Slow Flash movies in Safari and Firefox

Question

Level 1

25 points

Slow Flash movies in Safari and Firefox

This issue started right after the software update of Safari 3.2.1 (from 3.2). I'm totally lost, because it does not make any sense to me. The performance on Flash websites with either Safari or Firefox, is extremely slow and stuttering. Fade-ins and outs are no longer smooth, I can even HEAR their "calculating".

What confuses me most is the fact that watching my self-created Flash movies as swf files is perfectly fast and smooth. As soon as they are being viewed in a browser, local on the computer or on a web server, they are slow.

Here's what I already did, and it got somewhat better, but not back to how it was before the software update:
- reset safari, empty cache.
- uninstalled and reinstalled the latest Adobe Flash Player plug in.
- repair disk permissions
- add DNS codes
- I even upgraded the RAM's to the PB's max of 2GB

Anybody got any ideas? I was thinking it might be the video card. But why would the Flash movie show smooth as an swf file but not in a browser?? And why was everything OK before the update?

I read that the video card is part of the logic board. Is it possible to exchange that at all?? This is what's installed: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700, VRAM 64 MB.

Thanks in advance for any inputs!!

PowerBook G4 15" Alu, 1.5 GHz, 2GB RAM, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Jan 4, 2009 12:27 AM

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Answer 1

Ady Author

Level 1

25 points

Jan 4, 2009 11:22 PM in response to Ady

I figured out the problem/cure. I had help, though not from this website... 🙂 However, I thought I'm going to post the solution here, in case someone else is experiencing the same problem! It turned out that it was not the update to the latest Safari (3.2.1), but the latest Adobe Flash player version (10) that caused the bug. Apparently older Mac's (I'm using the 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 aluminum) cannot handle the latest technology of Flash player 10.

I uninstalled the plugins, using Adobe's Flash player uninstaller, downloaded the Flash player 9 folder here: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sliceId=2 and installed version 9.0.151.0. Repair disk permissions. That's it. Everything is back to normal!!

If this was helpful to anybody, I'll be happy to hear from you!

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Answer 2

Mar 14, 2009 10:45 PM in response to Ady

Ady, thanks a lot for sharing.. I'm not sure this is my problem but it might be..

I have terrible latency in Safari, especially loading images and video; my mac now is giving me flashbacks to OS 9; obviously I have the latest version of Safari. Firebox much faster. I also note that the more tabs I have open, the worse it is (often have 6 open). There are even lags when entering text (such as right now). It's getting worse.

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Answer 3

Ady Author

Level 1

25 points

Apr 9, 2009 2:22 AM in response to Ady

does anyone know if this issue has been solved by adobe? I would like to update my flash player to version 10, but I doubt that it's going to work. does anybody have news on that? thanks!!

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Answer 4

kmac1036

Level 4

2,370 points

Apr 9, 2009 9:01 AM in response to Ady

My G4 (check sig) still studders you tube vids with the new 10 😟

sites are slow too.

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Answer 5

vikg

Level 1

8 points

Apr 20, 2009 1:21 PM in response to Ady

Ady, Thank you very much for the clue. I didn't find Adobe Flashplayer on my computer but did have something called Flip4Mac which is supposed to allow you to view Windows Media Player format files. Upon uninstalling this and repairing my disk permissions, things seem to be back to normal. Not sure if Flip4Mac is based on Adobe FP 10 but it clearly was the problem in my case. Thanks again!

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