Comment 3 for bug 1141781

I finally came up with a workaround that will let me get through an entire TV show without restarting Firefox or waiting around a few minutes after sending the TERM signal to plugin-container (i.e., "killing").

Use kcmshell4 khotkeys (or search "custom shortcuts") to assign 3 hotkeys. Here I use function keys, but adding a modifier key would help to avoid conflicts with other shortcuts--F11 doesn't work while the Netflix player is running, but the shortcuts are global and you might need it for something else:

F10: killall plugin-container
F11: killall -s STOP plugin-container; i8kctl fan 2 2 (or a command to speed up the cpu fan)
F12: killall -s CONT plugin-container

Frame locks up but audio is still playing?
:press F10, wait a few seconds and then press F12 to resume. Repeat until playback returns to normal.

System's all wonky and can't recover?
:press F10. If Silverlight was still suspended and frame remains on screen, press F12 to initiate the TERM signal.

A few caveats: Player controls and Firefox controls won't work again until Silverlight stops with TERM or once you get to the end of a video. The window manager might not like "pausing" the process like this and could react in unpredictable ways, so you'll probably have to alt+tab to other applications and GUI elements might not redraw properly--Works great in KDE 4.8.5 though. The fan command is just a guess and will only work on Dell laptops--I noticed that resuming with F12 worked best after the fan started going faster...I don't have any serious cpu temperature issues when reading the output of sensors, but it's about 100% consistent for me to have to wait until the fan kicks up before resuming, which is only something that happens when running Netflix Desktop.

Using F11 to pause Netflix instead of the player controls takes the load off the CPU and could potentially fix issues before they start when you get up for refreshments.