Netflix problem

This does strike me as an odd issue since the resolution of the streaming video is the same whether you're watching it windowed or full screen so the resources required to play full screen should not be enough to cause a bottel neck. You could try checking that your Silverlight pluggin is up to date and if that isn't it you can try to trash your Silverlight preferences. That has fixed a few of my odd Netflix quirks before.

 

Interesting. Do you have any other programs running in the background? Like a handbrake encode or anything processor / memory intensive. Those would cause netflix to be choppy.

Your macbook pro should be able to handle HD netflix streams just fine. My old mac mini 1.66 ( cpu upgraded to a 2.33 core2duo) handles HD netflix streams just fine, and its running with a pretty crappy integrated gpu.


Edit: do you have any other application windows open in the background? I know in the past when i've had a window open with like a moving downloading bar.... that sometimes the window will interfere with my full screen netflix streams.

 

What are you using for your browser? I notice sometimes if safari really eats my ram (seems to be a bad memory leak) netflix can get a little choppy. Closing safari and freeing up my ram fixes the issue. How much ram do you have?

 

Try netflix in a different browser and see if you still have the problem. That might help determine the problem.

 

Silverlight isn't officially supported on the Mac version of Chrome. It is on Firefox and Safari though. See HERE for a table of compatibility.

 

Same Issue

I had the same problem with my 2011 13" i7 on an external monitor I just picked up. I tried to play full screen and it became unwatchable. I restarted and that didn't fix anything. I opened safari, and it worked just fine.

I didn't delve deeper into this, but I think I confounded my results by accident. When I went fullscreen in chrome and it prompted if I wanted to keep it full screen regardless of what I did on the other monitor, I said yes. When I used safari, I said no.

 

I had the same problem after doing a software update on my 13'' mbp. Netflix is only choppy with chrome. Safari/Firefox work fine. Easy solution, switch browsers. Long term you might want to try uninstalling/reinstalling chrome and silverlight. Or try a factory restore using the disks.