Stuttering with Flash - How many have it, how many 09's?

[Eric-PTEK]

I have had it with the 09 Mini and stuttering Flash.

Plex is great, we've been using it on Hulu, NBC's website, etc but the stuttering makes it unwatchable.

The problem is its the Mac, not necessarily Adobe. Boot into either Vista or Win7 and have the exact same problems. I have 6 other machines in the house ranging from much slower(2.2ghz Celeron off core2 architecture) to my much much faster C2Q at 3.3ghz.

None of them this issue.

Last night I downloaded Hulu Desktop at someones recommendation and it played decent, would stutter every 1 minute or so but nothing bad. Sit down today to watch something, its 10x worse than watching it over Plex.

I've rebooted, reloaded, upgraded Flash, put in 3 gigs of ram...you name it.

Its the box IMO and that makes no sense because why does it happen in Vista/7 via Bootcamp?

FWIW it plays MKV's and MP4's with no problem at all....I never had this problem on my previous Mini.

The Mini is in our bedroom connected to a 47" Westinghouse 1080p display via DVI. I run it at 1280x720 because from our viewing distance its way too tough to see the 1920x1080.

I can turn it down to low or medium quality in Hulu, no difference. In fact it seems worse the lower it goes.

 

[MultiFinder17]

Nope, never had any stuttering on my '09 mini, and in fact, I hardly have any stuttering on my '05 PowerBook.

 

[Eric-PTEK]

From what I've gathered read the only people with the issues are '09's.

Is yours an early 09? Mine I got the day after they launched.

Do Mac's do what would be considered BIOS upgrades on a PC?

 

[Krafty]

I dont think Mac uses BIOS.

I have a mid-2009 mini and I've had no troubles.

 

[paulbeattie87]

From what I've gathered read the only people with the issues are '09's.

Is yours an early 09? Mine I got the day after they launched.

Do Mac's do what would be considered BIOS upgrades on a PC?

No problems here on my 2.93GHz 24" iMac with a GT120 with 256MB VRAM.

As for BIOS updates, Apple don't use a BIOS to control computer function. The only BIOS found on a mac is an open-source software implementation found when you use Bootcamp. Apple use EFI or Extensible Firmware Interface. It superseded BIOS a few years ago.

I'd be more inclined to say it would be a software issue, have you tried bootcamp? You could also try calling Apple and see what they think, it is fairly new after all!

 

[pcguru83]

I've got it on my 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo Mini (with 4GB of RAM). Which is interesting, because I don't remember having problems with it on my 1.83GHz Core Duo Mini (with only 2GB of RAM).

I firmly believe the problem is Adobe's. Their flash plug-in for OS X just downright sucks.

 

[Eric-PTEK]

Yes I've tried Bootcamp, same issue.

Thats why I posted this. There seems to be a group of people with Nvidia 09 Mac's who have this issue, in OSx or an MS OS.

I have not tried to call Apple yet. I was looking to see how many people had the issue.

I dumped Win7 tonight and went back to Vista since none of the Win7 Nvidia drivers seem to accelerate video at all on a Mini.

Still had the issue while playing at the exact same time on my laptop the same stream looked fine.

My Mini is painfully slow IMO in Vista/Win7. I never put XP on this one but compared to my old unit which was a 1.83ghz Core 2 it feels slower in every way and is slower than it should be.

By all rights it should be faster than my Core Duo laptop but its not.

 

[paulbeattie87]

The flash plugin is horrid on any platform, on Windows it can slow the browser down to the point where windows is starting to lock it down ready for a forced quit. On OS X it used to cause me Safari crashes left right and centre, every day it would quit Safari all without warning. Worst part is Safari has no tab recovery like Firefox or Opera even IE! They seem to have this problem covered in Snow Leopard stopping plug-ins from crashing the whole browser session.

As for speed, before my 09' iMac I had an 08' one. My 08' iMac in comparison to this one was mighty slow. The specification difference was minimal as well, 08' had a 2.8GHz processor and an ATi Radeon 2600XT 256MB, 4GB RAM too. The difference in speed I cannot believe. It's like I had moved from having all apps in rosetta/PPC to the latest Intel Core 2 Duo's!

I don't know, maybe your Mini has some other problems like my 08' iMac did. Really it's amazing the difference, I couldn't run Parallels without seeing a huge crash in performance, now I can leave Parallels running all the time without even knowing it's open! Safari has also never crashed, even when I have 20+ tabs open across many windows, it is still responsive. That was not the case on my old iMac.