Why is watching 720p Youtube vids so cpu intensive?

By Inctye
in Smart Home, Network & Security

 Share

Recommended Posts

Experienced

Inctye

Posted
Posted

As many of you might know by now, youtube videos can be watched in 720p HD quality by adding "&fmt=22" to the end of video urls. I use a Greasemonkey plugin called YousableTubeFix and dev updated the script yesterday with a feature that automatically switches to 720p quality when available.

But, the problem I noticed when watching these 720p vids is my cpu usage started shooting up to 50-100% usage and the video played less smoothly than it normally does at lower quality levels. Anyone know why this happens? I have a AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-56 1.8Ghz and 2gigs of memory.

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted

What what what?.. Youtube now offer 720p?.. yeah right!

Last time I checked they offered high quality videos..but still the Quality was not that good.. I have never seen a good quality high-res Video on youtube... What I have seen are Videos that where 720p Compressed on youtube (poorly) and uploaded.. The outcome = Rubbish Viewing.

If this is a new feature.. please do share the news.

Now back to topic; Have you updated your version of Flash to the new version?

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted

whoa! that's amazing! is there a section just for High Quality Videos?

OP: The Video Plays perfectly fine for me, maybe updating Flash will help?

Experienced

Inctye

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Flash is poorly optimized yes, but even there, a 720p video would be hard on the CPU if not hardware accelerated by the GPU.

I have updated to Flash 10 since it was first released. But, you are probably are right on the GPU part. I have a crappy integrated Radeon x1200, which probably pushes most of the load onto the CPUs. Completely overlooked the GPU when I made my decision to buy this laptop two years ago and kind of regretting it. So for now, I guess I'm stuck with watching just plain "high quality" instead of HD.

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted

From your first post it looks like you are using Firefox.. try running Firefox in Safemode and trying to see if the Video playback is better. Firefox still seems to be a big memory hog.

also you might as well check out alternative browsers

Grand Master

Matrix XII

Posted
Posted

Oh my! How could I not have know this? :|

Very smart of youtube to do this, maybe I'll start browsing there a bit more again.

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted
Oh my! How could I not have know this? :|

Very smart of youtube to do this, maybe I'll start browsing there a bit more again.

Man I am as shocked as you.. I am glad Youtube now have this! Just hope they don't pull a Stage6 with this move.

Proficient

arturogoga

Posted
Posted

Doesn't matter much if you have a powerful videocard: flash just stinks for video. If you wanna watch 720p, better get the h.264 version (mp4).

Not much of an issue in Windows (I get 20-30% CPU in Windows Vista x64), but on my MBP (with the 9600M) it's nearly unwatchable. Same goes for linux.

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted
Doesn't matter much if you have a powerful videocard: flash just stinks for video. If you wanna watch 720p, better get the h.264 version (mp4).

Not much of an issue in Windows (I get 20-30% CPU in Windows Vista x64), but on my MBP (with the 9600M) it's nearly unwatchable. Same goes for linux.

Is there a way to switch from Flash to quicktime Video or something?

Grand Master

Blackhearted

Posted
Posted

The 720p link Prickly posted didn't really seem that cpu intensive to me. It averaged around 25-30% and peaked at a mere 35% on my athlon64x2 4000+ @ 2.82ghz. I've seen flash do much worse than that without 720p video.

Experienced

Inctye

Posted
  • Author
Posted
If hulu can't live up to 720p, youtube may have won

Hulu already has a small designated HD section for 720p and 1080p that works amazingly, but the selections are limited to some old episodes. There are probably some server-side and website kinks and capacity that need to be worked out before they do a wide release for all of their shows and movies. I don't see them losing the advantage they have anytime soon given that it is the best online tv show/movie player there is.

Doesn't matter much if you have a powerful videocard: flash just stinks for video. If you wanna watch 720p, better get the h.264 version (mp4).

Not much of an issue in Windows (I get 20-30% CPU in Windows Vista x64), but on my MBP (with the 9600M) it's nearly unwatchable. Same goes for linux.

