[Big Mac]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

I don't have any HD video playback issues on a 1.8GHz G5 with 2 Gb of RAM pretty much anywhere.

I was under the same mistaken impression on my G5 DP 2.0/6GB/9800XT. You have to find a true HD 720p youtube video. There's one of a guy who dances in different lands across the world, for example, called "Where is Matt" or something similar. Find a video like that, click the watch in HD, and you should see a new, much larger and wide screen video field. Play the resulting video and you'll see your G5 choke.

[Todd Madson]

Correct. I've signed up on that Adobe bug report system, just waiting for the confirmation e-mail.

Also, I just remembered a guy I've known for 20 years works for Adobe but I'm not sure if he's got any connections with the Flash development side but I know he has 11 Mac computers in
his house and his main "recreational" computer is a dual G5 (he was talking about it at a Christmas party we attended) so I've reported it to him too but he may be on vacation presently.

[Big Mac]

Good to know, Todd. It does suck to be relegated by Flash like this. A computer that is fine playing 1080p shouldn't choke on 720p regardless of the container, especially given all the evidence you've brought forth.

[olePigeon]

Welcome to Flash on the Mac. Check all performance at the door.

[Todd Madson]

I still have yet to hear from my contact at Adobe or get a login for their bug reporting system.

Performance: still mediocre at best.

Macintouch has still ignored my report but with all the hoopla surrounding the recent
ilife09/iwork09/new macbook that's all they can seem to talk about and are probably
focusing on that.

Anyone else have any suggestions for where to publicise this?

[Big Mac]

Maybe the Admins can get us some juice on the MacNN front page.

[reader50]

Based on linkbacks, it was featured on the front page Dec 24 as a hot forum thread. It might be again, if the discussion stays involved and informative.

[Todd Madson]

Some more interesting stuff:

What seems to be interesting about this is that the audio stream seems to play fine, it's the video alone that seems to be the problem (at least on my G5 2.5).

So very strange indeed, I suspect something relating to the way video is buffered must be involved.

I also took the opportunity to try this on my wife's lamp style Imac 1.25 ghz G4 at Leopard 10.56 with 768 megs of ram and found similar behavior although at that speed the audio wasn't
as continuous as on the G5 2.5.

More experiments:

Now, I did a "high quality" mode video at youtube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmPVJNBvpAU

You'll notice on the right side where on the larger videos you can select "Play in HD" this one says "Watch in High Quality" and it plays fine on every computer that wasn't playing above.
that includes the PPCs.

That came from a MP4 file in H.264, 848x480, 29.97fps, QT says 6.93 M/bits per second. It's close to 200 megabytes in size (the original file). Plays fine in Quicktime and Flash on PPC.

The original big file was MP4 at H.264, 1280x720, 29.97fps, QT says 1.77 M/bits per second. And smaller in terms of size in megabytes (around 44 megs). Plays fine in Quicktime but not Flash on PPC.

Just like my original video.

Do you see where I'm going with this? It appears that it's not "file size" but "screen real estate occupied" that is effecting flash.

Some theories might be an algorithm that when scaled up beyond a certain point is causing issues.
Another thought is that video card related.

Any PPC G5 users out there have a BEEFY video card?

Come to think of it, a friend of mine has a G5 2.0 PCI-E model with a PCI-E video card - I'll get him involved in the testing.

[Big Mac]

Screen real estate or resolution?

[Todd Madson]

Possibly both.
Perhaps resolution is the problem.

Latest news: My friend with a:
G5 2.0 ghz dual core version
6 gigs of ram
Nvidia GeForce 6600 LE
Same result - audio plays, video plays a few frames and the video crawls to a halt.

(like this machine: http://www.everymac.com/systems/appl..._dual_2.0.html listed here....)

I initially thought it was an ATI problem but it appears to effect ATI/NVidia cards equally.

[Todd Madson]

Update: maybe this is a cross platform issue after all.

I was configuring on of the Dell D630 laptops at work, the same kind I have for work but with Vista.. 2 gigs of ram, 80 gig 7200 rpm drive, same 128 meg NVidia Quadro NVS135M video.

