online video is skipping

[marbles]

hi,

when on youtube etc my white macbook (2.0Ghz Nvidia graphics) video will start to stop/skip/stutter.

basically every 5 minutes or so the video will skipa second or half second and continue playing for a minute or so then do it again.

I've a solid 7 -8 Mb connection, my macbook temp is floating around 60 when watching video, right now it's 49.

whats going on ?

~d

 

[Makosuke]

First, I'm going to assume that there's plenty of buffer, so it's not just a network speed issue--that'd be easy to see, based on where the red pre-load meter is.

Second, I see almost exactly this problem on my MBP 17"; in my case it is unquestionably caused by the hard drive doing something weird. I know it's the drive because it makes a quiet little "clatter-chunk" sound, like maybe it's parking and quickly un-parking the heads. Sound continues playing (I assume more internal buffer or something), video stalls briefly.

You might try turning the sound off and putting your ear near the computer to see if it's making a similar noise when it stutters.

I assume this is actually a hardware issue (I have "let drives sleep" turned off, but that shouldn't happen during active use anyway), but I've been loathe to hand the thing off to Apple to find out, since it's subtle and intermittent. I'll give it a shot before AppleCare runs out next month, though.

The other obvious thing to test for would be that it's something else in that window or another stalling Flash. The test would be to switch to another browser or use a Flashblock-style plugin to disable any other Flash on the page and see if that fixes it.

 

[marbles]

will happen with plenty of 'buffer' , no noises that I can detect from the HD but as anothewr post of mine mentions I have a crackly noise ( I suspect CPU) when loading certain info on websites...like at the end of a youtube video when they show more vids in the screen of the just finished video .

and ticker tape scrolling information makes the macbook make the same noises also . though no hard drive noise except for standard read write noises.

I've got no scrpit installed so no other flash is running that I know of

 

[Scorch07]

I have problem with my MBP when watching HD videos on youtube. RAM is usually the culprit. Even though I have plenty more RAM to use, it's not that it's filling it up, it's just my browser getting cluttered or something. Usually closing the browser for a few minutes or switching to a different one and going straight to the video allows for smooth playback. See if that works.

 

[Makosuke]

Hmm... sounds different from my issue, then, but the RAM suggestion may be on target. Have you tried a different browser? If you usually use Safari, how about Camino? Or Opera?

If the behavior goes away in a different browser, then it must be someting internal to that browser, rather than something systemwide. Could well be cache related, be it disk or RAM cache.

Alternately it could just be Flash sucking, which it continues to do.

By the way, the quiet "crackling" under CPU load is probably normal (and unrelated), if you're describing what I think you are. I've heard the same thing on a number of computers, both Mac and Windows.