Yep, the greasemonkey script called YousableTubeFix is amazing and has features that allows for watching 720p in mp4 format. Did a little more testing on a few other vids and its still consistantly around 50-60% usage on both cores, around 20-30% on another computer better hardware. Must be mostly flash and a little bit of hardware too.

Grand Master

Brandon Live Veteran

Posted
  • Veteran
Posted

As much as I love to rag on Flash for being total crap, my CPU usage doesn't go above 5% while playing back that video. Though, this is on a Q9540.

Give me some reasons why?

Vastly more secure, efficient, and better video quality?

Grand Master

Jase

Posted
Posted
As much as I love to rag on Flash for being total crap, my CPU usage doesn't go above 5% while playing back that video. Though, this is on a Q9540.

Vastly more secure, efficient, and better video quality?

Can you please elaborate on that?

This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.

  • Posts

    • what other retro software do yall use

      By goretsky · Posted

      Hello, Also known for https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jan/29/adware-internet.   Regards, Aryeh Goretsky    
    • You pay just $100 per TB with this rare 4TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD deal

      By goretsky · Posted

      Hello, I have used a few TEAM Group SSDs, USB flash drives, and Micro SDXC cards in the past. They all seemed to work fine. Regards, Aryeh Goretsky
    • You pay just $100 per TB with this rare 4TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD deal

      By vjlex · Posted

      "just $100 per TB"? Just? Are we trying to make this seem like the new normal? Kinda weird to make it sound like that is not a ridiculously expensive asking price.
    • Major Xbox layoffs may claim South of Midnight developer Compulsion entirely

      By qbrick · Posted

      The reviews you refer to mean nothing. Where there is no journalism there is no reason to call the gaming media's opinion pieces "reviews". For GP games there is indeed a metric for success - increasing subscriptions. Which turns in revenue. The only circumstance in which subs do not rise when great is being released is a Game Pass system where the company is close to fully saturated with customers in a subscription. However, in that case as the theory goes you spend aplenty in all kind of games - from shady live service cash cows and customer offending agitprop crap in purple colours to robust and entertaining single player games. And keep a solid level of profitability. Ignoring the simply innocuous but mid games MGS has released primarily of the second kind.
    • Report: Microsoft to use AWS to help GitHub deal with a major surge in demand

      By pradeepviswav · Posted

      Report: Microsoft to use AWS to help GitHub deal with a major surge in demand by Pradeep Viswanathan Thanks to the surge of coding AI agents, GitHub's usage has skyrocketed over the past 12 months. To meet this demand, GitHub started with a plan in October 2025 to increase capacity by 10x. However, by early this year, the company realized that it needed 30x scale. This rapid growth has caused severe strain on the platform's reliability, resulting in several small outages over the past few months. In April, GitHub published a long blog post explaining the steps it is taking to resolve these reliability issues. In the post, the company also confirmed that it is working toward a multi-cloud architecture for better resilience. Today, Business Insider reported that GitHub is turning to Amazon Web Services to help deal with a major surge in AI-driven coding activity. It is important to note that GitHub is still in the process of moving completely to the Azure cloud. The current plan is to move the platform fully to Azure by 2027 so that it can scale better as per developer demand. Therefore, the current decision to utilize AWS might be part of a short-term plan to meet immediate demand. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that GitHub is using multiple cloud providers with the following statement: For Microsoft, the decision highlights the operational pressure behind the AI boom. GitHub has to stay reliable for developers at a time when rivals such as Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, and other AI coding tools are gaining attention. And the decision to use AWS for computing capacity seems practical given the circumstances.

  • Recent Achievements

    • Collaborator
      vjlex earned a badge
      Collaborator
    • Reacting Well
      Dys Topia earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • Conversation Starter
      NovaEdgeX earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • One Year In
      Console General earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Twozo Technologies earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      517
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      182
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      106
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      88
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      68
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!