MacBook Video Problems, Really Need Help

[conor ordan]

When watching any kind of online video (even at 360p on YouTube and other sites) the video will suddenly stop, the whole screen freezes for around a second, I cannot move the mouse or do anything in this time. While the screen is frozen the audio will skip and jump until the screen is unfrozen.

This happens on all 3 web browsers (Chome, Safari and Firefox).
All software is up to date.

My MacBook's specs are as follows..
OS: Mac OS X 10.5.8
CPU: 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
RAM: 2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
HDD: 110GB (20GB available)
GPU: Integrated Intel GMA 950 - 64MB VRAM - Monitor is running at 1280x800

If you need to know anything else just ask.

 

[Makosuke]

If the mouse pointer is also freezing, the problem is happening at a fairly low-level--almost NOTHING will freeze the pointer. I'm inclined to say it's something system-level (perhaps even hardware, though I'd expect more severe problems if it were hardware), but if it's really ONLY happening in Flash, maybe Flash is just tickling some low-level system bug to cause this.

Have you seen this issue with any non-Flash video? Say, stuff opened in QuickTime player, or better yet test some HTML5 video and see if it works (you can switch YouTube to HTML5, or try another site).

If HTML5 video is ok, then the first thing to try is uninstall and remove Flash--download the Flash Uninstaller:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

...run it, download the latest version of Flash, reinstall it, see if the problem goes away.