2006 1,1 Mac Pro - Video Playback Freeze

[The Cat Empire]

This is seriously making me very angry.

I'm running Mac OS X Lion (10.7.1) on my 2006 Mac Pro and if I try to play videos, my Mac Pro will lock up with a spinning beach ball and even if I force quit iTunes (or QuickTime Player), other apps start freezing too. It gets so bad that I have to completely restart the computer.

So basically I'm unable to play videos within Lion (works fine in 10.6).

Apparently 2011 iMacs suffered from a similar video bug (before 10.7.1) where their computer would freeze after waking it from sleep and THEN playing a video, but I have my computer set to never sleep and it doesn't matter if I have a fresh boot, a fresh install of Lion, it still freezes if I try to play more than one QuickTime video.

My exact configuration is: Mac Pro, 5GB of RAM, ATI Radeon 4870 HD, 4 Hard Drives (Lion, Snow Leopard, Time Machine, Windows 7).

Here are the things I've tried so far:

1. I put in my old Nvidia 8800GT video card... same exact problem.
2. Bought a new hard drive and installed Lion fresh on it (left everything at default settings)... same problem.
3. Repaired permissions
4. Reset PRAM

So I'm thinking that it must be some sort of hardware thing... but why would it only do it on Lion and not Snow Leopard? Also, why wouldn't 10.7.1 fix it for me while it fixed other freezing issues for the 2011 iMac?

I'm getting seriously really annoyed now.

So my question is... does anyone have a similar configuration as me and has Lion installed? Can you see if your computer is affected as well?

Note: Oddly, I've never had any issues playing Flash movies in Safari (which it seems like 10.7.1 notes about the freeze fix).

Please post any tips you may have... I'm about to give up.

 

[ActionableMango]

My first guess would have been bad video card but you've already swapped that. My second guess would be bad memory.

Pull out half the memory and try playing a video. If you still have the problem, swap the halves and try again.

If you don't have enough memory to try that, you can use a memory tester such as memtest.

 

[Neodym]

So I'm thinking that it must be some sort of hardware thing... but why would it only do it on Lion and not Snow Leopard?

That's funny - how do you figure it must be a hardware thing? I would rather suspect Lion to be the cause - you say it yourself: everything works fine under SnowLeopard.

Lion has changed quite much under the hood and there have been reports regarding video playback issues, especially with non-Apple graphic cards.

I would revert to Snow Leopard if everything works fine there and wait for Lion to reach .2 or .3, before trying it again.

Also, why wouldn't 10.7.1 fix it for me while it fixed other freezing issues for the 2011 iMac?

Mmmh - maybe because you have a completely different hardware?

 

[The Cat Empire]

That's funny - how do you figure it must be a hardware thing? I would rather suspect Lion to be the cause - you say it yourself: everything works fine under SnowLeopard.

Lion has changed quite much under the hood and there have been reports regarding video playback issues, especially with non-Apple graphic cards.

I would revert to Snow Leopard if everything works fine there and wait for Lion to reach .2 or .3, before trying it again.


Mmmh - maybe because you have a completely different hardware?

I'm happy to report that I completely SOLVED my issue by taking out my old GeForce 7300 (that came with my Mac Pro) because I've been using the ATI Radeon 4870 instead.

Just simply taking out that old graphics card (just sitting there in a slot, with nothing hooked up to it) solved my issues.

I'm so happy now!!!