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Flash Player 10 on PPC macs SLOW... anyone else?

hawken king

hawken king

macrumors member
Original poster
Seriously, this has killed flash for me.

I'm not sure what Adobe have tested this on, but I'm going to have roll back to flash player 9.

I cannot believe that it's even having trouble playing youtube videos without dropping a few frames here and there. Forget fullscreen flash websites.

The funny thing is my workstation is a G5 tower with oodles of powerful stuff inside. I have no problem creating things with adobe software.

Anyone else?
 
Performance seems fine, but its completely broken in Safari, only a few flash objects work, videos don't show up at all and the "install flash to watch" text is shown instead.

It work fine in Firefox though no problems at all.

I've since reinstalled version 9 which i luckily had on a disc as i couldn't find any old version on adobes site.
 
Flash Player 10 is very much broken on older Mac computers as of March 2009.

I know it sounds too old but my g4 400mhz is very fast because the install of 10.4.11 is very clean. Flash 9 was working great with firefox3 and Safari3, both with all updates.

Then I updated to flash 10 and the problems were so obvious. Websites that used flash for plain animation would crawl, and any video would skip.

Here is a good test video of wall-e ( uses youtube )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHH3iSeDBLo

On flash 9 there are is almost no frame skip. Looks beautiful.
On flash 10 you get a new frame only once in a while, even audio skips.

I found tools on Adobe's website to remove flash 10.
I rebooted and installed flash 9 ( same tool page )
I rebooted and things work awesome.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266

read the Adobe help tips, they help. I used flash 9r159, the easy to use installer was in a zip file called mac "UB" (whatever that means )

test your web browser and flash plugin test here
http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/


This is the perfect example of bloatware that harms the environment and creates e-waste. My mac g4 with OS 10.4 is a showcase of efficiency. All websites work and even the latest version of iTunes runs ok. But any normal person would not make the connection that flash 10 was the hog that made this computer seem ready for the dump. Most normal people would not be able to remove flash 10 and find and re-install flash 9. I'll be contacting adobe. If they are going to write such poor code their installer should halt and say that PPC macs can't support the flash 10 version. The flash 10 installer should leave a PPC mac untouched and working well with flash 9. And website developers should know to avoid flash 10 because they are forcing visitors to go away or go out and buy new computers in a world crazy with consumption.

I'll be contacting adobe. They really missed a major bug or they really don't care about the earth under their kids feet. I used to work at Macromedia testing plugins like this. Heck I even tested the first ever plugin for web browsers, netscape 2.0 and director ( shockwave ) 4.0.

I reported the bug. You can register a new username and then use the menu to "watch" the bug. My guess is that they will delay, deny or diminish this very major bug.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-1647
 
Interesting. This is the first I have heard of this issue as I no longer have access to any PPCs.

FP10 was heavily rewritten for intel performance on macs -- FP9 was a known resource hog and ran poorly compared to PCs. So it seems that for every macbook cooling fan that is now at rest with FP10, there is a sad PPC...

I agree that your best bet is to roll back to FP9. Most sites are written for FP9 and will be for another year or so -- the feature set of FP10 is not that large, and the FP10-only features are primarily centered upon features that I don't see older machines being able to support very well anyway. The FP10 version of flex has not even been publicly released yet, so the migration is still early...

I would personally be surprised if FP11 supported PPC, but I have yet to see an official roadmap from Adobe.
 
You are right the average user wouldn't ever connect the fact that their computer is only slow when displaying Flash content. It took me at least a handful of repeated attempts searching for "flash slow firefox" to find anything with substance.

It wasn't until I search for "flash 10 requirements" after a comment here http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1850996 suggested it was processor related.

Finally a search for "flash 10 ppc" brought me to this little gathering.

Interestingly enough I have 1.5 GHz PowerPC G4 with 1.25GB DDR SDRAM and the WALL-E video plays fine for me. However as soon as I start to "multi-tab" with Facebook, You-tube, etc I notice the lag. I've also found it to be related to the total available memory.

