All Videos Lag on MacBook

[tcgrey]

I've been having issues getting videos to play without lagging. By lagging I mean... it sounds as if like a half second is stuck on repeat. I have problems with online movies (YouTube, videos on news sites, Vimeo - any and all videos) at any size player and with QuickTime and VLC. I thought it might just be low processing so I just upgraded my RAM to 4GBs. I know it's not my internet speed because my roommates can stream full screen videos fine. I've cleared my cache and cookies, moved all unnecessary files to an external hd, and I try quitting all background programs running through the Activity Monitor. I've also tried repairing disk permissions.

Computer Specs:
Mid-2007 MacBook - White 13"
Version 10.6.8
Processor: 2.16 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
Memory: 4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Hard Drive:
Capacity - 319.73 GB
Available - 160.51 GB
Used - 159.21 GB

Does anyone have any ideas on what I can do to maybe clean up my computer to make videos play smoothly? I'm out of ideas. Please let me know if you need any more information. Thank you!

 

[takumadna]

hey dude,

i'm having a same problem, while i'm streaming youtube sometime its go lag.
i think i just lag while streaming player, but it go smooth while playing video such as AVI, RMVB etc

 

[Henk Poley]

Unlike iPhones, iPods, iPads, and later MacBooks, Mid 2007 MacBooks have basically no h.264 video acceleration (see Tech Note TN2267: VDADecoder). But video up to 720p will probably run reasonably smooth on CPU grunt alone.

Check if you have the latest Flash player, QuickTime, VLC with:
* https://www.mozilla.org/plugincheck/
* http://www.apple.com/softwareupdate/
* http://mac.informer.com/

Otherwise, while no video is playing the CPU use should be low. If anything else is using a lot of CPU, video playback will lag. Check the CPU use with Activity Monitor: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH5148

You may use flash blockers like ClickToFlash to stop (other) websites from loading CPU heavy animations that disturb video playback.

 

[tcgrey]

Turns out my Flash was out of date. I updated it so I'll see if that helps. Thanks for all the links.