MB: Horrible video playback?

[stefan15]

Hey everyone, question for you guys.

I was thinking about getting a macbook fairly soon, until I tried out my girlfriend's. We had recently upgraded her MB to 2gb ram, to work more efficiently in Photoshop/Illustrator.

However, under firefox, even low-res youtube videos tend to run choppy. Full screen playback of movies is a bit of a rough experience.

Any possible causes/remedies for this?

Thanks!

EDIT: It is one of the earlier MB's.. not necessarily the first rev (or.. generation, not sure if there have been actual revision per se), in which case it is around the 3rd (or, second updated version since release). Overheating perhaps?

 

[plinden]

My wife's MacBook was ordered the day after the MacBooks were announced, so is the first generation - 1.83GHz Core Duo, with 1GB RAM.

It plays standard def video from DVD or iTunes TV shows, no problem. No stuttering, no dropped frames. Even hi-def samples from the Apple website are surprisingly good, with no dropped frames and stuttering only in high motion video.

However, streaming non-H.264 video eg. Flash from YouTube or WMV from CNN is indeed a pain. But Flash is notoriously bad on Macs.

In my work, we provide streaming WMV on the interweb, and our encoding engineers (most of whom actually own Macs at home) tell me that WMV is typically not optimized for streaming to Macs, usually resulting in buffering and stuttering in the video. (By the way, I have no first hand knowledge of how to configure WMV streams ... I write the infrastructure programs they use.)

 

[thegrandmaster]

Have you tried streaming under a different browser?

I used Firefox on my Mac for a bit and really didn't like it, seemed to have trouble doing stuff it shouldn't have trouble with. Try streaming the same thing with Camino/Safari/Opera and see if its any better.

 

[stefan15]

No, I haven't tried a different browser.. Maybe I'll let her know..

@plinden: Interesting point. I wonder why WMV/flash video would need to be reconfigured to stream to macs; you would think it would be just a network optimization thing--not necessarily "mac specific". Good to know that this isn't a necessarily uncommon issue.

Perhaps a patch on Adobe's end is a possibility at some point?

 

[Dynamyk]

Havent had any problems yet, but I'm using Safari..

 

[Jim Campbell]

Havent had any problems yet, but I'm using Safari..

Yep - YouTube is fine on my C2D MB too, and .wmv with Flip4Mac installed, using Safari.

Cheers

Jim