In the end I agree with you that Adobe likely "purposely" choose not to notify users as this would prevent them from upgrading. It's much more beneficial in terms of platform numbers to have only the wise users revert vs preventing all (users with PPC Macs) from upgrading in the first place.

Seems like those phrases always stay true "out with the old and in with the new" too bad there really isn't anything wrong with our computers but yet sooner rather than later we'll likely be forced to upgrade solely because Adobe would rather net the cost of maintaining a PPC build as revenue instead of maintaining user satisfaction.

Who knows maybe they even spent of few grand on market research to determine the specific percentage of users who would be affected and deemed it an "acceptable loss"? Seeing as there really isn't any contender to Flash wouldn't be surprised.

Maybe we just have a diluted expectation of lifecycle? Nevertheless I'm sure Adobe won't disappoint us...the next version of flash will be sure to notify us of the lack of resources. 🙂

Best,
m31uk3
 
Adobe make me MAD as hell with their lame software. How can they code something so badly? I can only pray for the time when Flash is no more ... 😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

<END RANT>
 
wallydallas,

You said: "read the Adobe help tips, they help. I used flash 9r159".

I found 9r159 for the Mac in the folder of flash 9 that I downloaded. But can you direct me to the Adobe help tips that you read? Also, how did you determine that 9r159 would be the best version to use?

I've been having a terrible time viewing most flash content these days with my iMac G4 PPC flat panel 1 GHz. I just don't think this machine is that underpowered, even by today's standards, and I just wish the content providers would code video that would still work properly for us. I hope that downgrading from my flash 10 viewer to the flash 9 one will help me for a while longer (until I'm "forced" to buy a new Mac!).

Thanks.
 
BOO Adobe

I've been having this problem forever!😡 I have a PowerMac G4 350mhz and 2 iBook 1.33ghz G4's and I refuse to toss them away just because Flash doesn't run properly. Flash 9 was slow on all my PPC's so I tried upgrading to Flash 10. Same deal, maybe even a little worse. Downgraded to Flash 8 (which is PPC-only btw) and now even the PowerMac 350mhz can run Youtube without pegging 100% CPU! The iBooks can run Youtube vids at about 50% CPU (down from 100%), which means longer battery life and less heat! A great weight has been lifted from my shoulders😱, I no longer have to worry about tossing out my PPC's!

Specs: Tiger 10.4.11, Safari 3.2.3, Flash 8.042
 
dgw2jr said:
I've been having this problem forever!😡 I have a PowerMac G4 350mhz and 2 iBook 1.33ghz G4's and I refuse to toss them away just because Flash doesn't run properly. Flash 9 was slow on all my PPC's so I tried upgrading to Flash 10. Same deal, maybe even a little worse. Downgraded to Flash 8 (which is PPC-only btw) and now even the PowerMac 350mhz can run Youtube without pegging 100% CPU! The iBooks can run Youtube vids at about 50% CPU (down from 100%), which means longer battery life and less heat! A great weight has been lifted from my shoulders😱, I no longer have to worry about tossing out my PPC's!

Specs: Tiger 10.4.11, Safari 3.2.3, Flash 8.042
Click to expand...

Where can I get it?
 
Youtube only wants Flashplayer 10

I just installed FlashPlayer 9, bu youtube won't show any video because it sys I don't have the latest version of FlashPlayer.

Can I not use FlashPlayer 9 on youtube or an I not doing something correctly?
 
Augh!

... what can we do? Almost all of the sites out there, (especially $%^&* hulu ) are requireing upgrade to flash 10 and failing, quitting, scolding me, etc. when i don't!

Shine us if we don't want to buy a new intel machine to use as a television? My PPC g4 laptop is a screamer and it does everything i want, or should i say it DID until Flash 10 came out.

Is this something every flash coder out there controls or is it something that can be tweaked in a browser or plist hack?
 