When the machine is under heavy processor load, the youtube HD video starts to exhibit similar signs of problems - not nearly as bad but not as smooth as some other machines without the heavy cpu utilization.

[Big Mac]

I'm pretty sure Adobe will just say PPC processors aren't as good as Intel processors at decoding HD Flash video, even though that just shows how poor Flash is as a video container format.

[Todd Madson]

It's easy to presume what they might say but until they're aware of it, this is all speculation especially given my very recent findings regarding x86 machines under load.

Plus, we know that PPC machines can handle 1080p video just fine under real video formats like Quicktime, arguably a much higher quality container.

Remember also that HD videos is a recent development on youtube, not even a month old, there may be other issues afoot that we have not yet seen.

I'm thinking of making a webpage with links to short examples and then I'll publicize it as far as I need to.

I'll make several one minute videos instead of huge examples, the full size files will be on my server and then we can point it out
to whoever might have the capability to deal with it.

[Big Mac]

You're right, it's worth a try. However, while HD videos on YouTube are recent, Flash HD videos have been supported by YouTube competitors for some time now, and their (Vimeo for example) HD videos don't play any better than YouTube's.

[Todd Madson]

Okay this is interesting.

I was at an Apple store the night before last and found out that the iPod touch plays the H.264 youtube videos just fine.

There's no way in heck that an iPod touch has more CPU horsepower than a G5 tower, it's just not possible.

Anyway - I've been fighting a cold so the short videos I want to film for my "proof of concept" site haven't been filmed yet. Stay tuned.

[Big Mac]

Thank you for the update, Todd. We do know that H.264 plays fine. It's all about the Flash container.

[Todd Madson]

Does anyone have an idea what CPU is in an iPod touch? Just out of curiosity.

I thought the originals were StrongARM processors but not sure about the touches.

Update: It is reported to be a 412 mhz Arm 11 processor.

Amazing really all that power in such a small package.

[ArtD]

Thank God I found this topic finally. I was losing my mind. Couldn't find jack about this issue at Adobe/Flash forums. I really hope they're aware of the issue and are working on a patch. Because every single person who has concluded that this is a Flash Plugin/PowerPC issue is 10000% correct. All my personal testing led to the exact same, incontrovertible conclusion.

Problem of Youtube choppy HD playback exists only my Dual 2.3 Ghz PowerPC G5, 3.5 GB DDR SDRAM, Flash 10.
Video plays flawlessly on my MacBook Pro Dual 2.6 Intel, 2 GB RAM, Flash 10.
Video plays flawlessly on my girlfriend's MacBook 2.1 Intel, 1 GB RAM, Flash 10.

I've experimented with various FCP exports including native, h264, mp4, and flv. I've experimented from various bit rates from 500 to 9000 kbps. Nothing makes a difference (Please note that the videos in question were all captured, edited, proxied, exported, and uploaded from the PowerPC G5).

Processing power and video cards aren't the problem here people. It's a PowerPC compatibility issue. And yes, it is a serious issue, esp. to those of us who rely on Youtube for legitimate marketing and communication.

[ajprice]

Originally Posted by Todd Madson 

Does anyone have an idea what CPU is in an iPod touch? Just out of curiosity.

I thought the originals were StrongARM processors but not sure about the touches.

Update: It is reported to be a 412 mhz Arm 11 processor.

Amazing really all that power in such a small package.

Just to restate what Big Mac said, the problem isn't with H264. Youtube on an iPhone/iPod Touch links to H264 versions of the videos at the correct resolution for 320x480 screen size, and not Flash full resolution or HD versions. Its YouTube HD Flash video on PPC Macs that is the problem here.

[Todd Madson]

Hi Art and welcome to the crew of miscreants. It bums me out because people really need to see just what an awful pit my basement is in my videos in the spendor of HD. By excluding high end powermacs it excludes a subset of the population who might want to see dank basement guitar videos. Grin.

Is there any way of contacting anyone at Adobe over this? I never did get a reply back from my friend who works at Adobe, I think his old e-mail account is a dead account, so I might have to actually do some calling around and talk to people which is always a challenge sometimes....

