Flash video on OS X 10.6 /17 October 2009 @ 9am
While watching a YouTube video today my computer started to show the usual Flash symptoms. The system fan sounded like it was taking off and the CPU usage was going through the roof, it also began to heat up to the point where I could not have it on my lap.
I have the ClickToFlash Safari plugin installed which helps prevent a lot of these issues, but obviously if you want to watch a YouTube view you have to succumb to the evil of Flash right? Wrong!
YouTube for a while have been encoding their videos in the MP4 format using the h.264 compression standard. What this means is you can watch a video that is not encoded in Flash. Great but how do I access it I hear you ask. Well if you have ClickToFlash you can set it to load this version of the video by default:
Take a look at the different in Activity monitor between Flash and MP4.
First Flash:
Next MP4 using h.264 compression:
There is a massive difference in CPU usage. No wonder my laptop was getting hot while watching Flash video.
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