Here's a solution: buy a new Mac. 😛

It's obvious that older machines aren't being supported anymore, so why even deal with these issues any longer? I'm surprised that the few of you PPC users are still running 350Mhz-450Mhz G4s! That's about 8-9 years old now. C'mon, live with the times. I can understand holding onto those machines for "nostalgic" purposes, but for casual use? Not worth it. You waste more time waiting on things to process with these machines.

PPC is obsolete now. Get over it.
 
Unfortunately, I believe fiercetiger is mostly correct. I have an iMac G4 1 GHz and it just doesn't cut it with internet video. Flash is part of the problem, but not the whole thing. I upgraded to Flash 10 for a while and then I downgraded back to Flash 9. It really doesn't help much and then, like other poster have said, you run into those sites that make you use Flash 10.

The bottom line just seems to be that nobody is optimizing their video for PPCs anymore and it just ain't going to get any better. My son can watch higher quality video on his iPod touch via our home WiFi than I can on my G4 iMac desktop. It's just a shame that even though our PPC machines can do most anything we ask of them, they just cannot handle current internet video. It's not just Flash, have any of you run into the MS Silverlight problem? Heck, I'm no fan of Flash or of MS Silverlight, but if content I want to watch is presented in these formats I really have no choice but to upgrade to a new Mac. I'll probably do this as soon as Snow Leopard pounces!
 
sgmorr said:
Unfortunately, I believe fiercetiger is mostly correct. I have an iMac G4 1 GHz and it just doesn't cut it with internet video. Flash is part of the problem, but not the whole thing. I upgraded to Flash 10 for a while and then I downgraded back to Flash 9. It really doesn't help much and then, like other poster have said, you run into those sites that make you use Flash 10.

The bottom line just seems to be that nobody is optimizing their video for PPCs anymore and it just ain't going to get any better. My son can watch higher quality video on his iPod touch via our home WiFi than I can on my G4 iMac desktop. It's just a shame that even though our PPC machines can do most anything we ask of them, they just cannot handle current internet video. It's not just Flash, have any of you run into the MS Silverlight problem? Heck, I'm no fan of Flash or of MS Silverlight, but if content I want to watch is presented in these formats I really have no choice but to upgrade to a new Mac. I'll probably do this as soon as Snow Leopard pounces!
Click to expand...

Yeah, and usually by year 3 of any machine, it's time to upgrade. 5 is pushing it.

And yes, as video codecs get more advanced and efficient, it needs more processing power. H.264 and MPEG-4 are just too processor hungry for older G4s. My 1Ghz PowerBook G4 can barely decode these formats, depending on the resolution, bitrate, etc. It definitely can't decode HD for these formats. If you take that into account, and put Flash on top of it, see how much bottleneck and processing overhead it has? Only G5s have a decent amount of horsepower to process Flash + video. For G5s, you can probably hold off for maybe another year...If you're lucky. 😛
 
Alternative to Flash problems

I use an alternative fix for the Adobe Flash problems, which include the problems of non-standard interfaces and slowness. I simply block the Websites which force the use of Adobe Flash. "You must upgrade to Adobe Flash...something to use this site." No, you must use a Web design format that I can read. 🙁

It was nice yesterday when I hit a site that actually used QuickTime video, a format that I could download in the plugin, save it to the hard drive, and play it full-screen in QuickTime. Watching video in Adobe Flash is an awful experience, particularly when the video stream is interrupted.
 
arogge said:
I use an alternative fix for the Adobe Flash problems, which include the problems of non-standard interfaces and slowness. I simply block the Websites which force the use of Adobe Flash. "You must upgrade to Adobe Flash...something to use this site." No, you must use a Web design format that I can read. 🙁

It was nice yesterday when I hit a site that actually used QuickTime video, a format that I could download in the plugin, save it to the hard drive, and play it full-screen in QuickTime. Watching video in Adobe Flash is an awful experience, particularly when the video stream is interrupted.
Click to expand...

I file probably 2-3 SAFARI crash reports running 10.5.8 & Safari 4 on my G5s daily.
Some are related directly to Flash Player, some are not, but the notion that you can do without FLASH is ridiculous. Many sites are completely non-functional without it making it absolutely necessary.

