Problem with Snow Leopard: Flash Player

It does appear to be Flash/Snow Leopard related. I have noticed video playback stuttering on my Mac Pro 1.1 with the stock GeForce 7300 GT video card that was never there before. If you watch Activity Monitor when you play back a Flash video in 10.6 you will note that the CPU demands have increased by quite a lot over what they were with 10.5. Others have reported this problem in many other forums as well. If you force Safari to operate in 32 bit mode (right click on Safari, select info and then check the "open in 32 bit" checkbox) it reduces the problem but does not totally eliminate it. In my case, I have found that Firefox (which only operates in 32 bit mode) does not suffer from this problem as much as Safari does when it is operated in 64 bit mode. [Just a note: In 10.6 when you monitor Safari CPU demands you need to add what you see for the Safari process as well as the Flash process since they are reported separately. In 10.5 you need only monitor the Safari process since here it includes the plugin (Flash in this case) CPU demands as well.]

This problem is occurring on all three of our Macs to some degree. However, the larger your monitor is and the higher your monitor resolution is, the worse it gets. You will note that if your open a HULU movie in a pop out window and then grab the lower corner and enlarge the window (and therefore the video) the CPU demands increase dramatically as the window gets bigger and the stuttering gets worse.

Looks like Apple and Adobe will need to work this out (assuming that Apple wants to work it out) for Flash to work properly as a plugin for Safari with 10.6.

 

I posted a thread about this shortly after Snow Leopard was released. On my 2.4 Ghz alu iMac, Flash playback is significantly worse under Snow Leopard than Leopard. I'm getting exactly what you are - stuttering playback on YouTube and other Flash-based sites. Updating to the latest Flash plugin doesn't improve it.

Pretty poor really. This plus the constant beachballing is making me seriously consider switching back to Leopard. Given that 10.6.1 didn't appear to fix anything, I wonder how long it will be before Snow Leopard is really mature (10.6.5+ perhaps?).

 

I don't experience any other graphics problem with 10.6.1 other then with Flash video. Therefore, I think that problem is actually with the Flash plugin and not with SL. This may be the reason that Apple is doing all it can to replace Flash with other open standard video options.

Flash has always been a pain in more ways than one, however, with SL the Flash video CPU demands are causing noticeable problems that did not show up with Leopard.

Movies that I encoded with H.264 at high resolution with HandBrake with the AppleTV preset play full screen at the 2560X1600 resolution on my 30 inch Apple Cinema HD monitor with no problems what-so-ever.

 

Thing is Flash playback is fine under Leopard using the same plugin, so Snow Leopard must have something to do with it somewhere...

 

I get the same problem and a lot of people I know have the same issue as well. Also, I get the stupid spinning beachball every 10 mins or so. I cant be bothered to install Leopard back and probably going to resort to using Win XP till they solve this mess. Have done clean installs and nothing works well. Even in Leopard, I cant watch a movie without having it freeze a a few times in-between.

 

There is a developer's version of Flash that some SL users have reported has fixed their problems. I can't attest to this though as I don't use it.

Note: It's a thread here at MR but I can't find it.

 

adobe flash version 9/10 hack for Snow Leo only!

I've managed to come up with my own version of flash by combining a version 9 executable into a 10 version base and the videos play a lot smoother, especially in full screen. I've tested it at hulu.com and usanetwork.com

you can get it here:
http://philtesone.com/mac/FlashSnowLeopard.zip
and unzip it into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and overwrite the two files there. . .

remember this is for Snow Leopard only! Leopard 10.5.8 works great with the latest flash player. . .

 

You........are.........a............god!!!!!!!!!

I was trying to fix this problem for 4 hours today. I called Mac tech support as well as Adobe and I couldn't get any help. I trued you on a whim and I am back in business! I THANK YOU MY FRIEND!!! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!! TO anyone else having this problem, download his player plugins. They work!

 

hehe, glad to be of some assistance!

 

Using flash player 10 now and its just as terrible. Gonna try this so that I can hopefully make it more than 5 minutes through a show on hulu.

Dang... Hulu said I need flash10 and wouldn't work with out it...

 

I know, same here. . .I think Hulu won't let you use this anymore, it keeps telling me to update my flashplayer now. . .

here's a pic from adobe of my detected flash versions and the latest versions available:

 

It Works!!!!!

I had the same problem playing videos on Youtube, and NOTHING I did fixed it but this! It's great, thank you, thank you!!!

 

The server response implies that the file has been removed

Hey guys, does anybody have an alternative link to the file please?

 

I'm still on Snow Leopard and could really use that file since Youtube STILL freezes really badly! Ptesone, are you around on here still? Or if anyone else who has the file could re-upload it, that would be great! Thanks!