MB 1,1-7,1 The Quest For The Best OS - State of streaming YouTube with a web browser on a MacBook 2,1 (GMA 950)

[alex_free]

My first computer was a MacBook 2,1. I daily drove it from basically 2011-2019. Recently I bought the exact model back (even the same color, rare black). So it’s a 2.16GHz C2D with 1280x800 16:10 display, with the almost useless GMA 950.

The GMA 950 is/was so useless, that it spawned my passion for late 90s/early 00s PC games in the early 2010s when I had it. Quake III/UT etc.. Nothing past 2003 is guaranteed to run on it really,

Anyways, I use chromium-legacy on my late 2012 Mac mini (absolute beast capable of H.265 1080p) with YouTube on 10.12 and Linux and Windows 7 (yes I triple booted it) and I knew it supported Mac OS X 10.7, so I figured let’s give it a go.

Initial impressions, a little too slow to be usable on YouTube for streaming video full screen. Not reactive enough. I thought, well mine back in the day had maxed out 4GB of RAM, this one came with 2GBs maybe I should try that. So I bought 4GBs of RAM and maxed it out. Then next tried Linux (I did not go back to lion with the 4GBs at this point of the adventure…)

After the amazing experience of Fedora on the late 2012 Mac mini, I expected this would work great. No it did not. XFCE spin of fedora is broken with the intel driver for GMA 950 and your stuck with software rendering. Cinamon spin doesn’t even boot. Finally the regular gnome works fine, even with hardware acceleration but on every Linux I try the right headphone speaker is mapped to the subwoofer on the actual MacBook. And then comes the really sad truth:

GMA 950 has no hardware acceleration in any modern browser. Even if the OS is hardware accelerated…

I’m not talking about video codec acceleration, I’m talking about canvas acceleration. Any kind of 2d acceleration. GMA 950 never had any kind of video codec acceleration, but to be not even supported for anything on the screen for the video is tuff.

Chrome just crashes if you try to force it. I mean yea the OpenGL is ancient (v2.1 on Linux, v1.4 on Mac OS or Windows). But this little bit of help could make a lot of difference here with one of the supercomputer tasks of 2024, streaming YouTube with a browser.

Something else that doesn’t help is YouTube is moving to VP9/other codecs which are even harder on the ancient C2D. And then you add entirely software based rendering.

Let me clear up what I mean. At least with say a dedicated video player with the right codecs for the CPU, you can play even HD content (720p/1080pish) on such a system as this because it doesn’t have a crazy modern browser+software decode of video+no hardware display accel. The video player can at least output OpenGL or whatever for the display, even though it’s decoded by the CPU.

I can play 1080p/720p H.264 downloaded YouTube videos just fine on the Linux os for example with the right codecs. But the browser has too much going against it performance wise to do the same, even with 240p…

Next, my atomic bomb Windows XP. I mained windows xp on such a machine for a period in 2018, and it was awesome. Modern vlc, YouTube worked great, 1080p/720p streaming just like with Firefox/chrome on lion back then.

But then I installed XP, and while these era Mac’s are absolute beasts of XP machines, I ran into a familiar issue. No hardware accel. I used superium, basically chromium-legacy for windows xp-7. And same issue, no hardware accel.

Choppy, not satisfactory results. I tried mypal, a fork of Firefox 74 and pretty much the same. Tons of vsync issues, a bit choppy.


For fun I tried the last official Firefox/chromium on both lion and windows xp. Both had hardware accel for at least canvas, and both did much better performance wise but full screen was broken on all.. and much of other things to.

Finally, I arrive back at lion. And I’m here to say with 4GBs of RAM (really 3GBs only seeable due to motherboard quirk), 360p selected, and H264ify browser extension (forces legacy codecs, I did use this in every above test too) and ublock origin lite, it is the absolute optimal experience. You may get a few dropped frames here and there, but this is the only setup worth using a browser with. 2GBs is not enough RAM!

