BannerJohn

question about mac,nothing to do with cutters

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OK so I finally got a decent mac. PowerMac, g4... 1.25 ghz...1.5 GB Ram.. Running Tiger 4.11....soon to update to Leopard.I love everything about it but one thing. Is there ANY WAY to watch Youtube Videos on it without them jerking and pausing? I have every update I can find. Or is it just not possible?

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Hi John, long time no talk, ive been preoccupied with my VW. I would say you are just low on ram, I just picked up a macbook and it did the same thing till I upgraded from 512mb to 2gigs....

GL,

Wayne

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I hope that's it....you would think that 1.25 gb of ram with NOTHING else going on would be enough. However, I have another GB on the way.

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I have 3 gigs on my laptop, and youtube still lags! I think it's because they make so much for every ad that flips, so they deliberately lags the vids to make money.

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On my sony NW series laptop i got 4 gigs and can run 4 720 HD youtube videos at once with no issues. Right now i have photoshop and dreamweaver cs4 with SBE and 4 safari windows at the same time smoothly.

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I thought maybe it had something to do that NMacs don;t really support Flash,because Steve Jobs doesn't like Adobe.

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I think it has more to do with it being a few generations behind.  There was the g4 then the g5 before apple even did the switch to Intel computers in 2006.  The g4 was made from 1999 to 2004, so it's at best a 6 year old machine. You'll also probably have to turn to eBay to find a copy of Leopard (not Snow Leopard) as its no longer available from Apple.

In our design lab (I teach for a day job) we have some old imac g3s and g4s that seem to run youtube fine.  What browser are you using?

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I already have the copy of Leopard.

I have tried every browser that I could find that would run in Tiger...IE, Safari, Opera,and Firefox, it makes no difference.

If it is a question of it being an older machine, that doesn't say much for Apple. I can run Youtube fine on Windows machines with 700mhz processors and 256 mb of ram.

I Googled this problem,and it's all over the place. Seems to be a common problem with Macs and Youtube. I see that Youtube is even beta testing a new version they call html4 or something, that is supposed to run better on a mac. Fact remains. macs don't natively support flash. I do know that much.

Maybe there is a plug-in or some trick that you know about that I don't..which is what I was asking to begin with.

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Mac's do support flash. Iphone OS device (iphone, ipad, pod touch) don't support flash.  Like I said, we have  student lab that runs youtube fine, with machines ranging from g3 imacs with 512mb of ram to brand new intel imacs, and even a couple of quicksilver Power Mac G4 machines.  Youtube's HTML5 version, that runs h.264 video instead of flash video, came about specifically because the iphone OS devices would not support flash. 

No computer's really "natively" support flash.  Every Pc and MAC has to have Flash player plugin installed to play flash.

It's been only in the last year that the flash war has become a big issue, with Apple publicly lashing out at Adobe over Flash within the last few months.

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ok so ask your students in the lab what they did to make Youtube run smoothly. I really like the OSx but I watch a lot of Youtube when I can't sleep and would really like to get this problem solved.

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They don't set them up.  They're all set up as stock, and users don't have the ability to install past what is installed on the machines (Adobe CS3 and a blend of Tiger and Leopard as an OS).  Have you checked "Software Update" under the Apple menu and see if there is ANY system updates available? And the flash site to see that it is the current version? I would upgrade to leopard and see what happens.  If it continues, the video card might be suspect.

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I've done all that. I'm not computer illiterate, just Mac new. I've been building and operating Windows machines for 15 years...including setting up networks. All updates are current,both in Tiger and Flash.

I've also got a better video card coming(ATI Radeon 9000 Pro  with 64 MB of DDR SDRAM) so we shall see.

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Sorry if it came off that I was trying to treat you like you were computer illiterate.  I deal with students on a day to day basis that bash computers 'because they don't work' when in reality its 99% user error.  I've also seen alot of problems out of both mac and pc, regardless of what one side or the other says, they're both nowhere near perfect.  I've been building computers since 1996 and dealing with macs since 2002.  I no longer love computers like I once did after all of that. lol

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I don't tend to use YouTube much, but if there's something I am really interested in, I let it buffer (I think that's the word..) once and then go back and play it. Low res is also faster.  I have used Macs since the mid-80's so do not know the other system to compare.

Jim

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I found an app for firefox that lets you download the youtube vids...but they download in FLV which is ok since I use VLC media player, which is free and plays virtually any video file,including flash. Takes a bit longer but I have the vids to watch again if I want. I highly recommend VLC as a player for music and video,as well as DVDs. It has solved many a problem for me over the years.

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Well Im still not sure why your video is choppy, i just checked and my macbook is fine, very strange. I did find another conversion tool for you though that will download the video in whatever format you like.

www.youtubeonlinevideoconverter.com

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Guest YHC

BannerJohn,

What is your connection speed. I know if you have a slow connection or if you have someone else using allot of bandwith on your network it could cause it to lag. I find that some videos play smooth and some don't. But if I let them buffer like someone else has stated it works fine.

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I have 10mb down speed(cable modem) most of the time. Fast enough for everything else. I keep saying that this seems to be a common problem. Google it. A LOT of people have problems qwith youtube and Macs.

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Personally I wouldn't put much into it as is. i would upgrade to Leopard, Download all updates, and then download a newer version of Firefox and try again.

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OK so I finally got a decent mac. PowerMac, g4... 1.25 ghz...1.5 GB Ram.. Running Tiger 4.11....soon to update to Leopard.I love everything about it but one thing. Is there ANY WAY to watch Youtube Videos on it without them jerking and pausing? I have every update I can find. Or is it just not possible?

sir, my main use machine is a G4, 1.6 gh 2 gig ram,  you could consider this "maxed out" for the G4 series, yes it can be pushed farther but...

the G4 is not really comfortable with the demands of video. This one does run Utube and other videos well enough, the suggestions of lower rez and prebuffering will help, we presume that your web connection is wide broadband.

but a G5 dual processor is a better option if you can do that.

My second machine is a G5 2x 1.8 + 8 gig ram, (pre-intell) and has the power to do video well.

Does this sound about right? the problem we face is that the newer software is requiring more machine to run it,  so the software that delivers the video is asking the machine to step past its original design.

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I got it to work by installing leopard, and upgrading ram to 2gb.

Doesn't say much about the mac though...I can watch Youtube flawlessly on a little 7 inch netbook I have with a 300mhz processor and 128 mb of ram.

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I used to be hard core Mac addict, but found that pretty much everything I was doing was easier on a PC and software availability is much better.  The only things a Mac has over a PC is it's immunity to most viruses, which are written to run on the Windows OS...And it has a cleaner OS.  No registry or any of that garbage to get corrupt. 

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I use my Macs strictly for surfing the net,email,etc. They do LOOK cooler than the Windows machines I have. It's nice not to have to worry about getting a virus every time I go to a website.

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Hey John, you could check google and see if they have a version of (google) chrome for the mac.

It's a lightweight browser and worked on my machine when the webpages were rather blotted and nothing else would work...

I got one mac at the house the ex gave me, it's a rather large and ugly paperweight!  :huh:

Sorry to see you downgrade!  :D

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