01-30-2010, 03:34 AM
M A V I C wrote:
You've got too much installed for me to figure out what's going on. I find it said you blame Flash yet you've got a bunch of third-party stuff installed that has been causing conflicts. Those could easily be causing problems with playback.
As far as being able to watch "YouTube" fine with QT but not with Flash, I don't know how else to put it. YouTube provides multiple content formats. FLV can be a wrapper around multiple formats.
Not only that, but in the YouTube example the .FLV that plays is being modified as it plays. They're actually stretching the video which can be harder to play that if it was higher res to begin with. So if you have the FLV playing locally from just the Flash Player, it could very well have better playback than how it's embedded in YouTube.
In the example you gave, the FLV is 320x240 yet the player in the browser is scaling it to 480px wide.
Damn right I've got too much installed. From a user's point of view this should be transparent, particularly on a Mac. Yet I find I have to install Perian, Flip4Mac WMV and ClickToFlash to watch videos on the web.
However, Perian and Flip4Mac only operate when QuickTime is called to play a video. I suppose they could contribute to some problem with Safari playing Flash, but that seems unlikely, as all they do is modify the QuickTime plugin. ClickToFlash blocks flash until you click on it, or whitelist a site, in which case it becomes inoperative. Making ClickToFlash inoperative on YouTube does not help.
From what you've said, it may be how YouTube is using Flash which is the problem. But I can't seem to find any Flash video on any site which plays properly. I can find other types of video (.mov., .wmv, etc.) which do play properly, and I can play YouTube's Flash videos properly outside of Safari.
All this points to a problem with Flash, either in how it works or how its implemented.
I could try an experiment where I uninstall Perian, Flip4Mac and ClickToFlash, but right now I can't see how that could possibly help, so it's not worth the trouble. And even if it did help, it would screw up the sites which use SilverLight, .wmv, .avi and other formats.
I can also say that blocking most Flash with ClickToFlash makes web browsing much more pleasant. Whatever it's doing, Flash uses a lot of resources and slows down my computer. It may be brilliant in many circumstances, but on balance for me, Flash does not work very well. This would strike me as the basic argument for why Apple has left it out of relatively processor-weak devices like the iPhone and iPad.
- W