Youtube HTML5 - Safari Performance Issues

Question

Level 1

32 points

Youtube HTML5 - Safari Performance Issues

Wondering if anyone has any tips for some serious performance issues I'm experiencing under Safari while trying to use Youtube's HTML5 player. I've been experiencing this problem through multiple versions of Safari, and haven't been able to fix the issue. Also, I noticed this issue only seems to affect Safari while Firefox, Chrome, and Opera all seem to be able to take advantage of this feature just fine. The issue doesn't seem to affect any other websites including places like Vimeo, National Geographic, Pitchfork, The Onion.

What I'm experiencing is when using the HTML5 Player under Youtube, the moment the video loads I start getting the spinning beach ball. The page becomes completely unresponsive and I start to hear the video playing with the video frame only updating the image every few seconds. This continues until the video complete loads, at which point the video plays perfectly normal. It's got something to do with playing the video while it's loading, but it's not a buffer issue. You literally can't do anything on the page while it's loading... pause, scroll, maximize, anything.

Couple things worth mentioning:

- Only add-ons and plugins are : AdBlock, Java, Quicktime, and Silverlight. (Happens when they are disabled too)

- Happens at all video qualities from 240p-1080p.

- Firefox, Chrome, and Opera play Youtube HTML5 just fine.

- Problem stops once video has buffered fully

MacBook Pro Mid-2009, 2.26GHz Core2Duo, 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD

Please help, I'm trying to get away from Flash and this is the last peice of the puzzle for me!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7), 13" (late-2009)

Posted on Apr 20, 2012 10:18 AM

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Answer 1

juca2929

Level 1

12 points

Apr 20, 2012 12:14 PM in response to mightymilk

Hi, seems that few people have this same problem!

You just described every thing I had to say. Except I don't have any extension. I did a fresh installl, everything up to date and this problem only happens no Safari...!

ANYONE???

Cheers mate

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Answer 2

Apr 22, 2012 1:33 AM in response to mightymilk

Yes, I'm consistently having the same problems with HTML5 on youtube. Safari shows the spinning beach ball, whole browser becomes unresponsive, the video doesn't play smoothly, video is out of sync with audio. Killing the tab with the youtube HTML5 video makes everything come back to normal.

No solution as yet.

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Answer 3

Apr 22, 2012 1:39 AM in response to mightymilk

Ok, I have a solution. Go to this page

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Click on "Leave the HTML5 trial".

Youtube videos continue to play in HTML5 (e.g. right-click shows HTML5 options like Download Video and Restore Flash) but now the video playback is silky smooth.

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Answer 4

juca2929

Level 1

12 points

Apr 22, 2012 4:49 AM in response to nathan262

Hi, that seems to work for me!!! Many thanks Nathan 🙂

Cheers

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Answer 5

Apr 23, 2012 3:00 PM in response to nathan262

That works.

Who says Flash is no good?😀

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Answer 6

May 10, 2012 8:33 AM in response to mightymilk

Oh, thank The Maker for this thread and thank you nathan262 for the answer! =)

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Answer 7

mightymilk Author

Level 1

32 points

May 28, 2012 1:40 PM in response to nathan262

nathan262 wrote:

Ok, I have a solution. Go to this page

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Click on "Leave the HTML5 trial".

Youtube videos continue to play in HTML5 (e.g. right-click shows HTML5 options like Download Video and Restore Flash) but now the video playback is silky smooth.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to solve the problem on my end. Performance is still choppy until the video loads completely, and I'm also experiencing no sound from the videos. As soon as I switch to Firefox or Chrome though, playback is flawless and working as intended. I think there's something more at play here regarding compatibility between Safari and Youtube. I take it Apple hasn't formally acknowledged this yet?

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Answer 8

Thanar

Level 2

300 points

Jul 11, 2012 3:53 PM in response to mightymilk

Having the same issue on a MacBook 4,1 for almost a year.. Thought it was Tiger's fault, so upgraded to Snow Leopard, since Apple is giving it away for free, but still cannot use HTML5 on YouTube. Symptoms as described by original poster.

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Answer 9

Jul 29, 2012 9:41 AM in response to mightymilk

I've been facing exactly the same issues with Youtube on Safari. I've managed to find a short-term solution but it's not a fix by any means because the problem still persists – basically I've realised that if I delete the following two items from the "Cookies and other website data" in my privacy settings, youtube runs smoothly without any glitches for a while:

1) youtube-nocookie.com (Cache)

2) youtube.com (Cache, cookies, local storage)

Like I said, it's no solution, but it's a quick fix when you really want to watch youtube videos and can't because everything freezes.

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Answer 10

Mar 4, 2013 2:25 PM in response to mightymilk

Sorry for reopening this thread but I found out something that could help others.

I think the problem is related to the Youtube's default codec used in HTML5 playback.

If you check the page with the HTML5 program trial (http://www.youtube.com/html5), you can see what codecs your browser supports.

In my list, I found that Safari was accepting WebM/VP8 and h.264.

If you right click the HTML5 video you're playing you will see the codec it is using (Right click -> Show video info), in my case it was using WebM/VP8 so I supposed the issue could be related to that codec. After updating all my codecs (Flip4Mac, DivX, Perian) nothing changed, so I searched for the codec package that included the WebM/VP8 codec Safari was default for.

I've found that Perian included the codec so I uninstalled Perian (I don't know how to uninstall a single codec from the package) and then Safari started to play the video using h.264 codec, and... the problem was totally solved!

HTML5 videos now play smooth, wihout freezes or audio/video problems.

Good luck! 🙂

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