Is there any way to play Flash video on a G4?

[coupdetat]

I'm almost down to the last straw on this... I can't stand how bad Flash performance is on G4's! It's popularity on the web has singlehandedly made my Powerbook obsolete when pretty much everything else out there still works fine.

I know people have complained about Flash performance in the past, but is there any way at all to run it properly? I've never found an answer even though the subject comes up often in Google searches. I shut down all background programs but the lag is still terrible. I know there are some websites that can download YouTube into MP4 format which works great, but they usually only work with a limited number of sites.

...Any other ideas?

 

[atluten]

Aside from quitting all other applications that may be using the CPU intensively, there really is no other way to improve the performance. Flash has relatively poor performance on all systems, PowerPC and Intel, so people watching flash videos on sites such as YouTube will end up with the similar fan-crazy experience after extended watching.

 

[TheReef]

The latest version (10) is said to improve performance significantly.
I tried the beta on my G3, Youtube ran much better, but was all scrambled and green. When the full release is announced (if it hasn't been already that is) give it a go.

Also, you could try upping your processor performance in the energy saver pane, note this will make you PowerBook run a lot more hot.

 

[TEG]

Works great for me, as long as I let it buffer.

TEG

 

[coupdetat]

I found something that works perfectly!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006

Okay, so you have to use Firefox, but it lets you perfectly download embedded flash video as .FLV. It's kind of slow to respond at times, but the tradeoff gets you REALLY good playback in VLC. My VLC crashes when I try to fast-forward, though. It's worth a shot for people who have been unsuccesful using other methods.

I found that Flash 10 beta significantly lowered processor load too, but...er...it doesn't work properly. Adobe really needs to get its act together, but I guess they're mostly a monopoly in this area.

 

[ThunderRobot]

Odd.

Flash video is running fine on my Mac Mini G4 1.25 GHz / 1GB RAM.

OS X 10.3.9 / Firefox 3 / Flash Player 9.

I watched two programmes full screen on BBC iPlayer last night without a problem.

 

[co678]

I am on a TiBook G4 DVI 800Mhz w\ 1GB of RAM 10.4.11, and I can watch flash OK but I can't have other tabs\apps open. I run Adblock Plus inside of Firefox Optimized for my G4 processor which is 1000 times better than just the unoptimized version.

But I have to say flash is very, very CPU Intensive.

Hopefully Flash 10 will resolve this.