After I installed Lion, my video playback is choppy. My software is up to date, but I do have an older MacBook. The choppy video is in all video formats, and happens using Quicktime, Quicktime pro, VLC and other software, so I suspect it is hardware related. This could be a video processor issue, video memory or video caching issue, I suspect. Any suggestions?
MacBook, Mac OS X (10.7.2)
I had really annoying choppiness on HD video (1920x1080p) on my mid-2008 24" iMac with 4GB RAM and early versions of Lion. But installing the newest OS X 10.7.3 seems to have completely solved the problem. Video is as smooth as could be now.
Do you have 2GB or 4GB, or more, of RAM memory? Some have reported performance issues on Lion with 2GB of memory, which is the minimum. Those with issues reported that moving to 4GB made quite a difference in performance.
Also, do you have free space on your hard drive?
Thanks for the college try at this. While the upgrade seems to have fixed your video issues, mine remain. After I posted this originally, and did not get any immediate feedback, I stopped by the local Apple store here in Charlotte, NC. They told me that my problems were mainly from my Macbook being too old (late 2006-2007) so the processor speed 2GHZ and memory limit of 4GB really restricted smooth video playback with Lion. I also cleared off over 250GB off my hard disk so it eliminated that possibility as well. Video was fine under Snow Leopard, so I am pretty sure it is teh way Lion interacts with my system. Time for a new Macbook Pro.
Good thoughts, although I did make sure I had plenty of disk space and the max of 4GB of RAM. I think this is a function of Lion not working well with video on an old 2ghz processor.
Simple way to find out if its a configuration issue or hardware is to create another user account. Make sure its an admin account, name it test or something. Log in with the test account and try your video...is it still choppy?
I have a mid 2008 8-core Mac Pro with 16gb of RAM. Video ahs been very choppy since upgrading to Lion (I'm on 10.7.3). If I'm editing video in Final Cut Pro and listening to iTunes, both apps have choppy playback. The issue has to be system-wide and not app-specific. But how to fix it? Everything was fine under Snow Leopard.
AWESOME!! This worked for me, NO MORE choppy video. I must have some weird configurations on my main admin account or something. Created a new user account for video playback and everything is smooth as butter, no hiccups watsoever.
Back story:
I was getting really frustrated with the choppy video playback because I know I had/have the horsepower for 720p-1080p video; even after upgrading this Black Friday from 4gb - 8gb, installing an SSD and changing to 64bit mode, I was still getting choppy video playback for 720p and 1080p videos and only 480p would be smooth. After adding a new user account my videos are no longer choppy, have been and will be using this new account until I figure out what is wrong on my main account.
Mac Specs:
10.6.8 in 64bit Mode
2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
8GB RAM
320 HDD (in optical drive bay)
128 SSD (main drive bay)
Not sure if this is still happening to anyone and maybe my problem was isolated but I fixed the issue on my machine and thought I'd share...
I was having MAJOR lag issues with streaming video online on my machine. To the point that the videos were unwatchable because of the jittery, choppiness, and generally overall poor performance.
After troubleshooting for an hour I found that MY problem was stemming from a google chrome issue. I am all fixed now and here is where I found the solution.
https://productforums.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/chrome/zRDBYF_yLdE
Make sure you restart Chrome once you've followed the instructions for the fix to take affect.
Although I know some people have way larger issues then just a crummy flash setting on Chrome but I hope this helps someone...
How do I fix choppy video playback after installing Lion?
