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Youtube extremely slow on my mac pro

OK, so now I decided to see if my isp was throttling my connection.

Used this:

CONNECTION TEST UTILITY

Results say that they aren't.

This must be coming from Youtube.

The only thing is: Why would a pc be able to download, right next to a mac that couldn't?

Is there some sort of configuration on the mac network, which prevents it from downloading from youtube?

Strange that I had a bump in speed, right after changing my dns.
 
Try changing your user agent when you test on the Mac.
In Safari prefs go to the advanced tab and click to show develop menu.
Go to the menu and choose the browser name youtube will sniff and see if there are any improvements. They could be sniffing out OS X but it is doubtful. Then join the html5 beta and check that. Then DL click to flash in Safari extensions and test that. Something has got to work:)
 
Greetings:

Started subscribing to this post after noticing YouTube being completely useless on my MBP15. I'm running Firefox 4.0.1 and it's so bad that I've given up. It's both amazing and tragic to me that I use my iPhone to watch YouTube instead.

I will, though, attest to Safari running YouTube with next to no hangups after following some of Milou's Bones advice (install ClickToFlash and run Flush), so thanks MBones for the tip. I too was able to watch a vid full screen with no freezes, which was awesome.

This was definitely a first for me though—I admittedly never use Safari; as a designer I'm always using Firefox for their Firebug feature—a must-have for debugging, experimentation and such. I guess I can save my video-watching for Safari now, but it would be nice to have a Firefox fix.

In the meantime I'll continue my investigation and will keep you posted. Thanks, everyone, for your input. This forum has been a valuable resource.
 
clicktoflash

click to flash works perfectly! Before youtube was slow on my i5 mac pro...now i'm watching HD, full screed, at the highest quality available
 
Flush worked! No more slow video! Thanks!

Miraculous! I've tried all kinds of stuff and this was the first thing that appears to have completely solved the problem. Thank you! :D


Milou's Bones said:
Short answer: Delete your Flash cookies.

Flash keeps its own cookies (surprise!) in its own folder that can bog down your flash player. Delete them. Delete them every day. This is what works for me. But deleting cookies in your browser won't touch them. So, two ways to do this: use FLUSH (http://machacks.tv/2009/01/27/flushapp-flash-cookie-removal-tool-for-os-x/) or use the Flash panel in your System Preferences.

Long answer:

First of all, everyone stop saying it's Madelyn's internet connection. Obviously it's not if she has no trouble with her Windows machine. As a Mac user, I can tell you that Flash butts heads with Macs in a way that Windows users never have to worry about. Mine was also slogging it to run flash video. I had given up on full-screen altogether.

My solution(s):

  1. My kludgy workaround had been to run the video in regular size and zoom in on it using the Universal Access zoom function that you can turn on in the system preferences.
  2. THEN I installed the extension clicktoflash—which I recommend for many reasons, not the least of which is that Flash can make my Mac run up to 30 degrees hotter. It also makes lots of ads invisible! (http://clicktoflash.com/)
  3. THEN I discovered the YouTube5 Safari extension (http://www.verticalforest.com/youtube5-extension/). It plays YouTube videos as HTML5, not Flash. Even seems to work on YouTube videos embedded on other websites. No more slow YouTube.
  4. THEN I discovered by accident that Flash video played perfectly well in a new user account I created for my boyfriend. (Try it!) I thought for a long time that this was my solution, especially when I hook my laptop up to my TV. This made me think that my regular user account was bogged down in some way, but I couldn't think of how, since i regularly reset Safari and had reinstalled Flash several times.
  5. THEN I stumbled on FLUSH. It ferrets out Flash cookies and gets rid of them. This seems to have fixed everything. I put it in my Login Items in the User Accounts panel in my System Preferences, so I don't forget. But I run it every so often when I think of it anyway. I don't know why cookies should have such a bad effect, but this seems to have fixed things for me. Now I run full screen Flash video with no trouble.

