I have a 21.5" iMac that's just a little over a year old. I've been doing some reading about hardware acceleration and have arrived at a question. When viewing youtube video in 1080p or trying a 1080p video with quicktime, my cpu is still at 100% and sometimes more. The video seems to playback fine but I am wondering why I am hearing other people with much lower cpu results and I'm not seeing that? I've got the latest version of flash 10.1 for the streaming and according to my system profiler I have the nvidia 9400. Am I missing something or does someone have an explanation?
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hardware accel question
- Thread starter rknorr
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As you have a Dual Core CPU (C2D or i3 or i5) the CPU usage gets shown as up to 200% due to two cores. With four cores it would be up to 400% and the more cores the more percent.
I have a 2007 C2D CPU and just tested a 1080p video on YT (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kiv8-jfv74&feature=&p=9CB64AA5F1D6AA28&index=0&playnext=1) and got around 120% CPU usage, which is okay, as roughly 80% is still free for other processes.
The CPU is there to be used, but if you don't want this, you can always try ClickToFlash or the YouTube HTML 5 beta.
I have a 2007 C2D CPU and just tested a 1080p video on YT (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kiv8-jfv74&feature=&p=9CB64AA5F1D6AA28&index=0&playnext=1) and got around 120% CPU usage, which is okay, as roughly 80% is still free for other processes.
The CPU is there to be used, but if you don't want this, you can always try ClickToFlash or the YouTube HTML 5 beta.
Try the new 10.2 beta, it significantly reduced CPU usage on my MBA. Got around 25% CPU usage when watching Avatar trailer in 1080p
Ok, thanks for the replies. After I posted I did realize that it was basically using one core at 100% and so overall I was still well below maxing it out, but thanks for pointing that out. In terms of playing a 1080p video directly from the hard drive through quicktime, would about 100% on one core be correct there as well?
Yes, as it doesn't matter where the movie is stored, but what compression it uses (Flash, like many HD movies too, use H264 or any other MPEG-4 codec variant), and that compression needs to be decoded, which is CPU intensive.
Other way round. It is and has always been Apple's fault that Flash performs without hardware acceleration on OS X. Apple never gave Adobe access to hardware acceleration.
However, this shouldn't be an issue any more. Simple solution: youtube.com/html5