Of course, using an external client will always yield better performance. Using YouTube-DLP on a Linux distribution that’s actually hardware accelerated with vlc and the right codecs, was the expected results…

Same thing with VLC (which min support for latest version as of current date is Windows XP SP3/Mac 10.7.0). If you bypass the browser and use a downloaded/streamer and output to a hardware accelerated video player, you’ll always have good results.

Even on tiger with this machine running PPCMC 7 to download videos and play them back with VLC let me do 720p playback easily.

I just want to say, the dream is not dead. I never thought I would have my first laptop back and find something that would actually do something close to what I did 10 years ago with it, thank you legacy-chromium.

If you know, you know. GraphicsMediaAccelerator 950 is more like DisplayController 950. It doesn’t even have hardware Textures and lighting, a 2001 thing for nvidia GPUs.

 

[notabitail]

I've gotten youtube to play back on a Core Duo with Supermium on Windows Vista.

Try the Vorapis V3 extension. It seems to help with a lot of the heavy stuff YT loads in: https://vorapis.pages.dev/#/

 

[Wowfunhappy]

If your goal is just Youtube, have you tried Chrome OS Flex? No idea if it will actually work, mind you. https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/

GMA 950 has no hardware acceleration in any modern browser. Even if the OS is hardware accelerated…

The GMA 950 is such crap that I'm not convinced you would even substantially benefit from hardware acceleration.

 

[KestiriX]

you could try putting modded 10.8 on it. it might give you better experience. I put it on iMac, also equipped with gma 950 and it ran surprisingly well.

 

[alex_free]

I've gotten youtube to play back on a Core Duo with Supermium on Windows Vista.

Try the Vorapis V3 extension. It seems to help with a lot of the heavy stuff YT loads in: https://vorapis.pages.dev/#/

This is amazing. I can now stream 720p no problem on legacy-chromium running on 10.7 lion. I must try XP next. YouTube normally is so resource intensive I can only do 360p.

It literally fixes YouTube. Better older less intensive interface. Black magic this is. Really inspires me to make more stuff. I can’t believe the YouTube website is this resource intensive, it’s quite a feat.

It kinda all makes sense. Other sites like kick do just fine, it was just YouTube.

 

[alex_free]

you could try putting modded 10.8 on it. it might give you better experience. I put it on iMac, also equipped with gma 950 and it ran surprisingly well.

I was really close to doing this but at the last second I choose 10.7 due to nostalgia reasons. I never actually used 10.8 back in the day, I did use 10.7 a lot and I used to actually not like it too much and always preferred snow leopard, but have sort of grown to like it and the software support is much stronger then 10.6. I still have 10.4 on another partition.

10.8 does have graphics driver support, I did hear about some kind of issue with legacy chromium somewhere with it and the GMA 950 on modified 10.8 but haven’t tried. I don’t really see a need right now to run 10.8 on this machine.

 

[alex_free]

If your goal is just Youtube, have you tried Chrome OS Flex? No idea if it will actually work, mind you. https://chromeos.google/products/chromeos-flex/


The GMA 950 is such crap that I'm not convinced you would even substantially benefit from hardware acceleration.

What kind of brought this on was my Mac mini originally had 3 external HDDs, a 4TB, 2TB, and another 2TB. It really didn’t like all of these plus an IDE CD burner and more things plugged in at once, and I ran out of room. So I bought one single external 20TB HDD to replace all of them with.

Now I have 3 spare HDDs. I dedicated one of the 2TBs to my Xbox 360 for much faster transfer rates (compared to this junk Walmart usb drive) of 8GB games from my Mac mini to the internal Xbox 360 HDD.

The other 2, I’m not sure. Maybe the 4TB will go to the PS5 if I ever run out of space.

But basically, right now the machine has the original 2007 hard drive in it, which is sub 5400rpm IIRC. I’m debating on putting in a SSD or the 2TB HDD I now have free. So I didn’t mind installing a bunch of operating systems to compare performance since it won’t be the final one anyways.