The level of abandonment that both Apple and Adobe have given PowerPC G5 Mac users in just 3 short years is unconscionable and will make me re-think my next purchases of Apple or Adobe equipment or software.

I predict that Apple's poor treatment of long-time Mac users will result in a huge boost for Windows 7.

FIX THE PROBLEM APPLE AND ADOBE!
 
Not just you, unfortunately......

This bug is not limited to Motorola PPC-based systems. I regularly refit Linux onto machines with 350-450mhz AMD/Intel processors, and the exact same behavior is exhibited. Video plays acceptably in Flash 9, struggles to even achieve 2-3fps in Flash 10. Setting quality to low doesn't increase the performance perceptibly, certainly not to an acceptable level. Interestingly, playing these same FLV format movies in a standalone media player (VLC, Gxine) performance is perfect; no perceptible frame loss, and no audio breaks. Even 640x480 plays fine, so with an efficient decoder, everything's fine. Whatever routines Flash 10 is using to decode the video is apparently VERY inefficient. That MUST be fixed.

The above is what I just posted at the Adobe bug site. I created a membership here just so I could share it with you. I thought you'd be happy to know that you're not suffering alone. Although I'm not what most people think of as a "Mac person" I am an IT professional and I do service them from time to time. I understand how they work much better now thanks to OS X, or we could say OS UniX (which I'm rapidly becoming more familiar with.) I'm sure I'll be back from time to time now that I know this site exists looking for tips on head-scratchers with Macs, since they're not my greatest field of experience.

I for one have never participated in the war between Macs and the so-called "PCs," which Macs are too, but I know what people mean. 😀 I say, go with what you like. I see benefits and drawbacks to both, but if you like it, I won't knock it, whatever the logo is.

I guess I said all that to say......let's stick together and get this FIXED! I created a similar thread at a lightweight Linux site that I frequent. A large number of the people there think it's fun/useful/who knows to make computers long deemed scrap silica usable again. Until Adobe screwed up Flash so badly, it was really pretty easy, so I feel that there will be support for this bug there, too.
 
HyperZboy said:
Many sites are completely non-functional without it making it absolutely necessary.
Click to expand...

I fail to understand why it is my responsibility to read Adobe Flash. It should be the responsibility of the person or company that programmed the non-compliant Website to make it compliant and available for me to read, unless the host is paying me to use the Website.

As a customer, if I can't get in to buy something because the stupid Website requires Flash, animated layers, pop-up windows, or some other unnecessary software coding, I start looking for a company that uses proper Web standards.

I bought something yesterday at a store, partially because the company's Website was fast and presented product information in a format that I could read easily. Before I went to that store, I checked one of their biggest competitors. That company's Website was running some sort of repetitive script that kept freezing my browser, making product information difficult to view. I spent less than five minutes there before giving up and going with the first choice. I didn't even care if the other company had lower prices or different products. I don't have time to fight with a poorly-designed Website. As it was, the store where I bought the product had an excellent price and excellent service.

This Flash-everywhere nonsense is like the old argument that people shouldn't use Apple computers because most people use Microsoft Windows, and it's better to use what most people are using. I do the same refusals when people send me Microsoft Office files that I can't read. Send me an MS DOCX file instead of using one of the standards-compliant formats and you'll likely get it bounced back to you.
 
Quite so......

Good thoughts, arogge.....BTW, how's the weather in Tattooine? 🙂

Unfortunately, in many cases it's not a matter of choosing one store over another. For example, I provide credit card processing to merchants, and one of my backend websites uses Flash. I wish it didn't, but I have to adapt unless and until they decide that using Flash is not a good idea for that site. My only alternative is to call them and get the info that way, which, in many cases, is exactly what I do. Still, it's nice to be able to get my info at 3AM if the fancy hits me (those of you who are also in business for yourself will know what I mean 🙄 ) and the website is the only way I know of to do that.

