Just setup a 2008 Lenovo t430 laptop with windows 7 (going to use it to check website rendering as I'm fed up of booting into Parellels and it slowing my entire machine to a crawl) Anyway, I'm wondering why the hell this crappy old Lenovo with an old ATI 3400 graphic card blows away my Unibody 2008 MBP 8 gigs of ram and 9600GT video card when viewing Big Buck Bunny in 1080p! The Lenovo is just ticking over at 26% cpu usage BUT my poor MBP is hitting 80% or more. I have the latest versions of flash player on both machines and used Chrome too! This is the video I'm watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSGBVzeBUbk Seems like Adobe is purposely screwing with something here? The video also loaded a lot quicker on window7 than my MBP ???
They killed the butterfly, WTF? I am running the same system, minus the extra 4GB of RAM and it ran fine. Fans kicked on, of course, but it did not slow my machine down.
CPU usage? I get 80% plus with Chrome, Safari and Firefox. (Yeah that big bunny kicked those little buggers asses didn't he!)
2.5 year old 2.8GHz C2D with 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro: about 25% CPU utilisation, and pretty much the same playing the h.264 version (I use Click To Flash on Safari now)
I don't think "Adobe is purposefully screwing with something here"; I think your machine blows (or you have an old Flash Player). My 2009 uni ran at 25% cpu
My guess would be that some systems aren't having their GPUs invoked for video playback in Flash. Could always try the same vid in h264 to see what's at fault (Flash player not using GPU or H264 decoder not using it), but it's not like you can do anything about it anyway.