Why Does YouTube Play so Slowly on the PowerPC Platform

[Appleboy45]

So I got a iBook G4 that I use while it is and older laptop, it's still quite useful and I enjoy using it. The one thing it doesn't do great at is play YouTube videos. My iBook G4 as a 1.4GHz PPC G4, 1.5GBs of RAM and OS X 10.5 Leopard. The web browser I use is TenFourFox (The one for the G4e if you are wondering). What causes YouTube videos to run slowly on the PPC platform? The 8-Bit Guy (Formaly The iBook Guy even though I'm sure everyone knows that by now) said it has to do with Adobe Flash Player, but I'm not using that and that video was made years ago.

[thekeemo]

Its an old cpu thats why

[STRMfrmXMN]

7 minutes ago, Appleboy45 said:

So I got a iBook G4 that I use while it is and older laptop, it's still quite useful and I enjoy using it. The one thing it doesn't do great at is play YouTube videos. My iBook G4 as a 1.4GHz PPC G4, 1.5GBs of RAM and OS X 10.5 Leopard. The web browser I use is TenFourFox (The one for the G4e if you are wondering). What causes YouTube videos to run slowly on the PPC platform? The 8-Bit Guy (Formaly The iBook Guy even though I'm sure everyone knows that by now) said it has to do with Adobe Flash Player, but I'm not using that and that video was made years ago.

I used to have an iMac G5, one of the most powerful PowerPC Macs. I couldn't play Youtube videos above 240P ever. You need one more processing core, even if the cores are weak, to play above that.

[Katsunaka]

Jeez I never would have figured that a PC wouldn't be capable of Youtube.

 

 

[iCrushDreams]

7 minutes ago, Katsunaka said:

Jeez I never would have figured that a PC wouldn't be capable of Youtube.

 

 

The CPU still has to decode and render the h.264 YouTube stream. That's not a ton of work, but an older CPU will definitely struggle.

[potoooooooo]

Your CPU isn't powerful enough for decoding.

 

I suggest you move up to something newer, perhaps one of the 2009 white macbooks? They have core 2 duo iirc, and are cheap while still being good and relatively svelte. Not to mention being a thousand times more modern and usable with newer software.

[Appleboy45]

4 hours ago, thekeemo said:

Its an old cpu thats why

Well  I know it's old, but I'd think it couldn't require that much horsepower to play a video.

[Appleboy45]

3 hours ago, STRMfrmXMN said:

I used to have an iMac G5, one of the most powerful PowerPC Macs. I couldn't play Youtube videos above 240P ever. You need one more processing core, even if the cores are weak, to play above that.

I would have thought one core would have been enough. But I guess YouTube does require quite some horses under the hood then.

[Appleboy45]

3 hours ago, potoooooooo said:

Your CPU isn't powerful enough for decoding.

 

I suggest you move up to something newer, perhaps one of the 2009 white macbooks? They have core 2 duo iirc, and are cheap while still being good and relatively svelte. Not to mention being a thousand times more modern and usable with newer software.

I actually own a 2010 MacBook as my main machine with OS X El Capitan. I just have the iBook to play around with or just to experience 2007 again.

[Stefan1024]

It' a lot of work to decode high res videos. Moderns CPUs and GPUs have an integrated ASIC just for this purpose so they haven't to process it.

[thekeemo]

35 minutes ago, Appleboy45 said:

Well  I know it's old, but I'd think it couldn't require that much horsepower to play a video.

Processing video is not as simple as it seems. You take it for granted.