Netflix very jittery ONLY on Safari. Chrome works fine.

I have a late 2008 MBP running Yosemite. (Thinking of reverting to Mavericks but that's another topic) I'm running the latest version of Silverlight on Safari 8.0.3
I've been streaming Netflix for years but for some reason over the past year it has become unbearably choppy, jittery, or strobey.
Yet watching it on Chrome is perfect. While this seems to be a "fix" it just annoys the **** out of me that I can't figure out what it is.
I've reinstalled Silverlight, and cleared all website data and it hasn't helped at all.
Processor and/or fan doesn't seem to be working too hard.
Not necessarily relevant but the computer was a little slow after Yosemite so I ran disk utility and reset PRAM which seemed to get me back to normal aside from a slow startup. FYI

I have looked all over and haven't found any info on this.

Safari, as of Yosemite, is the only browser that offers Netflix through an HTML5 based player. In less "jargony" speak, this simply means that it doesn't use Silverlight. It is very possible that this is the cause and unfortunately, as far as I can tell, you can't force Safari to use Silverlight.

If you're playing a video on Netflix through Safari, what kind of CPU usage (see Activity Monitor) do you see?

Yeah I know about HTML5 but in my understanding only 2011 and newer can accommodate streaming on it. I deleted Silverlight under the impression running on HTML5 would fix the problem but was given an error message that said silverlight had to be installed to view content.
I guess the trouble is Safari battling HTML5 on an older machine not capable of using it. I guess I will just have to continue using Chrome for my late night movie watching

Safari has been HTML5 capable for years now but Netflix support has only just been introduced with version 8 since it relies on encrypted media extensions. In short, you need Safari 8 to go sans Silverlight if you use Netflix.

The easiest solution is probably to stick with Chrome but if ever want to drill down to find a solution, feel free to post back.