Also, as a long-time Windoze user and an IT guy, I assure you that there are drawbacks to using the same technology as everybody else. The biggest of these is security exploits. Windoze is perpetually getting itself hijacked by evil software, mostly from the internet, whereas most Mac and/or Linux users won't ever have to worry about it because the evilware is primarily written for the Windoze codebase and doesn't work on either the classic Mac or the OSX/Unix/Linux codebase. The evilware coders want their programming to have the greatest possible payload, so they write it for the biggest possible target: Windoze. Being different has its advantages. 😛 That's one of the reasons I started playing with Linux.

Flash is no different. Flash, like Windoze, has to be constantly updated because its popularity makes it a ready target for writers of exploitware. Just make a nice Flash exploit and draw people to your website, and boom! Got 'em good with whatever you want to harass them with for the next 6 months until they either figure out how to remove it or reformat and start over (almost never necessary, but most people think it's the only way to unhijack a Windoze box.)

I hope Adobe will take this seriously and figure out a way to make the Flash player operate efficiently so that it doesn't take a 780hp computer to pull a 300 pound trailer, so to speak....... I can watch DVD-quality DivX and any Flash video with the VLC media player on a 350mhz Pentium II with no glitching or lack of fluidity, but try to watch a 320x240 Youtube video in Flash 10....no way. Absolutely pathetic coding.

Perhaps we should encourage them to go Open Source with the Flash Player so we can fix it for them. 😀

--------------------------------------
Posted from a Pentium-II 350mhz running Puppy Linux 4.1.2
 
Wow, this thread is still going on? 🙄

Anyways, you people complaining, either don't use Flash, or just buy a new machine. The rest of us running proper machines will move along, while you guys are stuck in the stone age of technology. If you guys want either Adobe or Apple to support older technology, good luck with that. It's like saying Apple should still support OS 9 years after it's been obsolete! 😛

How else will technology move forward if companies keep supporting obsolete technologies? The point is, is that they DON'T. Yes, I agree Flash does suck and it's a resource hog, but you know, most websites use it now. So either deal with it or not. You're the only one that can make that happen. 😉

I use older machines for more of "nostalgic" purposes rather than actually using it as a daily machine.
 
Actually.......lol

fiercetiger224 said:
Yes, I agree Flash does suck and it's a resource hog, but you know, most websites use it now. So either deal with it or not. You're the only one that can make that happen. 😉
Click to expand...

So you agree with us. 😀 Seriously, that's all we want addressed. There's no REASON Flash SHOULD be a resource hog, and we think it's ridiculous that they've made it into one.

And some credit where credit is due: Apple has actually done a great job supporting older hardware. OSX runs fine on 10-12 year old machines if you can get it onto it (a bit of a trick sometimes, as it tends to come on a DVD and the older boxes tend to not have DVDs) because it's EFFICIENT. It's based on Unix, so it should be. 😀 OK, so OSX won't run on the 68030-based machine I have in my shed for grins.......no big deal. I've no beef with Apple about supporting older hardware, and the OP praised Apple likewise. :apple: It's Adobe that's the boogieman here.
 
Thank you so much for the Flash 8 tip!

Most of the flash sites and videos on youtube on "standard" quality are working perfectly on this release up to this very day! 😀

So happy now. 😀

I just "upgraded" to Flash 8 my eMac as well my still amazingly fast running Quicksilver Dual 800! They're playing the youtube videos like champs now. This coupled with SafariBlock plugin leaves nothing to be desired now.

Of course video content from NYT etc won't work but the paper is there to be read, not seen so it's fine by me! Everything is as fluid as it was back in 2002! Good old times.

And yes, it's Adobe's fault not to have optimized Flash Player for the Mac platform. The performance on current Intel macs is A-BYS-MAL!

Maybe they fix it a bit with 10.1 but it's still a scam to watch a HQ or HD Youtube video on a brand new MacMini and getting 80% CPU usage off one single damn video! LOL!

Still, amazing tip about Flash 8! Really! THANKS again and happy Xmas!
 
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