I found out recently, here at this forum, that the new flash requires a CPU with the SSE2 instruction set. Does anyone know if Silverlight has similar or the same requirements? This is not a major deal for me. I am stuck using an old computer, for a few more days, with an AMD Athlon 2800+ (2.08GHz) that has only an SSE instruction set. But I am curious.

I can install and run Netflix, through wine of course, on Debian-LXDE. I actually was able to install Windows 7 on this same computer, Aero, indexing, etc off. I tried Netflix on Windows 7 and it would work fine for a brief time and than I would get the same problem I have with Debian-Wine and Netflix. The audio would lag behind the video.

My guess, if it is not an SSE issue, is that the hardware is just too old to handle it all.

AMD Athlon 2800+ 32bit single (2.08GHz)
Nvidia 6200 (only driver I could get to work on Windows 7 was 280.26 and Legacy Drivers on Linux)
1GB RAM

So between the low RAM, the ancient Nvidia card and the outdated drivers, plus the CPU, if it is not the SSE instruciton set it has to be the hardware. As I said I am just curious. Until recently I never knew about SSE or SSE2.

I don't know for Silverlight (I use Windows only for gaming and don't have a non-SSE2 CPU for testing), but since Pipelight is open source you can compile it with the CPU support you need.

Compiling Pipelight is a good idea. I did try something different, which makes me really think it is the hardware. I went with the lightest possible videos on Netflix on Windows, I haven't tested this yet on Debian. Watching things like Family Guy, Futurama, etc, the audio stayed in sync with the video. So it looks like it has more to do with the hardware than anything else. With the latest Adobe Flash plugin, and my SSE CPU, it wouldn't even work. Netflix does load and work.