Netbook and Youtube

[Clarkey]

Youtube won't play properly on my netbook. It's choppy and takes a while to load. Last night I was able to play a large movie I downloaded on the netbook with no issues. Am I correct in assuming this means my wireless signal is too slow, thus causing the youtube lag?

[Kipper is King]

Most netbooks can't handle HD Youtube video. SD should be fine, so I think you are correct in assuming your wireless is to blame.

[yads]

Was your netbook plugged in to the outlet when you were watching youtube?

[photon]

On my netbook it depended on the video, even in SD ones it would sometime choke on them, CPU limited.

[Mazrim]

Flash is very tough on slower computers, so anything 480p or higher on Youtube can cause hiccups on netbooks. Most low to midrange computers will likely have a fit if you play a large 1080p file on youtube as well.

[Hack&Lube]

Netbooks are powerful enough. The problem is flash in browsers is slow and inefficient as hell. If you save the HD youtube videos to your harddrive in their native FLV format and combine them with Media Player Home Cinema w/ a commercial codec/splitter like CoreAVC, it runs like butter, even on a very underclocked netbook CPU. I can watch 720p youtube videos on a netbook underclocked to 570MHz for battery life.

There are some beta versions of flash from Adobe that dump some acceleration to the GPU but most netbooks don't have a decent GPU to allow this to work. Generally if I am watching youtube straight from the browser, I can only do 480p videos or it chugs.

It's just the combination of flash in a browser that is inefficient. It's not the connection speed.

[Crazy Bacon Legs]

Also, the DownloadHelper addon for Firefox lets you save the video directly from YouTube into .mp4 format. Much easier if there's something worth watching on a connection that isn't good for streaming.

[Russic]

Would viewing youtube via HTML5 make a difference? It's still in beta, but it's not flash.

http://www.youtube.com/html5