How Does Youtube Lag in OSX....

Make sure you have all software updates in place. You didn't mention what version of OS X or how much ram you have or how much HDD space you have available however I have never had an issue with choppy play of YouTube videos rather using Tiger or Leopard.

Also what you can do is reset PRAM to clear the overall memory. Although some may say that flash is not great on the Mac OS it's not true because I have never had issues with flash and I have had only Macs for the last 10 years.

 

YouTube uses Flash for the videos, and Adobe's version of Flash for the Mac isn't anywhere near as efficient as the version they wrote for Windows.

If you've only had Macs for the last 10 years, then what are you comparing your Flash on Mac experience to?

I run Windows at work at Mac at home, and I can tell you that Flash on Windows uses far less CPU to play videos than Flash on OS X does.

 

Well, I don't think there was anything in my post that said I didn't run Windows PC's although I have not seen any difference however the OP was concerned about choppy playback of YouTube videos, not CPU use that's why I asked about how much ram, OS version, updates and HDD space as that can affect playback.

 

I'm having this problem as well. It's a brand new iMac, fully updated with the 3.06GHz, 4GB RAM, 8800 512MB. The only thing running was the WoW updater...and all that was using was bandwidth, and the YouTube video buffered plenty fast, it had the whole thing loaded and was still stuttering.

It lags in Safari and Firefox.

 

Flash is just poor on Mac OS X.

The new beta version looks better, but it's still not as good as Windows.

 

But it shouldn't skip like this...it's crazy...

 

do try out flash 10 beta 2. It might help.

Maybe flash on OSX isn't as good as on windows, but for your hardware, it should be absolutely fine on youtube. I suspect its something related to your OS or hardware. Did you see any other display problem outside youtube or browser?

 

Flash is pretty awful, especially under 10.4 (better in 10.5)

Adobe Flash Player 10.0d536 broke cnn videos under 10.4
(yes cnn, they do have some videos that are approaching youtube in news quality, lol).

Poor coding by Adobe...