Choppy HD YouTube? Why?

Evening everybody, I've got a rather annoying situation.

There's this HD movie out on YouTube, maybe you've heard of it, Home Project, and no matter if I use Safari, Firefox or Opera, the video is always choppy.

It starts out fine and smooth (in HD + fullscreen obviously) and then, couple of minutes in, it gets choppy. All three browsers. And then iStat menus reports Firefox using 87% CPU, Opera 82% and Safari 78%. This is with no other application running, except the browser I'm testing this in.

Why is that? Why can't I watch an HD YouTube video on my late 2008 Unibody Macbook Pro?

At first I thought it was the other applications I was running, messenger, skype, etc etc. and then I thought it was the video card, so I switched to the 9600M GT. Same thing, choppy, choppy choppy.

Also, Perian is updated, but this shouldn't affect YouTube, since it is flash.

Can anyone try and see how their computers are handling this, or maybe does somebody have any idea as to how I can fix this?

It would be very much appreciated, cheers!

 

Maybe a silly question, but have you updated the actual flash player on the machine?

It would be a software issue, perhaps uninstall perian and flash and reinstall the new versions.

 

Yes I have, Perian updates by itself and I just reinstalled Flash.

Same result...

edit, SD content is just fine. HD content is choppy and it gets even choppier if I try to skip ahead in a movie or anything like that.

The videos stream really fast though, 2.23MB/s, so it can't be an internet issue...

edit 2: Well, it seems to be a wide-spread problem across multiple versions of Mac machines and OS X. Flash seems to be the problem.

 

Seems to load very slowly for me. Mine started getting choppy within the first 40 seconds.

 

Maybe try starting the video and pause it. Wait for it to load and then play it.

 

using the 9400 on my late 2008.. and it never gets choppy... but just have these random weird millisecond pauses every once in awhile

 

HD Youtube chopyness is due to your processor not being powerfull enough most of the time. Nothing to do with the graphics card at all (Flash doesnt work with graphic cards) What kind of processor do you have in it?

 

Flash is known to have problems with OSX.
E.g. high CPU ultilizations, glitches..etc

If you can't figure out the problem and you absolutely need to watch HD youtube videos, get vmware fusion or parallel and install windows 7 RC or something. Using Flash on windows will solve all of your problems with the high CPU utilization when viewing with a lot of flash videos.

 

I'd rather watch a choppy video than install Windows on my Mac. I'm sure things will be different with Snow Leopard.

 

random weird millisecond pauses = choppiness.

 

Well.. that's you.
I believe most people would rather want youtube to work properly instead one way or another. I think installing windows in a virtual machine will solve many of the problem that many mac users are having and is probably the the easiest and fastest way too.

 

depends on your definition I guess... I said they happen every once in awhile. To me they'd have to be happening more than once every few minutes to be considers choppy.

 

Must as well buy a PC.
Strange when such things happen on Windows OMG Microsoft sucks Windows is lame.
When such thing happen on Mac OS X oh nvm I can live if it somehow Apple will fix it it is forgivable(Like Windows don't have patches).

 

Youtube is fine on my MBP. On my MBA though it is a different story.

 

This is not a Windows or Mac OSX problem. The root of the problem is poor Flash support on Mac OSX. Either Adobe is too lazy or Mac OSX isn't properly designed for flash compatibility. Support for Flash on Windows however is much better.

If one wants both the pros from Mac OSX and Windows at the same time, they'll need to run one of them in virtual machines. That way, people can switch between Windows and MacOSX without having to restart the computer to boot into another OS. I wish apple didn't put restrictions on running their OS on other PC hardwares, but I still do it anyways.

 

Actually I think that as long as user bought a copy of OS X software they shouldn't be allowed to restrict the installation on any machine unless the OS is bundled only not sold separately.
Whether they will provide hardware support is one thing but restriction on hardware installation is actually monopoly.
This is getting out of point.

 

Flash "HD" files are poorly programmed for Windows as well.

 

Just for fun i ran it in both IE7 and Firefox for Windows, on OSX under Wine... when i was using Flash9 and SD it actually ran great.... upgrade to flash 10 for HD option and whoa.... even the SD on flash 10 sucked, let alone the HD, talk about choppy.. it was like 5fps.. of course thats because of problems between Wine and Flash 10... but was still funny to see

 

I do hope this issue gets fixed soon because its quite annoying. Flash is not gpu accelerated at all, which is a problem that adobe needs to fix ASAP. Especially for upcoming Ion based netbooks to be able to handle HD content, because the 1.6ghz atom won't be able to.

 

Interesting how high bit-rate 720p files take up less resources than a simple "HD" flash file. Youtube needs to get Adobe's rear end.

 

Flash isn't designed to be hardware accelerated. It runs on the CPU, and that is it. You can't add hardware support through software. You actually have to have the "hardware" there to do it.

Edit: totally forgot about Open CL. You can run whatever you want on the GPU now, and it is possible to get flash on there (I guess).

----

Back to the point, it isn't even necessary to get hardware flash right now. they just need to fix the implementation they already have.

 

OpenCL is just a API, Windows included it in a new Direct3D 11.
Both are nothing to crow about if developers don't include software to use them.
In other words if it is not supported forget it.

 

It's choppy for me to, crappy flash.

 

???

http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help01.html

 

For the record, I fired this movie up on my Sager 5793 in Vista x64, and the playback isn't exceptionally smooth there either.

 

yah.. nothing is perfect. But compared to Flash support in OSX, flash support in Windows is so much better than in Mac OSX.
E.g. Flash HD videos play in Windows takes about 5-10% of my cpu power and My computer is not 8-16 times faster than the guy who stated it uses about 80% CPU power to play HD youtube videos. My computer is only about 2-3 times faster than his.

 

I read there that the scaling is GPU accelerated. Flash playback itself is not GPU accelerated as far as I know.

 

So which of the following statements are correct?

OR

I think the main problem is that flash is not a very good format for HD.

 

Both are correct?
If that guy is having problems playing back HD videos due to poor flash support in OSX, watching the video in Wndows in a virtual machine might solve his problem.

If we all have good computer, Flash is pretty good. Even if I play 5-6 hd flash videos from youtube all at once, my computer can still handle it. This is not the case for some weaker computers such as my netbook can barely play 720P flash videos from vimeo.com. Watching the flash HD videos under OSX is more problematic thus it requires higher performing computer under OSX to watch the same youtube hd video.

 

I also think both are correct.

 

I ran it with Hardware Acceleration off, and it ran exactly the same as with it on... no matter how many other things I had going on on the machine. I wonder if on some GPUs in OSX the hardware acceleration doesn't work right?

 

I don't think that is the case because Flash is not GPU accelerated. It's fully CPU dependent.

 

it is mostly CPU, but it can use the GPU for some things.

 

True. I mentioned that one page ago, scaling is GPU accelerated, flash playback is not.

 

I've been able to play other HD videos on youtube without a problem. It seems to be only this particular video. My son's Lenovo can't seem to play it properly either.

 

i understand that Open CL is cross platform framework for running applications on the GPU. that is why i mentioned it in reference to being able to run flash on the GPU. my gut reaction was that *there is absolutely no way* until i remembered Open CL. Since Flash is cross platform, Open CL would be the only way to cross-platform hardware accelerate it. i'm still not sure if it is possible or worth the developer's time, but if there is a way, that is it.

also

I don't think directx 10 cards will be able to take advantage of features introduced in directx 11, anyway. besides, it is still in development.

long story short, Open CL is cross platform technology, so discussing it isn't an attack on windows or microsoft.