How is YouTube failing, exactly?
May 26, 2015 2:08 PM   Subscribe

My PowerMac G5 with Dual 2.7 GHz processors, which can effortlessly edit and play 1080p60p videos in FINAL CUT STUDIO, with a 256MB nVidia 6800GT DDL and with a 100 Megabit connection to the Internet, cannot play 240p YouTube videos without resulting in choppy, crappy performance. Is this the fault of the MAC OS X operating system, the browser (Safari or TenFourFox), something on the YouTube side, or Flash, or HTML5?
posted by shipbreaker to Technology (9 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
My buddy had this problem and it turned out his internet provider (Shaw) was messing with YouTube traffic and causing the glitches. Can you test with a VPN service and see if the problem clears up?
posted by pocams at 2:16 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Usually this is a CDN (Content Distribution Network) server problem. YouTube's popular content is cached in CDN servers so that your request for cat videos can be fulfilled by a server near you. Unfortunately, if the route to that server is congested, or that server is overloaded, you'll get crappy service.

Solutions: try watching less popular cat videos? Or use a virtual private network (VPN) or server lookup (DNS) trick so that you appear to be somewhere else, where the CDN server for that location has a route to you that isn't as congested.

More at this Ars article, for example.

In addition, Flash is probably a problem, especially on your aging machine...
posted by RedOrGreen at 2:51 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


G5s and YouTube's use of h.264 don't mix very well at all. While the processors can handle uncompressed HD video, they will choke on modern compression codecs.

You could try downloading the YouTube file using Keepvid and see how it fares offline to rule out your internet and browser.
posted by porn in the woods at 3:41 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


Didn't Adobe stop doing Flash updates for PPC?
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 4:37 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm afraid the G5 has simply been eclipsed by today's web tech. Any version of Flash that it can run is woefully outdated and is pretty much doomed to fail (some sites will actually block outdated Flash installs.) And you can pretty much forget using the html5 version of YouTube.

I'm afraid the G5 is pretty much EOL, as far as the web is concerned. It hurts me, too, as I look at my trusty-yet-obsolete 2x2 G5 that can't get around on the web very well anymore. Great machines in their day. But their days has long since passed.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:58 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]


Also, any JS is going to be deadly slow on PPC. There's no JIT compiler for JS on PPC (according to a friend who maintains the PPC builds for Firefox) so the experience will be particularly slow.
posted by scruss at 5:51 PM on May 26, 2015


My 2007 MBP is getting the same way. Try opening Activity Monitor (under Applications/Utilities) and switching to watch memory usage. Then try YouTube. The combination of Firefox and the Flash plugin slowly eat up all of my free memory.

Firefox itself is a pain about this. It seems to eat up memory and never release it, such that I have to kill and restart it a couple of times a day to eliminate the choppiness and hanging. (It works, too; machine goes right back to normal)

Twitter from the website gets me to out-of-memory land pretty quickly, too.
posted by ctmf at 7:17 PM on May 26, 2015


Yeah, I just tossed a bunch of G5 PowerMacs. They're not even worth it at screw around machines for my kid anymore, the C2D imac I have does a better job with general web video.
posted by Oktober at 8:45 PM on May 26, 2015


The dual 2.7GHz config of the G5 is from 2005, and the most recent version of OS X it can run came out initially 8 years ago (with the last build coming in 2009). The problem is really just that things have moved on since then. nthing a few suggestions already here - find a plugin that'll let you download the video and watch it off-line (something like VLC or iTunes may be optimized a bit more for h.264 than your ancient copy of Flash). You're already running TenFourFox but it may be a good idea to check to make sure you're using the G5-specific version. (I would bet that you are, though.) You don't mention how much actual system memory you have but that might be a good thing to upgrade too, if you're still on a 1 or 2 GB configuration. If you are running Leopard (10.5), actually falling back to 10.4 may also help some. They're both not supported but Tiger (10.4) tends to run better on the PowerPC machines.

Other, more drastic options:
- Replace the video card. I don't know for sure but there may be some value to upgrading from what you have. You'll have to find a card compatible with your machine, though; unlike the Intel Macs, your replacement card may need a specialty BIOS to work in a G5. (This was certainly the case quite a while ago, and I've still got a GeForce4MX card that was a PC one that now only works in Macs.) You've got the last G5 that had AGP, though, so you may be rather limited here. The next gen up has PCI-Express and there are vastly more cards available there.
- Put Linux on it. Debian still does a PowerPC port that is still supported, but the options have gone down a lot on this since Apple switched to Intel.
- Replace it. 10 years is a long time for computers. Even an older Intel Mac mini will be tons faster than the G5, and as a plus you'll actually be able to run software that didn't go out of support years ago. (Keeping the G5 just to do Final Cut is not a bad idea. I have a G5 just for GarageBand, but I try real hard not to go on the Internet with it. Even my 6-year-old MacBook - not Pro, the less powerful regular one with horrible Intel video - is tons and tons faster than it and I'd only be able to get a couple hundred dollars if I sold it.)
posted by mrg at 11:16 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]


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