Youtube not playing properly under X.2

try firefox

It could just be that your machine's getting to be too old to handle Flash video, particularly videos which require Flash 9. A 500Mhz G3 is still the "minimum system requirement" for Flash, but their recommendation for playing video is *much* higher. (They specify a G5 or Intel as the minimum for full-screen viewing, for instance.)

Flash is really turning into a pig. I've found that even "simple" things like games stutter and lag a bit when I play them on a G4 AlBook. Not *badly*, but perceptibly when compared to the same thing running on either my work MacBook Pro or a Pentium 4 Linux box. The G4s (slowest one I still use is 1.33Ghz) still play video "okay", but I suspect they're living on borrowed time. Adobe has put MPEG4/H.264 support in the latest release of Flash 9, and there's a good chance it'll be the "default" format for Flash 10. G4s crumble trying to decode H.264. (They do okay with iPod-size videos but any more then that, forget it. And Flash seems add substantial overhead compared to playing a video ala carte with *any* codec, so the situation's going to be that much worse.) A G3's just going to squeak and die.

Good luck.

--Peace

Double post, it took much longer than usual, even after I stopped and hit post again. Wow.

My 600Mhz iBook plays video, barely. First, it's best to do it when running full speed, so either have processor performance set at auto or full. Second, use the shrink button in the bottom of most video windows to show the video at the actual resolution. It eats a LOT of CPU time to scale the video up just to fit the particular little area it's in in the page and the results are ugly. My iBook also runs 10.4 and has maxed RAM. I tried the same video in both FF2 and Safari 3 and Safari showed more jumping and lagging and such than FF. I wouldn't want to watch videos on it all time but it's not completely useless for it. I did some testing a while ago for streaming (YouTube, Google Video) under Linux and I saw a noticeable increase going from a Celeron 700 on a 66MHz bus to a P3 733 on a 133Mhz bus in the same machine. Double the cache and double the bus speed made streaming video useful. I couldn't watch videos on the Celeron but the P3 was perfectly fine. A G3 with double the cache of the P3 and a slightly slower bus should still be fine at about the same speed. Of course I don't have a G3 700 around to play with, just my 600 which is ok if use correctly.

10.2 is in general slower than 10.4 and if you aren't running on max RAM the swapping to disk will hurt performance a lot; it seems many of the lags I had were during disk accesses.

ive tried watching videos on my pismo 400mhz with 512mb ram and 10.4.11, and it lags horribly! where do i change cpu performance?

It's interesting to note the little footnote in the System Requirements for flash player in the Macintosh section:

"ATI Rage 128 GPU does not support fullscreen mode with hardware scaling."

(The 2001 iBook has a Rage 128, of course.) Given that, hitting that shrink button is probably a good idea. Still sounds like it's really a borderline situation, however.

--Peace

how about we compile a list of suggestions for playing youtube videos on older g3 macs, like the ibook g3's and the pismo

how about we compile a list of suggestions for playing youtube videos on older g3 macs, like the ibook g3's and the pismo

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