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What kind of battery life are you guys getting when watching youtube or playing a DVD

H

Hooksta

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 19, 2008
68
0
I get awesome battery life with my new i5 15" MacBook Pro EXCEPT when I start watching youtube. I swear I might get 2 to 2.5 hours of battery life then. My experience is still somewhat limited to MacBooks vs PC laptops.

Here's my observation...
For general web-surfing I can get 5.5 hours out of the Mac versus about 3 hours on my IBM laptop. However, I STILL get about 3 hours out of my IBM when I watch videos or youtube. Is there something I should be turning off when watching youtube?
 
Yoh could try forcing the integrated GFX to stay on, but to be honest, you main problem with YouTube is that flash for mac is a resource hog. You could try the html5 beta for YouTube? I've also heard the latest flash beta is much more efficient.
 
Sounds mostly likely I just need to deal with it. I appreciate the response!

It's not the end of the world by any means.
 
Hooksta said:
I get awesome battery life with my new i5 15" MacBook Pro EXCEPT when I start watching youtube. I swear I might get 2 to 2.5 hours of battery life then. My experience is still somewhat limited to MacBooks vs PC laptops.

Here's my observation...
For general web-surfing I can get 5.5 hours out of the Mac versus about 3 hours on my IBM laptop. However, I STILL get about 3 hours out of my IBM when I watch videos or youtube. Is there something I should be turning off when watching youtube?
Click to expand...

flash is very battery intensive, and the mac version of flash player is even worse than the windows version.
there are many safari extensions that force videos to play as HTML5 instead of flash, or you can enable the HTLM5 beta here, but that only shows most videos in HMTL5, where the extensions work on all videos.
 
sure thing, its right here

This one makes the videos play in a quicktime player while some others (I have seen two or three, but this is the only one I could remember the name of) make them play in the normal HTML5 youtube player.
 
Dozerrox said:
Yoh could try forcing the integrated GFX to stay on, but to be honest, you main problem with YouTube is that flash for mac is a resource hog. You could try the html5 beta for YouTube? I've also heard the latest flash beta is much more efficient.
Click to expand...

totally, flash on my i7 can consume up to 50% - html5 stays around 3% for the same videos
 
Hooksta said:
I get awesome battery life with my new i5 15" MacBook Pro EXCEPT when I start watching youtube. I swear I might get 2 to 2.5 hours of battery life then. My experience is still somewhat limited to MacBooks vs PC laptops.

Here's my observation...
For general web-surfing I can get 5.5 hours out of the Mac versus about 3 hours on my IBM laptop. However, I STILL get about 3 hours out of my IBM when I watch videos or youtube. Is there something I should be turning off when watching youtube?
Click to expand...


Your results are correct. The mac's battery life idling is very good compared to pc. However, at load, they're just intel machines with nvidia or integrated graphics at heart, and they consume just as many watts as the PCs.

This is my reasoning as to why I get very similar battery life as a windows pc when doing anything besides word processing.

Frankly, until proven otherwise, the size of the battery is what matters most.
 
2.5 hours of battery life is about right if you watch youtube videos online. Skype calls are also pretty bad with around the same time. Your fans will also be spinning at pretty high rpm's too.
 
Dozerrox said:
Yoh could try forcing the integrated GFX to stay on, but to be honest, you main problem with YouTube is that flash for mac is a resource hog. You could try the html5 beta for YouTube? I've also heard the latest flash beta is much more efficient.
Click to expand...

I think this is the main issue, flash might be signalling your nVidia GPU, a quick way to kill battery life. The intel integrated graphics can handle flash just fine. Use gfxCardStatus to force intel-only graphics.
 
demonsavatar said:
I think this is the main issue, flash might be signalling your nVidia GPU, a quick way to kill battery life. The intel integrated graphics can handle flash just fine. Use gfxCardStatus to force intel-only graphics.
Click to expand...

How do you do that? I thought we did not have that option on the new Macbook Pro's..? :confused::confused:
 
Right now I'm watching videos on youtube, and my battery is at 61%, and I have approximately 2:09 of battery left. I only have one of the 7 hour batteries, so I'd say that's not bad. I use a program called plex to watch my videos. It seems to helps with battery life quite a bit in my opinion.
 
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