video question

[cook.675]

Question: Lets say I'm watching a youtube video on my computer and click fullscreen. Now the video pixel-wise is fine but the playback is choppy and intermittent. Then when I return to the small screen mode the video is again fluid. Is this issue due to low memory, the video card, the speed of the internet connection, the processor, or some combination of all of the above?

Thanks

 

[TMRaven]

Usually it's a combination, but there very well could be one major bottleneck. It could be that the cpu can't handle it, or it's overheating, or your video card can't handle it.

What are the specs of your computer?

 

[cook.675]

Powermac G5 dual 2.0 GHZ; 1 gig RAM, apple 23" cinema display HD monitor via ADC connector; the video card i forgot the model but is factory with this comp. w/ 64 MB

 

[TMRaven]

You can monitor the cpu usage and memory usage through your activity monitor. If you see that your cpu usage maxes out during full-screening a flash video, then it might be your cpu. I really think it's your video card not being able to handle fullscreen flash though.

 

[goMac]

You've got a G5... those are generally getting too slow to handle YouTube. It's your processor, which isn't upgradable.

You can try some software workarounds. But your computer is getting long in the tooth. It might be time to upgrade. The G5s just moved off of Apple's vintage list onto the obsolete list.

(If you've got a PowerPC the video card doesn't enter into it. I don't think the PowerPC version of Flash uses the video card.)

 

[initialsBB]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

Have you tried forcing the HTML5 version of YouTube ? Does that change much in terms of CPU usage ?

 

[cook.675]

No I haven't tried those things. I know its an older machine, but really I don't think it's as dead as everyone says it is. If I upgrade the RAM to 8 GB, through in a new video card, how far off it is from today's models? Not that far off in my opinion. With those upgrades I think one could resonably expect it to handle that fullscreen video.

 

[ActionableMango]

Flash is terribly inefficient on OS X, even some of the Intel macs newer than your G5 peg the CPU trying to run Flash. Someone said force Youtube to HTML5. I didn't know you could do that, but if you can, I get it would help a lot.

For most applications, additional RAM will either do nothing at all or will help tremendously. If you are actually running out of RAM, then it will help a lot. If you aren't currently running out of RAM, then it will not speed up your computer by even a tiny fraction. So before you bother to spend money there, watch your memory usage.

I don't think updating your G5's video card will help Youtube at all. Also the best video card you can get for it is really old and outdated.

For the money you would spend on video and memory upgrades you might be better off selling the G5+monitor, adding your upgrade money, and get a blazing fast new iMac.

 

[CaptainChunk]

+1

It's the CPUs. G4s (the more recent, higher-clocked ones) and G5s will generally handle YouTube fine playing SD videos, but may still stutter at full-screen. But YouTube HD is practically out of the question.

It's really a combination of running Flash and decoding H.264, a task that was never remotely "fluid" until the emergence of dual-core Intel and AMD CPUs.

Beginning with Flash 10.1 (IIRC), Adobe started supporting GPU acceleration to help offset the CPU load, but unfortunately, the older GPUs available for G5s aren't compatible with its GPU decode engine.

So really, the only way you'll get stutter-free YouTube (or any flash-based video, for that matter) is to upgrade to a newer machine.