Netflix on Fusion - Performance

[Hogan65]

Netflix on demand does not yet support a Mac so I am trying to view online movies on a VM. Watching online videos online in a VM works pretty well for the most part. However, intermittenly, the video will stall for a second and then seems to catch up and then continues playing. In addition, once in a while, the video will jerk and skip a couple of frames. I am pretty sure this is a VM problem as a viewing on a Windows PC does not present these problems. I know that I am asking for alot and this may not be fixable in the current version but I was wondering if anyone knows of some performance tweaks that might help these problems?

[Huracan]

It's great that you have started this topic and that it was at the top of the list. I was going to do this myself. I am experiencing the same symptoms. I even reinstalled windows with minimal applications (removed antivirus) to see whether the problem would go away, and it didn't. I haven't tried many things, but nothing seems to help. Stage6 seems to have the same kind of issue when playing video. I did that experiment to discard that the problem was with packets lost on streaming. It seems that every once in a while VM Fusion gets "stuck" and the CPU usage drops and the video stalls. I hope someone has a tweak or workaround or that VMWare are working on figuring out this issue. I have a MacBook with 2GB of memory. I have tried both 1 core and 2 core for the virtual machine.

[WoodyZ]

It's great that you have started this topic and that it was at the top of the list.

You do realize that it was only at the top of the list because it was the most recent post and or reply to a post. e.g It was 7th on the list before I replied to your post and now it will be a the top but that will only be short lived and really has no value other than it's easier to see for a while. Granted a post at the top of the list might have a greater chance at being looked at however it's been my experience that does not guarantee it will be answered first over the other question posted. In most cases it's more likely that it will not be answered for a while or at all.

Some thoughts on performance...

How much memory does the Virtual Machine have the more the better providing you leave a proper amount for Mac OS X.

On a system the only 2 cores it actually better to just use one virtual processor.

Enabling Accelerate 3d graphics on the Display settings sheet bumps the video memory fro 16MB to 128MB and that may help some.

Using Bridged Mode on the Network I think would provide better throughput then the default NAT.

In VMware Fusion Preferences selecting Optimize for virtual machine disk performance may provide better performance then Optimize for Mac OS application performance

[Huracan]

Yes, I know it was a coincidence that it was at the top of the list. I just found it funny that when I was thinking about starting a new topic it was already there. I'd like to correct something I said earlier. The divx player at Stage6 seems to work fine once the movie has been downloaded correctly, so it could be a streaming related issue. I believe I have tried bridged mode in the past, with the laptop plugged to a decent speed Ethernet LAN. I have given half gigabyte to the Windows XP machine. I'll try the 3D acceleration setting and the other disk speed optimization.

[Hogan65]

I am sure that the next version of Fusion is going to pay alot of attention to performance since there was a recent article about how Parallels was faster than Fusion.

[Huracan]

I tried the 3D acceleration and the bridged mode and things seemed to improve quite a bit. I was able to watch a netflix movie without much video stalling, at least there was no annoying stalls. I kind of noticed some video frames getting lost here and there but without loss of sound. I had a couple of major errors from Netflix saying that the internet connection had stopped or something similar. For this I had to close Internet Explorer and come back again. At this particular time I was using Wireless Internet. Anyway, I hope that the next Fusion release focuses on performance, in particular streaming video performance.

Thanks for your help.

[Hogan65]

It seems that with the 10.5.2 update, that the perfornance is worse. Anyone else seeing the same thing?