Also, is there a thread somewhere in a more "Flash" centric area we could force it on maybe?

[Big Mac]

We could try the old torches and pitchforks up to Silicon Valley routine.

[Todd Madson]

I did some tests this past weekend and am doing some encoding for some new tests. Found some interesting bits.

[Big Mac]

What did you find?

[Salty]

Hate to say it... but you guys need to get laid...
and record it, post it on youtube, and complain about the video being choppy...

[The OSX Guy]

HD videos play fine on my G5 Dual 2GHz Machine with 4GB of RAM. I run the 9800XT card as well. No problem playing 1080p files.

[Big Mac]

Again, we're talking specifically about HD Flash videos. 1080p on a G5 is fine except when the container is Flash. Try this one on for size, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfKd...e=channel_page

[pookiegus]

I have a dual 2.3Ghz G5 with 256MB Graphics card and 4Gb RAM - I agree with everyone on this thread that Youtube HD videos won't playback smoothly with a G5.

I also have a macbookpro and a macpro and the same videos playback fine on the intel macs.

Here's some HD that I encoded that plays back choppy - Make sure you hit "watch in HD" on bottom right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHUVJ_Z3_gU

However, I have also been using exposureroom for hosting HD videos and they playback smoothly on my G5 - Can you guys confirm this?

Try these links and click the HD button

http://exposureroom.com/members/dann...45cc7fbe43d3b/
http://exposureroom.com/members/dann...d6d4669a3950c/

In my experience the HD stuff plays back smoothly on exposureroom with my G5 but stuttery on Youtube.

If this is true than the problem isn't caused by flash but by youtube - because exposureroom uses flash.

I also have HD on vimeo and it plays back smoother on my G5 than youtube but still drops a few frames occasionally. . .

Can you guys confirm this?

Here's a link- Make sure HD is turned on

http://www.vimeo.com/1411405

What does everyone think?

[Big Mac]

1080 is not smooth for me on exposureroom or vimeo either, but both are better than YouTube. The extra 300MHz probably helps you a good amount.

[olePigeon]

Flash sucks.

[Todd Madson]

There was a flash update due to some security hack, looking into it now.

http://www.adobe.com/support/securit...apsb09-01.html

Don't know if there is any performance increase or fix on the Mac side. More later.

[Todd Madson]

Update: there was a very slight performance increase with the security update,the performance went from absolutely
abysmal to merely awful. In other words, there are times I can view the video with stuttering performance instead of
a still picture with audio in the background. An improvement but still not good enough.

I have one more theory I want to try but does anyone have an application that allows for saving a flash video from youtube
to a file on a computer that I could try running locally right off the hard drive? In other words, I want to read the flash video
file from the hard drive instead of being streamed off of a website to rule out bandwidth issues.

[Todd Madson]

Originally Posted by pookiegus 

I have a dual 2.3Ghz G5 with 256MB Graphics card and 4Gb RAM - I agree with everyone on this thread that Youtube HD videos won't playback smoothly with a G5.

I also have a macbookpro and a macpro and the same videos playback fine on the intel macs.

Here's some HD that I encoded that plays back choppy - Make sure you hit "watch in HD" on bottom right
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHUVJ_Z3_gU

However, I have also been using exposureroom for hosting HD videos and they playback smoothly on my G5 - Can you guys confirm this?

Try these links and click the HD button

http://exposureroom.com/members/dann...45cc7fbe43d3b/
http://exposureroom.com/members/dann...d6d4669a3950c/

In my experience the HD stuff plays back smoothly on exposureroom with my G5 but stuttery on Youtube.

If this is true than the problem isn't caused by flash but by youtube - because exposureroom uses flash.

I also have HD on vimeo and it plays back smoother on my G5 than youtube but still drops a few frames occasionally. . .

Can you guys confirm this?

Here's a link- Make sure HD is turned on

http://www.vimeo.com/1411405

What does everyone think?

Confirmed. The problem is YOUTUBE.

The amazing Monarch butterfly emerging from chrysalis video plays fine on my G5 2.5 dual, really amazing footage and plays smoothly. I've wondered if the
constant hammering of bandwidth at youtube is part of why this fails to play, that youtube itself can't provide bandwidth to thousands of people wanting to
play HD content and I'd bet there's a million people leeching their bandwidth at any given moment during the day.

