YouTube recently switched to a widescreen format and while browsing around to test out the quality I was still shocked at the poor performance of Flash on a Mac, specifically with video. The playback is jerky and constantly pauses in both Firefox and Safari. Restarting the browser helps a bit but by no means solves the problem.
I had recently downloaded Flash Player 10 (10,0,12,36 at the time of this post) and noticed a slight improvement in playback and performance but still not what I would consider acceptable for video. Ars Technica published an article in October benchmarking Flash Player 10. On a Mac Pro, Flash 10 used between 25% and 75% of CPU resources. On the same hardware running Windows it used 6% CPU. On my MacBook Pro 2.33GHz I see between 30%-45% CPU usage watching YouTube. The difference in performance here is enormous and I assume is the result of a product coded for Windows first and then ported to the Mac.
I haven’t been able to find any peformance tweaks that would improve video playback but I did find a bug reported against Flash 10 for poor performance on the Mac in the Adobe Flash bug tracker. Register a bug tracking account and vote it up please.
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COMMENTS / 4 COMMENTS
steve added these pithy words on Jan 04 09 at 1:03 pmim using flash 10 player on my powerbook g4, 1.67ghz, 2gb ram computer. in safari, video is stop/start whereas in firefox, it is just about ok..
mglenn added these pithy words on Jan 04 09 at 1:07 pmSteve, it always seems to be “just about ok” no matter what version and what Mac it’s on. If you use Activity Monitory where is your CPU at? I also find (using iStatsMenu) that the disk is constantly getting hammered while watching video. I don’t think it’s swapping but perhaps buffering to disk?
Beany added these pithy words on Jul 08 11 at 9:03 pmI know this is old now… but i just wanted to say this problem was nothing to do with Adobe. Like almost every problem like this it’s because of Apple and there closed system. They do not allow Adobe access to code/API’s in order for Adobe to get Flash performance up. Microsoft and Google (with Android) both actively work with Adobe to ensure Flash works well on there OS’s. Apple do not do this and often do the complete opposite (not allowing it on the OS at all).
Theres a simple solution though… use a better OS.
mglenn added these pithy words on Feb 07 12 at 11:52 pmWell, Apple finally gave them the API access they wanted and it still performs poorly. Flash is done. Even Google, who used to crow about how it supported Flash on Android has dropped it from their release of Chrome for Andriod. http://parislemon.com/post/17215781807/chrome-for-android-the-browser-for-the-1
BTW, the “better OS” is cheap and patently false flame bait that weekends your otherwise well reasoned response.
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