The one thing about the SSD is I’m not sure how XP will play with that. I don’t think tiger would have issues?

 

[notabitail]

This is amazing. I can now stream 720p no problem on legacy-chromium running on 10.7 lion. I must try XP next. YouTube normally is so resource intensive I can only do 360p.

It literally fixes YouTube. Better older less intensive interface. Black magic this is. Really inspires me to make more stuff. I can’t believe the YouTube website is this resource intensive, it’s quite a feat.

It kinda all makes sense. Other sites like kick do just fine, it was just YouTube.

I got about 360p no fullscreen on a Pentium 4 (Nvidia FX5200 GPU is what that PC has). Supermium seems to play nicely with it.

I've even gotten it to run on a poo-poo dual-core Intel Atom once. It was actually watchable.

 

[Wowfunhappy]

The one thing about the SSD is I’m not sure how XP will play with that. I don’t think tiger would have issues?

If it’s a SATA SSD the operating system won’t matter. With one exception—you’re missing out on TRIM, which eventually may hurt performance somewhat, although it supposedly matters less with modern SSDs.

 

[alex_free]

If it’s a SATA SSD the operating system won’t matter. With one exception—you’re missing out on TRIM, which eventually may hurt performance somewhat, although it supposedly matters less with modern SSDs.

Good to know. Probably just going to get the SSD then, even without trim on below 10.6.8 and windows xp it will surely be faster/quieter/bettery battery life then the original HDD. I never got to this back in the day when I had it originally!

 

[MBAir2010]

my MacBook Air 2010 11" i5 Mojave (patcher via dos dude) streams videos from YouTube perfectly
using Firefox legacy and regular waterfox as I use that for night time entertainment mostly cycling videos
like the tour of Flanders, TDF via Eurosport using an VPN.
the ssd drive is from OWC 265GB 3G series I think which is faster as well

 

[rampancy]

I'm happy to meet a fellow lover of the A1181! I think a lot of people love to dump on the plucky GMA 950, but in my experience it's worked very well for retro gaming, especially using WINE, provided that expectations are adjusted accordingly. The original version of XIII, TRON 2.0, and many Build Engine, and idTech 2/3-based games work quite well.

With respect to YouTube playback, the best results I've gotten have been with Lion using the Disable YouTube 60 FPS userscript with Greasemonkey and Pale Moon, one of the only up-to-date modern browser options left for Lion; it's interesting that h264ify has worked for you; what browser have you used with it? On Snow Leopard, InterWeb 55 has worked well with the aformentioned user script. In my experience, h264ify hasn't helped with making YouTube viable on the last official versions of Firefox and Chrome for 10.7.

By far though, the best results I've gotten have been with Linux - during my experiements with Linux I used an older 32-bit compatible version of Zorin; the main gotcha I've had to watch out for is to get a version of Linux that has a 32-bit EFI. A lot of folks have actually talked about using MX Linux, which I personally haven't yet tried on an A1181.

But yes, the dream hasn't died! The GMA 950-equipped MacBook is still a Mac that's worthy of praise and use!

 

[alex_free]

I'm happy to meet a fellow lover of the A1181! I think a lot of people love to dump on the plucky GMA 950, but in my experience it's worked very well for retro gaming, especially using WINE, provided that expectations are adjusted accordingly. The original version of XIII, TRON 2.0, and many Build Engine, and idTech 2/3-based games work quite well.

With respect to YouTube playback, the best results I've gotten have been with Lion using the Disable YouTube 60 FPS userscript with Greasemonkey and Pale Moon, one of the only up-to-date modern browser options left for Lion; it's interesting that h264ify has worked for you; what browser have you used with it? On Snow Leopard, InterWeb 55 has worked well with the aformentioned user script. In my experience, h264ify hasn't helped with making YouTube viable on the last official versions of Firefox and Chrome for 10.7.

