Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Axo1ot1 · Apr 11, 2012, 09:28 PM

I've had a bunch of weird internet problems lately that Apple's Geniuses and phone tech people have blamed on bad wifi firmware. At this point I've got pretty much everything working well, except YouTube movies are misbehaving in the following ways:

-Audio usually starts playing before video
-The video playback is very choppy and stops and starts quite a bit
-over time, lip sync gets off by about a half a second
-pause/play is unpredictable, but generally doesn't work immediately, so there's a lot of clicking twice only to have the video stop and then start playing again a few seconds later

So this is all in Safari, and while Apple's techs are saying it's an issue with my computer's firmware, I'm disinclined to give up just yet since other video sites like Vimeo and LiveLeak seem to be okay.

I've tried clearing my cache.

Any ideas?

sek929 · 09:46 PM

That's because playing Youtube in Safari is absolutely horrendous. I've got the loading icon just spinning, video starts but only audio plays, video skips and sputters for 30 seconds before smoothing out, etc etc... Basically, everything you describe happens on my machine as well when I was running Safari.

I've had better luck using Chrome (2007 C2D iMac) but Youtube is incredible flaky on just about every Mac browser I've tried. Funny thing, because running XP in Bootcamp using Chrome on the same machine renders butter smooth youtube videos.

besson3c · Apr 12, 2012, 01:50 AM

Join YouTube's HTML5 beta (http://youtube.com/html5). HTML5 videos (where available) will play much better than Flash ones.

Spheric Harlot · Apr 12, 2012, 02:14 AM

It seems to vary with Flash versions.

I use ClicktoFlash, which replaces the Flash videos with h.264 versions played by QuickTime.

Much nicer, but no support for the ads, subtitles, click-through related links, etc.

besson3c · Apr 12, 2012, 02:48 AM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

It seems to vary with Flash versions.

I use ClicktoFlash, which replaces the Flash videos with h.264 versions played by QuickTime.

Wouldn't it be something like CoreVideo or some other lower level OS X thing, and not Quicktime? At the very least it wouldn't be the Quicktime browser plugin.

P · Apr 12, 2012, 06:50 AM

Quicktime is the framework, so it's fair to say that it's using Quicktime.

OP: Have you tried updating Flash to the latest version?

Atheist · Apr 12, 2012, 07:10 AM

YouTube is unusable in Safari on my machine as well. Safari really is a piece of crap.

besson3c · Apr 12, 2012, 07:14 AM

I guess I'm getting Quicktime confused with the Quicktime browser plugin. AFAIK the browser plugin is only used for handling video formats not natively supported by the browser called for in <embed> tags rather than <video> tags, namely older .mov videos and such.

The native HTML5 video support in Safari is probably handled by Quicktime, but the HTML5 video support in Chrome and Firefox is handled with a built-in player that likely utilizes CoreVideo for hardware acceleration.

Is this correct?

besson3c · Apr 12, 2012, 07:15 AM

Axo1ot1, does YouTube video play better in Chrome or Firefox?

Blaming something like this on Firmware is the very very very very very very last resort.

P · Apr 12, 2012, 08:10 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

I guess I'm getting Quicktime confused with the Quicktime browser plugin. AFAIK the browser plugin is only used for handling video formats not natively supported by the browser called for in <embed> tags rather than <video> tags, namely older .mov videos and such.

The native HTML5 video support in Safari is probably handled by Quicktime, but the HTML5 video support in Chrome and Firefox is handled with a built-in player that likely utilizes CoreVideo for hardware acceleration.

Is this correct?

I don't know how Chrome and Firefox work, but for the rest you are correct.

Axo1ot1 · Apr 13, 2012, 12:29 PM

Yeah I am up to date on Flash. I have tried it in Firefox and it seems to work fine, but I don't really like Firefox for general browsing, and it's kind of a pain in the ass to have to switch back and forth.

Waragainstsleep · Apr 13, 2012, 12:52 PM

Youtube on Safari on my MBP seems to have defaulted to HTML5 or some other codec but this causes it to think its playing the first 3-5 seconds on a loop without actually playing an audio or video. It works fine in Firefox with the exception that if you try to leave it buffering, it often stops halfway through until you start watching it which is annoying when your connection runs slow and you want to watch the video uninterrupted.

Eug · Apr 15, 2012, 12:49 AM

Yeah, it sucks on my Core i7 iMac with 12 GB RAM too in Lion Safari. Note that it usually only does the stuttering weirdness while the video is still loading. After loading of the entire video is complete, the video plays fine.

It seems to work better in Firefox, but I haven't extensively tested it. I'll be using Firefox more from now on though.

Oh and by the way, Flash browsing on desktops is still absolutely necessary for me.

Buck_W · Jun 30, 2012, 06:26 PM

Originally Posted by Atheist

YouTube is unusable in Safari on my machine as well. Safari really is a piece of crap.

I'm happy to find this thread because I was wondering what was going with Safari as well. I'm running the latest version (5.1.7), but encounter problem after problem trying to view YouTube videos. When I view the same pages/videos using Chrome and/or Firefox, it works fine. Is Apple aware of this problem? I've always been a fan of Safari, but this is becoming such a problem, I'm thinking of dumping it.

DigitalEl · Jul 1, 2012, 12:49 PM

Maybe a DNS issue? I had YouTube issues a couple of years ago and started this thread. Since switching DNS, everything's been fine.