Why does simple YouTube watching heat up the Air so quickly?

Question

Why does simple YouTube watching heat up the Air so quickly?

I have the Rev. C Air just recently bought, with the Nvidia 9400 graphic chip. SO far I love the machine but why would watching, for example, a short YouTube video heat the machine up so fast. The CPU pretty fast reaches 65-75 and more and the fans kick in. The same during a video skype call or when trying to download a mkv video file.
I know that these machines are known for heating up under a certain usage, but are the above examples taxing the system so quickly. I suppose there isn't a risk as long as the fans kick in, but I didn't think that the above were very heavy or taxing on any system. Not the same as, for example, rendering files, etc.
Thanks for any explanations.

Macbook Air, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Jul 25, 2010 11:38 AM

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Answer 1

Darkeyes

Level 1

15 points

Jul 26, 2010 4:18 AM in response to Steven Adamson1

It's not the Air's fault (well it's partly), but the main culprit is how intensive Flash on the website is... If you download the same video on your Harddrive (By pressing CMD ALTA and then double clicking the flash file while pressing alt... i.e Alt+Double Click on flv name) and then play it via VLC or other flash player, then the thing doesn't even crank the Air's CPU to 20% while the same thing if viewed on Safari takes around 50-60% resource and temperature hits 70C...

Trust me thats the case with most Macs, since flash and Mac don't go well... If I usually have to view many videos, then I make it a point to just download them by the above method and play them on VLC.. Keeps the thing cool and I don't have to worry about a lot of CPU usage...

But by todays standard, most laptops heat up a lot... So you have to deal with it or get a laptop stand with a fan in it like the Logitech N100 (it keeps the temperature even with youtube vids down in the 50s)...

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Answer 2

TeenTitan

Level 4

2,640 points

Jul 25, 2010 12:46 PM in response to Steven Adamson1

modern video/audio compression is a CPU intensive. So yes your computer will heat up while doing video playback. yes that includes skype video chat and audio chat. And yes that includes Windows media player.

Websites such as youtube tend to use Flash for video playback. Flash tends to be a CPU hog even at idle. witch just makes your computer work even harder.

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Answer 3

Jul 26, 2010 3:59 PM in response to Steven Adamson1

You could use ClickToFlash. Then you're able to watch youtube video as H.264 (as on the iPhone) instead of flash, using much less cpu and heating much less.

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Answer 4

Jul 26, 2010 4:26 PM in response to Steven Adamson1

Thanks for the responses. I get the picture. Too bad, because while video skyping with a friend the fans and heat block some of the sound. Oh well. Thanks for the specifics.

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Answer 5

TeenTitan

Level 4

2,640 points

Aug 4, 2010 6:00 PM in response to Steven Adamson1

You could always get a headset for skyping. 😀 Or if you have a bluetooth headset..

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