I am a mac newbie and not too much of a computer guy, but I never had any trouble viewing videos on my 10 year old pc. I now have a imac G5 and videos from youtube, flicker ect. will not run smoothly. The videos start and stop and stutter. My connection is fast so no prob there, I can sit here in front of the imac with my sons ipod touch or my iphone and watch perfectly smooth videos with our wifi signal. Maybe there is a simple setting change?
iMac
How much memory do you have? More should help buffering and make your video viewing smoother.
nVidia FX 5200 is really old and weak.
It isn't supported by Adobe for hardware accelerated playback.
The G5 is too weak to do a good job by itself.
Nothing can be done.
It's just too old.
Your PC might have a better GPU.
Hi Karen,
The root of the problem is that, once Apple went to Intel processor starting in 2006, developers of web video software and their codecs pretty much stopped supporting the older PowerPC processors. It's really bad with most G3 and G4 Macs, and I'm seeing reports like yours that G5's are struggling.
If it's an incompatibility between your processor and the method used to encode/embed the video, then adding RAM won't help. That said, I still find some sites with recent video content that run well on my old G4 PowerMac. For example, the videos on this Microsoft site:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/why-office2011
runs smoothly on My G4 Macs.
As the owner of a G5 iMac, I share your pain when it comes to viewing videos. Some of them play OK, but a lot of them don't. As stated in the other replies, technology has passed the PPC iMacs by. There is probably nothing that you can do exept eventually move to a newer Mac, the latest one you can afford.
And BTW, welcome to the Mac community!
Thanks, some videos will play some will not. It just seems funny to me that my 10 year old pc plays video just fine, and this mac is much younger and it cannot. Very frustrating I really cant afford a new machine right now.
I have no problem watchng videos from almost any source. Most are Flash videos:
You can check here: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/ to see which version you should install for your Mac and OS. [b]Note that version 10,1,102,64 is the last version available to PPC Mac users*. The latest version, 10.2.152.25, 10.3.x beta, or later, is for Intel Macs only, as Adobe no longer support the PPC platform. Version 11.0.1.152 is for Lion.
* Unhelpfully, if you want the last version for PPC Macs, you need to go here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/142/tn_14266.html and scroll down to 'Archived Versions/Older Archives'. The first one on the list, Flash Player 10.1 is the one you download. More information here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/838/cpsid_83808.html
You should first uninstall any previous version of Flash Player, using the uninstaller from here (make sure you use the correct one!):
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/865/cpsid_86551.html#prob1=uninst,os=m10.6,
I verified that I have the latest Flash version. It looks like I have the same iMac that you do, so perhaps it's my ISP causing the problem, except that it doesn't happen all the time.
I'm planning to buy a new iMac soon, so the problem will hopefully be gone. 🙂
My imac hates videos?
