Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdasen | Hacker News Reader

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In Safari in macOS, Netflix uses about 10% CPU showing 1080p. With Chrome, it uses 40% playing 720p. With Firefox, it uses about 75% CPU and my fan turns on. I'm guessing it's higher on 1080p.

I don't think Netflix has any interest in you using a proprietary client. They don't gain money if you watch one way or another. They gain money if you keep paying them your monthly fee.

EDIT: Installing this extension took Chrome CPU usage to 75% for me.

Also, I'm not saying that users shouldn't be given the choice to use their CPU resources to run Netflix. Maybe it would be better if Netflix were just more transparent about it. "By default, we only display video with 720p in Chrome due to high processor usage. Click here to change that preference or watch with Safari whose direct rendering means 1080p video using less processor resources." That way, users understand the problem and can decide they don't mind other programs becoming sluggish or the fan running or whatnot. Of course, companies generally don't like giving users details.

Firefox version of the same add-on if you want to run more tests: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/force-1080p-n...

Indeed it works just fine thx

> Of course, companies generally don't like giving users details.

The information is there but Netflix certainly doesn't make it obvious how to get to it. If you press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D while playing a video you'll get a debug display which includes details on the video and audio codec bit rates and resolution.

> They don't gain money if you watch one way or another.

720p will take less bandwidth, meaning less bandwidth costs ?

I suspect this is the real reason why it's limited to 720p. It's on the web where it's not possible to identify that 1080p on a non-hw accelerated rendering device on a fast network won't suffer from playing the higher quality content. Browsers need to provide more feature detection APIs so that Netflix can enable higher quality when it knows it won't impact the end users system. Must be possible since YouTube knows when to upgrade?

If that is true, then why does Netflix categorically refuse to communicate with its customers about this issue? Or even just document it in their help pages and provide a semi-hidden switch for turning it on?

720p Netflix on Firefox on Windows takes less than 1% CPU for me, and I'm not sure which process it is, because they're all less than 1% CPU.

GPU usage, per Process Explorer, is somewhere between 1% and 7%.

The Firefox addon to force 1080p takes it up to about 2% CPU and 9% GPU. Maybe. It's hard to tell, it's usually below that.

Basically, it's a rounding error on a machine with properly set up decoding pathways.

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