By far though, the best results I've gotten have been with Linux - during my experiements with Linux I used an older 32-bit compatible version of Zorin; the main gotcha I've had to watch out for is to get a version of Linux that has a 32-bit EFI. A lot of folks have actually talked about using MX Linux, which I personally haven't yet tried on an A1181.

But yes, the dream hasn't died! The GMA 950-equipped MacBook is still a Mac that's worthy of praise and use!

I was using wine bottler in like 2012 (basically ancient wine for OS X, it makes self contained .apps that run on any Mac system with the windows exe). I ran unreal, quake 2, quake 3, max Payne. Max payne 2 was the real breaking point (2003 game that required hardware TnL). I ended up installing windows back then and using this thing that faked what the GPU was saying it was a different one that supported hardware TexturesNLighting, and then emulating that support on CPU. If IIRC, it just barely was playable🤣. I also remember this was this really specific version of the nulldc emulator that while less accurate then the current one at the time from 2011, the 2007 version kinda worked on it.

I remember just how bad wine was. And later in like 2022 when I was maxing fallout 4 in 4k on Linux with a gaming laptop it was just crazy. I was using wine before it was cool. I’m sure even back then some of the problems were because of it only supporting open gl v1.4. But it really has come a long way.


It’s really funny too, when you compare the 2005 iBook GPU these replaced which had a higher open gl (2.0 on leopard) and hardware TnL then the early MacBooks.

If you go into it saying “ok I basically have an insane CPU (for this time period of gaming it is capable of) and the equivalent of a graphics card from 2000” then you’ll have a good time gaming. Lots of gems like Diablo II, emulators like project 64 and sixtyforce, pcsxr, genesis all usable.


Now onto making YouTube viable:

* Must have 4GBs of RAM (again only 3GBs usable due to motherboard quirk, but it makes a huge difference in memory pressure/performance).
* Use Chromium Legacy.
* Install Ublock Origin Lite, enable complete filtering mode. This does also help with performance since the Ads/scripts are blocked.
* Install Vorapis (Old YouTube Layout Extension) (I did MV3 download for chrome).
* Install H.264ify. Make sure you select disable 60fps and enable h264ify.

That’s it. My CPU usage while using the YouTube site also was cut in half, while playing double the resolution videos (360p was 80% with stock YouTube layout, with this legacy YouTube layout I have 720p and like 40% utilization). I can even have multiple tabs open of other videos and apps no problem.

H.264ify seems to work for me… if I check the video source with stats for nerds it’s always avc1 or some derivative, basically fancy H.264. I would certainly notice by now if anything was something else but I’ll post an update if I find it to not be H.264. I’d expect that to not play! But I’ll still check.

Some other stuff I tried was some beefy h264 shows/movies I have saved on my Mac mini, downloaded them via cyber duck and even the 1080p ones played quite nicely with the up to date vlc, still compatible with 10.7.5! Ahh it’s just how I remembered!

I’ve honestly had quite an amazing experience with fedora Linux (default gnome) on my late 2012 Mac mini which is maxed out with 16GBs of RAM. I tried converting it to xfce4 for performance reasons, which yes it does gain some but then it messed up sound auto-working from 3.5mm to hdmi display so probably the default gnome is best…

As for the MacBook 2,1, no problem setting up my triple boot (with xp this time, the installer for fedora is amazing) but it has audio routing issues that I remember once solving in the 2010s but can no longer find anything relevant with modern google search.


Also, 16:10 will always be the best laptop aspect ratio

 

[alex_free]

 

[alex_free]

my MacBook Air 2010 11" i5 Mojave (patcher via dos dude) streams videos from YouTube perfectly
using Firefox legacy and regular waterfox as I use that for night time entertainment mostly cycling videos
like the tour of Flanders, TDF via Eurosport using an VPN.
the ssd drive is from OWC 265GB 3G series I think which is faster as well

The jump from even 2007 to 2009 was insane. Let alone your Mac, you probably have no problems with 1080p codecs. Meanwhile we can’t do that with our hardware (really even my late 2012 Mac mini is night and day with this MacBook using a GMA 950).