So that worked for me.
Click to expand...

derbothaus said:
All this would make sense except I have zero issues loading any video on Win or OS X. I am also on Comcast. I use really fast DNS though (not comcast). Less than 29ms ping's. I use ClicktoFlash extension as well. You Tube is slow sometimes but it is isolated to them.
Click to expand...
 
youtube loading in slow motion, stops, etc

I tried everything, clearing caches, resetting safari, the only thing that worked was changing browser to firefox, videos work perfectly now....shame apple is not involved in this, must be a commercial issue, very dissapointed in them for not either fixing this or telling folks this simple fix......

Shame!::mad:
 
Cindori said:
Youtube is really slow now a days.

Perhaps you tested your Windows PC on a low-load time of the day.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure is the site guilty... maybe it's the version of flash plug-in everyone's using? My plug-in has crashed a couple of times whilst trying to play movies and not just on youtube.
 
I've always had issues with online HD flash video and my Macbook Pro. If I switch to 720p video, my browser starts to slow down, and the video plays like a slide show. Booting up on my Windows partition confirmed that hardware or internet connection can't be the problem so I've just put it down to a flash/OSX compatibility issue (which weirdly doesn't affect everyone...).

My work arounds at the moment are enabling a flash block Firefox extension, Flush, and waiting for a video to fully buffer before playing. Video still isn't smooth, but it plays reasonably well for short clips.
 
empty cache and close fonts

two things to add:

1. empty safari's cache. (i know this is old news to a lot of people.)

2. close unused fonts. this is a huge thing for system performance overall. if you are like me, you open fonts all the time as you need them, then forget to close them. they are a hidden drain on system resources that won't show up in your activity monitor.
 
Solution that worked for me

Quit any open applications except Safari.

Select the "Reset Safari..." option under the Safari menu. (checked all the boxes except the one to forget logins and passwords and to autofill).

Then "Empty Cache..." under the Safari menu.

Then quit Safari.

Go to your user folder in the Finder. Go to "Library->Internet Plug-Ins" and remove all plugins (move to desktop).

Restart Safari and try out a Youtube video.

Hope this works for you.
 
madelyn said:
hi everyone since a week or two i noticed that loading video's from youtube has become extremely slow on my mac pro, sometimes takes up to 5 min. to load a 1min. movie... my main browser is Firefox but its the same story with Safari.

weird thing is that its only with my mac, my windows laptop plays the videos soon as i click on them, no waiting involved.

I'm 100% sure it has nothing to do with my internet connection being slow because i have a fibernet high speed broadband internet connection. and if it would be a youtube problem than i guess the video's would take ages to load on my windows machine as well, non of that is the case...

could someone please tell me if this is a known problem or how to fix it, anyone else experienced the same thing?

I did not do any updates in the last month...


MacPro 6 core 3,33GHZ 8GB DDR3 , OSX 10.6.6
Click to expand...


I figured it out. Same problem on my iMac 21.5 2.7GHz, 1 TB hard drive... blah blah... The first few seconds would play then the whole page would freeze for 5 - 10 seconds then it would scroll up or down if i tried to while it was frozen. If I waited for the whole video to load while it was paused, the page would be fine and what not. Even if I closed the browser, the audio would still be playing, if the whole video was not loaded on pause. So obviously I was annoyed and looked for any kind of help I could find. So today I found out that youtube is using a HTML 5 experiment thingy.

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Go there and and click Leave The HTML5 Trial.

After I did that, my youtube was fine again.

Hope That helps and let me know if it works
 
I figured out the problem.

Everyone seems to forget this and I did too for a while because I had the same problem on my Windows computer.

All you have to do is Two-Finger click inside the youtube video window, go to settings and uncheck the box that says Enable Hardware Acceleration. This will ultimately fix your problem. :)
 
If you're using Chrome to watch YouTube, beware that Chrome uses it's own Flash/Shockwave plug-in which isn't from Adobe. It's called PepperFlash and it used to hard freeze my Mac Pro whenever something with Flash would play. Here's a link on how to disable it and use Adobe's plugin: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-google-chrome.html

If you're using Safari, just update Adobe plug-in and you're good to go. In my struggle to get Flash working properly, Safari had the lowest CPU consumption, Firefox somewhere in the middle and Chrome was by far the highest (even with the Adobe plugin working, PepperFlash disabled).
 
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