Netflix screen flickering on Safari solution

So, I was watching Netflix on Safari and noticed screen flickering, especially when the subtitles appeared. However, when I watch Netflix on Firefox, this does not happen. The problem is, Firefox does not support 1080p, only 720. Watching on MacBook Pro, the difference in quality is pretty noticeable. So I started to wonder what is going here. Well, it turns out the culprit is "Automatic graphics switching". My MacBook Pro has a discreet gpu. I conducted a little experiment: watching Netflix with "Automatic graphics switching turned on vs. off. The result was that with "Automatic graphics switching" turned on, the screen flickered; with it off, it was beautiful, not a single flickering. The reason for my suspicion against "Automatic graphics switching" was that even when the screen was not flickering, when I changed the volume, immediately following that the screed flickered, yet on Firefox, changing the volume did not affect the screen at all which made me think that maybe this is not just Safari issues but the hardware as well. I knew that Safari was optimized to be used with Mac computers including power efficiency. So, I am guessing the reason for screen flickering is that whenever subtitles appeared, gpu was switching back and forth, probably to be power efficient. I hope Apple sees this and make changes in the future.

Please let me know if this solved the issues of Netflix screen flickering on Safari.

Cheers!


Jason

Posted on Apr 24, 2018 7:39 PM

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7 replies

Aug 20, 2018 2:10 PM in response to marcin174

Pretty annoying. Same issue here, and there are many complaints on other forums regarding this and the youtube green glitch in Fullscreen on safari. Why is there no fix, not even in Mojave. My old MacBook Pro 2013 had it as well as my new 2018. No discrete graphics. Night shift off, automatic brightness off, everything updated, Mac brand new, disc fixed, empty cache. Still there. Video Playback Problems in 2018?

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Netflix screen flickering on Safari solution

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