My first computer was a MacBook 2,1. I daily drove it from basically 2011-2019. Recently I bought the exact model back (even the same color, rare black). So it’s a 2.16GHz C2D with 1280x800 16:10 display, with the almost useless GMA 950.
The GMA 950 is/was so useless, that it spawned my passion for late 90s/early 00s PC games in the early 2010s when I had it. Quake III/UT etc.. Nothing past 2003 is guaranteed to run on it really,
Anyways, I use chromium-legacy on my late 2012 Mac mini (absolute beast capable of H.265 1080p) with YouTube on 10.12 and Linux and Windows 7 (yes I triple booted it) and I knew it supported Mac OS X 10.7, so I figured let’s give it a go.
Initial impressions, a little too slow to be usable on YouTube for streaming video full screen. Not reactive enough. I thought, well mine back in the day had maxed out 4GB of RAM, this one came with 2GBs maybe I should try that. So I bought 4GBs of RAM and maxed it out. Then next tried Linux (I did not go back to lion with the 4GBs at this point of the adventure…)
After the amazing experience of Fedora on the late 2012 Mac mini, I expected this would work great. No it did not. XFCE spin of fedora is broken with the intel driver for GMA 950 and your stuck with software rendering. Cinamon spin doesn’t even boot. Finally the regular gnome works fine, even with hardware acceleration but on every Linux I try the right headphone speaker is mapped to the subwoofer on the actual MacBook. And then comes the really sad truth:
GMA 950 has no hardware acceleration in any modern browser. Even if the OS is hardware accelerated…
I’m not talking about video codec acceleration, I’m talking about canvas acceleration. Any kind of 2d acceleration. GMA 950 never had any kind of video codec acceleration, but to be not even supported for anything on the screen for the video is tuff.
Chrome just crashes if you try to force it. I mean yea the OpenGL is ancient (v2.1 on Linux, v1.4 on Mac OS or Windows). But this little bit of help could make a lot of difference here with one of the supercomputer tasks of 2024, streaming YouTube with a browser.
Something else that doesn’t help is YouTube is moving to VP9/other codecs which are even harder on the ancient C2D. And then you add entirely software based rendering.
Let me clear up what I mean. At least with say a dedicated video player with the right codecs for the CPU, you can play even HD content (720p/1080pish) on such a system as this because it doesn’t have a crazy modern browser+software decode of video+no hardware display accel. The video player can at least output OpenGL or whatever for the display, even though it’s decoded by the CPU.
I can play 1080p/720p H.264 downloaded YouTube videos just fine on the Linux os for example with the right codecs. But the browser has too much going against it performance wise to do the same, even with 240p…
Next, my atomic bomb Windows XP. I mained windows xp on such a machine for a period in 2018, and it was awesome. Modern vlc, YouTube worked great, 1080p/720p streaming just like with Firefox/chrome on lion back then.
But then I installed XP, and while these era Mac’s are absolute beasts of XP machines, I ran into a familiar issue. No hardware accel. I used superium, basically chromium-legacy for windows xp-7. And same issue, no hardware accel.
Choppy, not satisfactory results. I tried mypal, a fork of Firefox 74 and pretty much the same. Tons of vsync issues, a bit choppy.
For fun I tried the last official Firefox/chromium on both lion and windows xp. Both had hardware accel for at least canvas, and both did much better performance wise but full screen was broken on all.. and much of other things to.
Finally, I arrive back at lion. And I’m here to say with 4GBs of RAM (really 3GBs only seeable due to motherboard quirk), 360p selected, and H264ify browser extension (forces legacy codecs, I did use this in every above test too) and ublock origin lite, it is the absolute optimal experience. You may get a few dropped frames here and there, but this is the only setup worth using a browser with. 2GBs is not enough RAM!
Of course, using an external client will always yield better performance. Using YouTube-DLP on a Linux distribution that’s actually hardware accelerated with vlc and the right codecs, was the expected results…
Same thing with VLC (which min support for latest version as of current date is Windows XP SP3/Mac 10.7.0). If you bypass the browser and use a downloaded/streamer and output to a hardware accelerated video player, you’ll always have good results.
Even on tiger with this machine running PPCMC 7 to download videos and play them back with VLC let me do 720p playback easily.
I just want to say, the dream is not dead. I never thought I would have my first laptop back and find something that would actually do something close to what I did 10 years ago with it, thank you legacy-chromium.