And also confirmed that the Cato Model rocketry video plays fine in HD on my G5 2.5 dual.

I use ATICellerator II to overclock my video card but tried it on stock settings and it worked fine there too.

So, it appears YOUTUBE is the problem. And I just tried my guitar video on the Dell D630 Core2duo and it seems to have real issues playing that video now;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BFVT...e=channel_page and
that's on Windows Vista SP1 with an NVidia Quadro S135M - horrible performance.

Lots of stuttering and stopping and issues streaming.

Could it be youtubes' popularity exceeds its available bandwidth?

[Big Mac]

I don't know if it's that bandwidth related. I always let the videos load before trying to play them.

[Todd Madson]

Update: I have new drivers available for the laptop, I'll try that in a moment. All I know is that with a few minutes streamed I went
back to the beginning of the video and the flow of animation wasn't smooth at all on youtube. Proof that it wasn't just a Powermac
problem only. More after I update this.

[mabaker303]

Duel 1.8 G5 here

Experiencing the very same issue while playing Flash HD videos.

It is really unbelievable that there's like practically NO place on the internet where the issue has been yet rised to discussion - apart of course from here on nnforums.

I have also something to add here: Try to download the newest version of the Opera web browser and you all G5-users will definitely see a VISIBLE performance increase of the youtube HD videos/Vimeo HD videos performance. It'll be still jerky but not near as jerky as in Safari.

I have yet to find one person that would explain to me the CPU usage differences while playing a youtube video in Opera and Safari.

It's a puzzle truly and UNDOUBTEDLY Adobe's fault.

[Big Mac]

It could also be OS X's outdated browser plugin architecture causing us more system overhead.

[mabaker303]

You can also try and run the famous GUImark Flash benchmark on the same PPC machine but on different browsers. Opera results' graph is completely different than Sarafi's.

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark/

[Big Mac]

Thank you, I will try that.

[mabaker303]

No problem! Be sure to share the results with us here, Big Mac!

[Todd Madson]

Trying this with Safari 4 beta tonight. I have it on my laptop now and it zips against
everything else. More as I get it. We'll see how the G5 fares.

[Todd Madson]

Latest:

Installed Safari Beta 4.
G5 2.5 7 gigs of ram. Leopard version 10.56.
Radeon 9600XT video card overclocked to 551 mhz clock 331 mhz memory.

O'Rourke's diner clip plays the first 11 seconds flawlessly then hits a brick wall stuttering frames like a special effect. After that, it's like every other few frames so it's really quite bad.

Monarch butterfly clip plays flawlessly.
Oddfellows playhouse plays mostly flawlessly but occasional dropped frames.
Model rockets plays terrific.
My guitar video - herky jerky.

Mind you the audio is fine in all of these, it's the video that's the problem.
And mostly youtube.

[pookiegus]

Thanks Todd for all the testing!

I decided to download the source files from all three sites to see what was going on

Exposureroom and Vimeo both use FLV files with ON2 VP6 Codecs at 1.6Mbps bitrates
Quicktime with perian and VLC played both raw files fine without stuttering.

Youtube used an MP4 file with AVC1 Codec (H.264/MP4 AVC) at 2.5 Mbps bitrate
Quicktime with perian couldn't open the MP4
I kept getting this error in Quicktime"The movie could not be opened - An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie."

VLC opened the file but it played back very stuttery!!

According to VLC's forums - avc1 also known as H.264 is much more CPU-intensive than XviD/ordinary previous MPEG4-standards. ... of that size in other formats. For 720p-H.264 you need at least a 2 GHz single-core-G5 or an Intel-based mac.

So I guess our G5's just aren't fast enough to decode H.264 in an MP4 wrapper over 2.5 Mbps. . .

I'm going to try a different quicktime H264 codec to see if that plays back smoother. . .

[Todd Madson]

Interesting. So you need a 2 ghz CPU minimum to decode that?

