Safari and YouTube

[Aragornii]

I find that YouTube is almost unusable on Safari on my MacBook Pro (17", i7, plenty of RAM). It's very slow, lots of beach ball, video lags sound, generally sluggish and unresponsive.

If I switch over to Firefox it works fine, but it's a pain to copy a link over to Firefox anytime I want to watch a YouTube video, whether inline or directly on YouTube.

Anyone else experienced this? Any fixes? The only suggestion I found via a Google search was to repair permissions, but that didn't help.

Thanks.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

What about the HTML5 beta on YouTube? www.youtube.com/html5

 

[Weaselboy]

Go the link provided in the above post and EXIT the html5 beta, then install this extension. It will force YouTube to use h.264 video both on the main YouTube site and also on YouTube videos embedded on other sites. Works perfectly.

 

[Aragornii]

Thanks both. Disabling the HTML 5 beta fixed it immediately. That was clearly the problem. Not sure how it got turned on in the first place. Will also try the recommended extension. For now I'm using click-to-flash, but the appears to have more features.

 

[Erasmus]

I am having the same problem. Shall try the above solution, but I just can't believe how something so huge would slip under Apple's radar. For me, whenever I run a YouTube video, some Quicktime thing opens to run it, which saturates an entire core thread, locking up Safari, while leaving the other seven threads untouched. Hence unresponsive Safari with 87% idle CPU, and 6GB RAM free.

WTF, Apple???

EDIT: Exiting the HTML 5 beta fixed it for me immediately as well.