with the i386 emulation algorithms, and I believe that Darwine uses Qemu, which isn't known for having the best capabilities.
As I had VPC, I never really bothered with Darwine, but if anyone wanted to recover that project, I should expect that it could be improved. It would be interesting to see if it works at all, ignoring the video speed for the moment, to check initial viability.
Clearly, this is not a solution for a G4, but fast dual and quad G5 systems
might be able to pull it off.
That where I could use some feedback and benchmarks: From anyone who has used Darwine on a later-model G5, as they are pretty easy and inexpensive now, and this would be a useful took, assuming it is
usable.
As I said, I would expect only the lowest video quality,a nd smallest buffer, to function, but that is still better than naught, and is what I use on my Atom-based netbook. If only Netflix used JAVA instead of Silverlight, or if Hulu dumped their adverts; especially as the Hulu JAVA-encapsulated videos tend to break at every advert on older systems.
In my experience, my older HW runs Netflix with Silverlight far better than Hulu with JRTE.
It may also be interesting to try to pipe the video from an Intel system to a PPC system, via a 1000bT LAN connection. As the module relies on a pipe through Wine, it might be possible to do this, similarly, through an Intel system elsewhere on the network.
