Flash Player Sucks On Mac OS X
I have been scouring the internet in search of a solution to my “YouTube sucks on my Mac” problem. When I play YouTube videos on Mac OS X Tiger, YouTube drops frames so badly that it looks like I am watching a slideshow – even though the audio form the video runs smoothly. Safari 4.0 has been better than Firefox 3.5 thus far but neither compare to watching YouTube on my work computer which is a PC. The only answers I have seen thus far are not promising in that us Mac users should resign ourselves to the fact that this is life and Flash player will not work well on a Mac.
I wish I could say I found a solution but I have not. I have found a few tips that help improve the situation but it is still nothing compared to watching Youtube on a Windows PC. Boo.
Tip #1 – Fully Uninstall then Reinstall Flash Player
- You need to download the Flash Player Uninstaller from the Adobe website. After I ran that I restarted the system.
- Then download the latest version of Flash Player from the Adobe website and double check that your system meets the minimum requirements for that version of Flash Player.
- Close all applications and even things you have running in the background like Quicksilver, Camouflage, SMC Fan Control, MagiCal, etc.
- Run the installer and then open your Disk Utility Application and repair permissions. Restart your system and you should be good to go.
- Make sure that you have the most updated versions of your internet browser. I like Firefox most of the time but I have found that the Flash Player problem doesn’t seem as noticeable using Safari.
- Note: I was running Adobe Flash CS3 on my Mac which had Flash Player 9 with it. This did not seem to uninstall and it appeared as though I had multible versions of Flash Player lurking in different folders. I completely removed Adobe Flash CS3 to ensure there was only one flash player on my system – no noticeable improvement.
I have found definite improvement with Safari, but the frames are still dropped in Firefox. This is incredibly frustrating because I like Firefox as my browser of choice.
Tip #2 – Bypass Using Flash Player
There are a few different ways of bypassing using the Flash Player altogether. These involve the option to download the video file and use a different application or using an alternate player.
- If you are using Firefox then download the add-on called Greasemonkey. Then you can download a user script for Greasemonkey called YouTube HD Suite which will allow you to see the available formats of the video (HD, HQ, MP4, FLV). Also download YouTube HD Ultimate which gives you tons of options to improve YouTube – most importantly being able to download the video in various formats to play on an external player like VLC or Quicktime. Here is a great article on different userscripts that might be worth trying at Mashable by Sean P. Aune
I am using a Macbook Pro running Tiger. The specs are as follows:
- 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
- 2 GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
I have found that running High Definition video from the Apple site – movie trailers in 1080p look amazing when my Mac is hooked up to my HDTV but the computer doesn’t seem to be powerful enough to handle it for a long period of time. Quick time starts to drop frames and eventually it is unwatchable.
Maybe on newer Mac systems like the new Macbook Pros this problem is minimized as the hardware has improved so much. I am holding out for my dream home entertainment setup with a Mac mini. I am hoping that this problem will not carry forward because watching YouTube is a great source of entertainment and is very frustrating to watch when it is dropping frames and freezing. Especially now that YouTube has High Definition and High Quality options.
From the many forums out there it seems as though this is not an issue with every Mac system but it is enough of an issue to have people asking about it – no good solutions for my system as of yet.
I would be glad to hear of any other possible solutions to this problem. Let me know what they are in the comments section. Has anyone not experienced this and what hardware specs are you using? Is anyone running the same specs as me and not having this problem?
Related Posts:
Filed Under Troubleshooting Leave a Comment
Tagged With
Comments
Leave a Reply