Optimus issues with Netflix HD

First post here . I've been browsing this forum for a week or so ever since I received my M11xR2 i5 and it's been instrumental in helping me get the laptop running how it was meant to be.

I've recently run into a problem that has only been mentioned once on this forum. When streaming Netflix HD, the nvidia GPU will not turn on. The stream will work ok on the integrated chipset but the framerate makes viewing somewhat uncomfortable. I know Netflix uses silverlight, but it still uses the Firefox plugin-container.exe that triggers the nvidia GPU turn on for youtube, hulu, etc.

I've tried whitelisting the .exe and making the GPU the default chip but neither has worked.

I am currently running the latest nvidia 258.96 WHQL drivers. Any help on this matter is appreciated.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-m11x/502430-netflix-streaming-choppy-r2.html

 

I've read that thread. No solution was given except the theory that silverlight is causing the problems. It doesn't explain why when both youtube and netflix use the same .exe, only youtube can trigger the gpu to turn on.

 

Its just video you shouldn't need to use the GPU to play video. The CPU is good enough. Most laptops don't even have anything beyond integrated graphics.

Couple things to try:
Try plugging in the Ethernet cable to eliminate a wifi issue.
Try plugging in the power cable to eliminate a power setting issue.
Try another browser.

Netflix requirements don't require a GPU, just a 1.2GHZ generic cpu.

Edit: I just got a netflix trial to test it out. Works like a champ on my R2 with GPU off. I dumped the broadcom wifi card though for an Intel 6200 though. This is in IE8 watching a HD movie and HD tv show.

 

I saw your reply on the other post.

I feel like I notice a huge difference between video quality when streaming youtube 1080p using the integrated card vs the nvidia card. Do you use your GPU for video streaming at all?

 

Optimus isn't designed to kick in for a flash video. Flash is asking to using the GPU (you can disable hardware acceleration). Silverlight can also use hardware acceleration, but I believe the setting is disabled on netflix (I believe its a part of the embed html tag). It looks like its using CPU power to play the video.

GPU is offload is great when the cpu isn't powerful enough to decode the video like a netbook, but the alienware shouldn't have any problems using the CPU to decode HD video. In fact you could probably save battery life and reduce heat if you stuck with the CPU or Integrated graphics.

Video quality shouldn't be affected by using the CPU, Integrated graphics, or GPU. Both the Integrated graphics and Nvidia GPU offer basic edge enhancement and noise reduction, but these are usually off by default. Now if the device isn't powerful enough you could have more dropped frames, but each component in the M11x should be more than powerful enough for HD video.

I tried turning off flash hardware acceleration on a vimeo HD video and the quality and playback was just as good as using the GPU. If it was a netbook it would probably drop more frames, but look the same.

 

Thanks for the help Max. One last question. If outputting to a 1080p tv, does that take more CPU/GPU processing power than if just playing 1080p video on the netbook?

 

It should be the same or very close to the same as in both cases since the full 1080p video must be decoded and played at the same bitrate.