Do your fans turn on when watching HD movie streams?

[coldjeanzzz]

Whenever I watch HD quality stuff on Amazon prime the fans will turn on and run sort of loudly. Usually they aren't audible but these videos seem to tax it quite a bit and I was wondering if that's normal? The top left of the keyboard also gets quite hot.

Running on a 2012 MBA i5 8 GB RAM

 

[robvas]

Depends on what site I'm playing them from and how they are encoded.

Computers get hotter and the fans will come on if they are under heavy use - the CPU will throttle down if it overheats, you don't have to worry about damage.

 

[Steve121178]

Whenever I watch HD quality stuff on Amazon prime the fans will turn on and run sort of loudly. Usually they aren't audible but these videos seem to tax it quite a bit and I was wondering if that's normal? The top left of the keyboard also gets quite hot.

Running on a 2012 MBA i5 8 GB RAM

Totally normal. It will even heat up watching regular YouTube videos.

 

[gnasher729]

Whenever I watch HD quality stuff on Amazon prime the fans will turn on and run sort of loudly. Usually they aren't audible but these videos seem to tax it quite a bit and I was wondering if that's normal? The top left of the keyboard also gets quite hot.

Running on a 2012 MBA i5 8 GB RAM

Movies in h.264 format are decoded in hardware and shouldn't heat up your computer a lot. Movies in other formats like MPEG are decoded in software and heat up the computer a lot. Now we'd need to know what you mean by "sort of loudly". I would expect "I can hear the fans" in the first case and "I can hear the fans quite loudly" in the second case.

Run "Activity Monitor", it will tell you how much CPU each application uses. MPEG videos could easily use 150% CPU, while h.264 movies should use a lot less.

 

[kage207]

Netflix for me is about 50/50, sometimes it will never turn on and sometimes it will be on. Just depends on the delivery method of the video.

 

[Sarhir]

Streaming Movies

I am thinking about getting a MacBook Air. One of the things I would like to do is watch movies on it. If I subscribe to Netflix I understand I can "stream" movies. Here is the question; do I have to be connected to the internet the entire time I watch the movie? or can I just "download" the movie and watch it later?

I don't have internet where I live currently. Will be traveling soon and would like to be able to watch movies on the plane, or wherever I am.

I am considering the 13" model with 4 GB of memory and 256 GB of flash storage.

Second question: any recommendations on an external cd/dvd drive?

Thanks!