I have two 2.5 ghz processors though. If an extra 500 mhz per processor isn't enough I don't know what to think.

One moment, rebooting.

[olePigeon]

Did I mention that Flash sucks?

[Big Mac]

That fact won't make it go away, unfortunately.

[Todd Madson]

One other thing - the original H.264 files play fine in Quicktime and/or Perian and/or Mplayer, it's just the Flash video equivalent that pukes and
snorts all over itself.

Grumble.

[Groove24]

My 2.4Ghz Macbook Pro 3.1 couldn't run HD videos on YouTube. Not only that, it often got really hot and ran the fan whenever I was online and the battery life was really short.

I tried a bunch of stuff. Relaunched the Finder, checked the activity monitor and terminal, blah, blah, blah. The "Genius" at the Apple Store said it was my video card. Genius is such an overused term, isn't it?

Anyway, it turns out it wasn't my card at all. It was a well-known that Firefox sucks for Intel Macs. It just wasn't well-known by me. I opened Safari today and it ran the HD YouTube stuff almost perfectly.

I was mourning my hundreds of Firefox bookmarks when I found the link below. Beta Watch: Shiretoko Firefox 3.5 Intel-Optimized Browser

Now my machine runs true and fast, and the HD Movies on YouTube are even smoother than they were with Safari.

SO IF YOU'RE USING FIREFOX ON AN INTEL MAC - STOP DOING THAT. USE THIS: http://theappleblog.com/2009/05/11/beta-watch-shiretoko-firefox-3-5-intel-optimized-browser/"]http://theappleblog.com/2009/05/11/beta-watch-shiretoko-firefox-3-5-intel-optimized-browser/

[Power-pc-G5]

Hi,
Just thought i would add my input into this thread. I have a dual 2.3 g5 tower, with an Ati radeon x850xt in it.
I also have the same problems listed above with Youtube HD content stuttering. As mentioned before the sound seems to play well, but not so the images, jerky action/appaling fps etc.
This problem is also apparent on the BBC i-Player (HD version, great service for uk users!) which shows exactly the same symptoms. Reading the required specs on the BBC site, i think this is also Abobe Flash/Air pluggin based.
By comparison the my Intel Macbook is without a hitch on the same content.

Looking at the Activity Monitor on the power pc whilst replaying HD content the processing power of the system does not seem to be running on max at all- 115% spread over the two processors seems to be the norm. I would not like to try overclocking the graphics card anymore to see if that makes a difference, as it is allready an oem overclocked version of the x800xt card, i believe.

I neither have tried the Powerpc version of firefox, but suspect i would get the same problems , as it seems to me to be down to the Adobe flash player, from what i read here.

[Centerath]

Originally Posted by pookiegus 

I have a dual 2.3Ghz G5 with 256MB Graphics card and 4Gb RAM - I agree with everyone on this thread that Youtube HD videos won't playback smoothly with a G5.

I also have a macbookpro and a macpro and the same videos playback fine on the intel macs.

Here's some HD that I encoded that plays back choppy - Make sure you hit "watch in HD" on bottom right
YouTube - HD - O'Rourke's Diner - Diners, Drive-ins and Dives

However, I have also been using exposureroom for hosting HD videos and they playback smoothly on my G5 - Can you guys confirm this?

Try these links and click the HD button

Monarch Butterfly Hatching By SAMDOG Films On ExposureRoom
Oddfellows Playhouse Documentary By SAMDOG Films On ExposureRoom

In my experience the HD stuff plays back smoothly on exposureroom with my G5 but stuttery on Youtube.

If this is true than the problem isn't caused by flash but by youtube - because exposureroom uses flash.

I also have HD on vimeo and it plays back smoother on my G5 than youtube but still drops a few frames occasionally. . .

Can you guys confirm this?

Here's a link- Make sure HD is turned on

HD CATO Rocketry Club Launch Highlights #139 July 19,2008 on Vimeo

What does everyone think?

Yes i can see the the butterfly video on my iBook g4 14' that has 512 mb of ram and a 1.33 processor ...but i cant seem to watch any HD videos on youtube or through Quicktime... jeez

[Centerath]

I have the worst mac here i think LOL