Flickering on Netflix after Sierra update

Because it has been more than 2 months since I observed the problem and I reported it via Apple feedback, but it is still unsolved, I decided to contact AppleCare.

They were very helpful and friendly, and they finally identified the problem:

The flickering appears only when the subtitles are on and it happens every time the subtitles appear on the screen. If you disable the subtitles, or if you watch a scene which has no subtitles, there is no flickering.

They told me that they are working on this and it will be fixed in a future update of macOS. They were not able to specify if it will be fixed in the next update or afterwards, but it will be fixed after all.

Fingers crossed. 🙂

Hey everyone. I had the same problem-- rmbp 13 2016 without touchbar and only seemed to happen on netflix... ALSO only seemed to happen when I had it on low brightness like in bed watching at night... I turned off auto brightess... preferences - display-- uncheck automatically adjust brightness and it seemed to have solved the problem! I hope this helps some of you because it took me a good 15 mins to get through to apple to even write this! hahahah. Good luck peeps

Hi all,

I have MBP Retina (Early 2015). I have the same troubles as you've been having. Recently I went to Apple Store, in Barcelona, they changed the board for a new one but the flickering did not disappear. They told me it could be some bug and that they would try to solve it with later updates. It's been 4 months since I reported the problem and got the unsuccessful reparation, I've updated 3 times since they told me I had to wait for the update but it still flickers when watching videos with subtitles on Netflix. It's been a long since this post was created, maybe you found some solution. So, are you still having the flickering? What can I do or tell to the workers of Apple Store to understand that this is not a hardware problem?

I have MBA Early 14, and I also experience flickering while watching Netflix, but I see no flickering in Chrome/Opera.

Only Safari (and Safari Tech Preview).

There must be some issue with Intel drivers / Metal stack.

UPD: I've downloaded and run the latest nightly of WebKit. And guess what - flickering is there too. So there might be some regressing in WebKit engine.

I think I'm having the same issue! I'm not sure what is the proper word for what is happening, but my "flicker" happens every minute or so when I'm watching Netflix full-screen. For a very brief moment (around 1 second) the image kind of duplicates and moves to the right very quickly. This didn't happen on El Capitan for me.

Some stats:

• Macbook Pro MF839 (13-inch, retina, early 2015, 128GB SSD)
• MacOS Sierra

Here are some tests I worked on:

• I've performed a Safe Boot and also a PRAM Reset - no improvements.
• This issue happens on both Safari and Chrome, so I think it is not browser related. Probably some rendering issue with the video card.
• If I change the display mode to scaled and choose all the options but the default one, the flickering stops (so it only happens when it "feels like 1280x800").
• If while I'm watching Netflix I move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen (showing the menu bar) and keep it there, the flickering stops.

@plantbased: could you share your settings just so we know if we have the same problem, or if other people can help us?

Fantastic, that means we have the same MBP.

I've made some research during the day, and I come with a quick list of things to try. Here are the things I did that didn't work:

• Full Safari clear (https://discussions.apple.com/message/30688224#30688224)
• Change user agent (https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6620835?tstart=0)
• Show scrollbars only when scrolling (System Preferences > General) (https://discussions.apple.com/message/29557720#29557720)
• Run Safari in new user

However, I did one thing that made the playback seem normal:

Use Firefox

Could you try running Netflix on Firefox and see if it behaves correctly? What happens on Chrome? I believe the issue is with some sort of rendering technique only Chrome and Safari use.

I'm having the exact same issue, early 2015 13" retina macbook pro, only the ssd differs (mine is the 512G one) but I guess it's not relevant

Will try the resolution workaround and update, thank you for your suggestions!

Great, it's probably related to retina macbooks in general... I hope we can find a solution. Let me know if Firefox works well for you.

Same here, also MBP 13 2015!

Hi mathisiak! Does Firefox work for you?

Yep, no problems with firefox...

No problems with Firefox for me too, seems limited to Safari and Chrome

The issue still happens here, this is really frustrating

I'm checking threads daily to find other people who face this issue. There was one guy here (Random screen flickering while watching videos.) who described an issue, but apparently it got solved. I think it was a different problem than ours.