MBA and youtube. What's the score actually?

[hooly]

I have owned an MBA for about 6 weeks and on the whole love it.

There is a lot of talk and posts about the 'youtube' issue, but I am interested in the technical explanation.

For instance I watched a 2 hour, fairly high resolution movie in iTunes yesterday and my MBA didn't break a sweat. But after 5 minutes of youtube my fans are blowing hard.

What is so demanding about youtube? I hear it is because it is 'Flash based'. What does that really mean and why does it place such a high load on the processor?

I would love to hear a technical explanation for this.

With thanks

Hooly

[Lyrrad]

Originally Posted by hooly

I have owned an MBA for about 6 weeks and on the whole love it.

There is a lot of talk and posts about the 'youtube' issue, but I am interested in the technical explanation.

For instance I watched a 2 hour, fairly high resolution movie in iTunes yesterday and my MBA didn't break a sweat. But after 5 minutes of youtube my fans are blowing hard.

What is so demanding about youtube? I hear it is because it is 'Flash based'. What does that really mean and why does it place such a high load on the processor?

I would love to hear a technical explanation for this.

With thanks

Hooly

Some video playback takes a lot more CPU to decode and show on the screen. I assume it mostly depends on the method of encoding the video and how the playback program decodes it. For example, with the new MacBooks, it appears that iTunes store video takes even less CPU power since it offloads more of the decoding to the video hardware.