If you know, you know. GraphicsMediaAccelerator 950 is more like DisplayController 950. It doesn’t even have hardware Textures and lighting, a 2001 thing for nvidia GPUs.
The GMA 950 is/was so useless, that it spawned my passion for late 90s/early 00s PC games in the early 2010s when I had it. Quake III/UT etc.. Nothing past 2003 is guaranteed to run on it really,
Anyways, I use chromium-legacy on my late 2012 Mac mini (absolute beast capable of H.265 1080p) with YouTube on 10.12 and Linux and Windows 7 (yes I triple booted it) and I knew it supported Mac OS X 10.7, so I figured let’s give it a go.
Initial impressions, a little too slow to be usable on YouTube for streaming video full screen. Not reactive enough. I thought, well mine back in the day had maxed out 4GB of RAM, this one came with 2GBs maybe I should try that. So I bought 4GBs of RAM and maxed it out. Then next tried Linux (I did not go back to lion with the 4GBs at this point of the adventure…)
After the amazing experience of Fedora on the late 2012 Mac mini, I expected this would work great. No it did not. XFCE spin of fedora is broken with the intel driver for GMA 950 and your stuck with software rendering. Cinamon spin doesn’t even boot. Finally the regular gnome works fine, even with hardware acceleration but on every Linux I try the right headphone speaker is mapped to the subwoofer on the actual MacBook. And then comes the really sad truth:
GMA 950 has no hardware acceleration in any modern browser. Even if the OS is hardware accelerated…
I’m not talking about video codec acceleration, I’m talking about canvas acceleration. Any kind of 2d acceleration. GMA 950 never had any kind of video codec acceleration, but to be not even supported for anything on the screen for the video is tuff.
Chrome just crashes if you try to force it. I mean yea the OpenGL is ancient (v2.1 on Linux, v1.4 on Mac OS or Windows). But this little bit of help could make a lot of difference here with one of the supercomputer tasks of 2024, streaming YouTube with a browser.
Something else that doesn’t help is YouTube is moving to VP9/other codecs which are even harder on the ancient C2D. And then you add entirely software based rendering.
Let me clear up what I mean. At least with say a dedicated video player with the right codecs for the CPU, you can play even HD content (720p/1080pish) on such a system as this because it doesn’t have a crazy modern browser+software decode of video+no hardware display accel. The video player can at least output OpenGL or whatever for the display, even though it’s decoded by the CPU.
I can play 1080p/720p H.264 downloaded YouTube videos just fine on the Linux os for example with the right codecs. But the browser has too much going against it performance wise to do the same, even with 240p…
Next, my atomic bomb Windows XP. I mained windows xp on such a machine for a period in 2018, and it was awesome. Modern vlc, YouTube worked great, 1080p/720p streaming just like with Firefox/chrome on lion back then.
But then I installed XP, and while these era Mac’s are absolute beasts of XP machines, I ran into a familiar issue. No hardware accel. I used superium, basically chromium-legacy for windows xp-7. And same issue, no hardware accel.
Choppy, not satisfactory results. I tried mypal, a fork of Firefox 74 and pretty much the same. Tons of vsync issues, a bit choppy.
For fun I tried the last official Firefox/chromium on both lion and windows xp. Both had hardware accel for at least canvas, and both did much better performance wise but full screen was broken on all.. and much of other things to.
Finally, I arrive back at lion. And I’m here to say with 4GBs of RAM (really 3GBs only seeable due to motherboard quirk), 360p selected, and H264ify browser extension (forces legacy codecs, I did use this in every above test too) and ublock origin lite, it is the absolute optimal experience. You may get a few dropped frames here and there, but this is the only setup worth using a browser with. 2GBs is not enough RAM!
Of course, using an external client will always yield better performance. Using YouTube-DLP on a Linux distribution that’s actually hardware accelerated with vlc and the right codecs, was the expected results…
Same thing with VLC (which min support for latest version as of current date is Windows XP SP3/Mac 10.7.0). If you bypass the browser and use a downloaded/streamer and output to a hardware accelerated video player, you’ll always have good results.
Even on tiger with this machine running PPCMC 7 to download videos and play them back with VLC let me do 720p playback easily.
I just want to say, the dream is not dead. I never thought I would have my first laptop back and find something that would actually do something close to what I did 10 years ago with it, thank you legacy-chromium.
If you know, you know. GraphicsMediaAccelerator 950 is more like DisplayController 950. It doesn’t even have hardware Textures and lighting, a 2001 thing for nvidia GPUs.
