Updated
If you have to deal with buffering and other hiccups while watching Netflix on your computer, check out how to access the hidden diagnostics menu to fix it.
It’s your day off, and you’re ready to binge out watching an original Netflix series like House of Cards on Netflix (or any video) on a computer, and you end up having to deal with video buffering and streaming hiccups. Quite annoying. There could be a variety of issues that are causing this. Like your bandwidth speed, if you’re connected via WiFi or Ethernet, the amount of traffic on your network, etc. But if you’re having issues and nothing obvious is the cause of the skips ad pauses, you can try out the hidden diagnostics inside Netflix.
Hidden Netflix Streaming Settings
While you’re watching Netflix on your PC, hit Shift + Alt on your keyboard and left-click your mouse on the screen. That opens a diagnostics window that contains several playback options and settings you can tweak.
Note: On a Mac, hit Shift + Option and left-click the mouse to get the same thing.
For streaming issues, open the Stream Manager and select Manual Selection, and set the buffering rate that works best for your situation.
There are other settings in this menu that you can tweak too. For instance, if the audio isn’t syncing up correctly, you can set A/V Sync Compensation, get Player Info, and more.
Getting A/V stats can help you determine what’s going on behind the scenes so you can make the appropriate adjustments in the A/V Sync settings.
You can access most Diagnostics windows in Netflix with pure keyboard Kung-Fu too — no mouse click required. Here’s a list of the shortcuts for menu items:
- Stream Manager: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + S
- Player Info: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + P
- A/V Stats: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + D
- Logging: Ctrl + Shift + Alt + L
Did I miss any of them? Leave a comment and let us know! For more, make sure to check out our full archive of Netflix articles.
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3 Comments
3 Comments
Clint
August 7, 2013 at 11:09 am
Thanks Brian, I’m always up for any kind of tweaking that will, in my eyes, add horsepower to my computers performance no matter how big or little of them upgraded is.
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Brian Burgess
August 7, 2013 at 11:16 am
Thanks Clint! I am the same way. Hope this helps you out.
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Devin
October 5, 2015 at 8:00 pm
how do I do this on a chromebook- a screen pops up but it looks different than the stream manager
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