Choppy Youtube and flash video

Same issue here. I've got a Quad core Mac Pro. In Youtube the video skips here and there. This occurs on other video streaming sites as well. Downloaded Videos play fine. I have installed the latest Flash Player. I'm currently using my Display's built in speakers.

Just wanted to add my experience to this discussion. I've had the problem for several months as well, primarily in Firefox. I seem to remember it also happening in Safari but I just tested it there and YouTube seemed to work fine.

It's definitely been getting progressively worse. I use Flash 9 because Flash 10 causes problems in WordPress, but I tried upgrading to 10 just to see if it would make a difference in the video problem and it didn't. I've tried checking/unchecking Hardware Acceleration, deleting the cache & preferences, disabling all add-ons, unplugging speakers.. nothing works. It was annoying at first, but it's gotten incredibly frustrating, as all videos are basically unwatchable in Firefox. I guess it's good that they seem to work in Safari, but I shouldn't have to open a separate browser program every time I want to watch a video.

I am also having the same issue with Flash video content on my MacBook.

When I watch Flash videos about once every 30 seconds the video pauses for about 1 second but the sound continues. It seems to be worse on Youtube then on other sites, and the problem varies in severity between videos.

So far I have tried installing the latest Flash player, but this made no difference.

The same content plays perfect on my Vista machine.

I've just downloaded & installed the last version of the Adobe Flash Player (Version 10.0.22.87) and from now on there are no more problems with choppy videos (youtube, vimeo, etc).

To check the performance i've just visited the link below & it works well 😉

http://www.formula1.com/services/play_video.html

Plugin: http://get.adobe.com/de/flashplayer/

Greets

Glad it worked for you, but it did not help me when I updated long ago.

I can play the same video Firefox and Safari side by side. It stutters in FF and smooth as silk in Safari.

That F1 video works OK for me. I think that it only had a a minor slutter once in the first say 3 minutes (which I can live with). However, YouTube content is much worse, as are some other sites. They run perfectly on my VISTA machine but pause every 30 seconds to 1 minute on my MacBook. It all seems to depend on the site and the particular video

This YouTube video seems particularly bad, but works perfectly on Vista.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iMmvu9eMrg

Did you try to update not only the Adobe Flash Player Plugin but as well the Shockwave Plugin? That worked for me some weeks ago as well 😉

Thanks muchly for that tip .. updating the ShockWave plug-in seems (so far) to have corrected the choppiness issue for me. Flash still chews up way too much CPU though.

Just to chime in with my experience, I was getting horrible, unwatchable stuttering on YouTube videos, and I had Flash Player 9 installed. I updated to the latest version of Flash Player 10, and simultaneously installed/upgraded (not sure which) Shockwave Player to the latest version, and the stuttering problem is greatly improved.

I´ve got exactly the same problems for a very long time on now. Using a first generation MacBook I was looking forward to every new release of either OSX or Flashplayer througout the last two years but no luck so far. I´ve tried various browsers, different "fixes", cleaninstalls and so on but the problem could not be solved.

I got very heavy cpu usage every time i start watching youtube or similar flash video causing maximum fan speed and noise. Furthermore i can reproduce a complete browsercrash everytime when forwarding a video and jumping to a new position.

...so annoying...

This thread also helped me. This is what I did:
- uninstalled Flash 10, using the horrendous uninstaller linked earlier in this thread
- downloaded and installed Shockwave
- downloaded an installed Flash 10

The videos are now smooth. I tried Youtube, with and without HD, Vimeo, they are all smooth!

Then I uninstalled Shockwaves, and the videos are still smooth. So I wonder if installing it really helped in any way.
The key may be to use Flash uninstaller first, instead of just upgrading over an older version.

Okay, I'm a bit confused. What's the difference between "Flash Player Plugin" and "Shockwave" when it comes to all this? Here is what Firefox says is installed (after having uninstalled and reinstalled Flash 10 from the Adobe website)--

File name: Flash Player.plugin
Shockwave Flash 10.0 r22

MIME Type Description Suffixes Enabled
application/x-shockwave-flash Shockwave Flash swf Yes
application/futuresplash FutureSplash Player spl Yes


Am I missing a plugin? Is this what I should have installed? I've no idea what "FutureSplash" is, but it got installed with the standard Flash Player 10 installer.

Flash player is the plug-in that enables you to see youtube and other videos, and flash ads, and flash games

Shockwave is an plug-in (earlier technology) that is still supported by Adobe, and is inexplicably linked to flash but is not the same, and in general, manipulates bitmap-sprites instead of vector-graphics, although now flash supports bitmap sprites quite well...

(this is a very simplified reduction of Shockwave vs Flash

Shockwave is not as often seen online, for a long time I've only seen very rare Shockwave games.

However you did see "Shockwave Flash" which is strangely the official name of the Flash plugin internally.

Cool. Thanks for explaining that.

I've got this problem too and cannot recall if it just started or not as I do not remember ever trying to watch youtube on my Dual quad mac pro that I use for my studio. I recently tried to watch a product video for a musci software company and discovered that the video played very choppy even though all the content was loaded according to the staus bar. The video looked as if someone had hit ffwd on a DVD remote and the audio didn't match what was on the screen. Very unwatchable. I then went to the main youtube site to fins that i cannot play ANY youtube videos. I can play flash video from other sites that are not 'video' proper, but are of the presentation type flash movie variety, so I do not know if this is a flash thing, a flash on leopard thing or waht. I get the exact same playback when using firefox.

I have the latest flash player and even tried the shockwave install and it still plays like garbage on both browsers. I have claered the cache, deleted cache, history, etc.. did the uninstall with adobe uninstaller and still no luck. I even uninstalled flash 10 and put on the ame versoin of flash that works fine on my old G4 laptop. no luck either. Now that I think about it, this started happening after a one of the os x or safari updates because I do now recall looking at Logic ninja videos on you tube when I first got my mac pro a few months ago...