Slow Flash Sites

sjorlo · #1 December 11th, 2008, 03:34 PM

Apologies if this has been discussed elsewhere, I have searched for the past 5 hours! Anyway I've just bought a G4 Quicksilver 733mhz, with 1.5gb ram, 160gb harddrive off ebay and every thing is running sweet except any websites which use flash, eg youtube, bbc iplayer, etc or sites which have flash adverts, they appear choppy and unwatchable and really slow the computer down, but the audio is fine. My main browser is the latest version of firefox but I also have this problem in safari. I've updated to the latest version of flash player (10) but still no good. Other videos run fine in real player. My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce2 MX with VRAM 32 MB. Any ideas? I don't really want to upgrade the graphics card but if I have to then so be it. Many thanks.

ElDiabloConCaca · #2 December 11th, 2008, 04:03 PM

This is inherent to the PowerPC version of Flash. Not much you can do about it, unfortunately.

sjorlo · #3 December 12th, 2008, 05:38 AM

Even though Adobe states the minimum requirements have been met on my machine?http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/. Does anyone have a machine with similar specs where flash works fine?

wraith77 · #4 December 12th, 2008, 09:27 AM

ElDiablo is right. Flash just doesn't perform well on PowerPCs. I have a 1GHz eMac with 1GB of RAM, and Flash games and videos are terribly slow. They

work fine on my Intel MacBook however!

ElDiabloConCaca · #5 December 12th, 2008, 09:31 AM

Adobe's requirements are laughable. A 500MHz G3 at the minimum with 128MB of RAM? That would barely run OS X in a "usable" fashion.

Sure, that machine would technically run flash, but it wouldn't be usable in any fashion.

Trust me -- the PowerPC version of flash needs some serious horsepower behind it to be usable -- 1GHz (dual) or more, I would say, to be on-par with a PC or Intel-based Macintosh of similar spec. I've got a machine that's only a few hundred megahertz behind yours, and flash is damn near unusable, even though I exceed the minimum requirements by a long shot. On my Intel Mac, though, smooth as buttah!

nixgeek · #6 December 12th, 2008, 12:21 PM

My 2 GHz iMac G5 is molasses-slow in regards to Adobe Flash, and I've got 1.5 GB RAM on the thing. It's using Flash 10. I believe Adobe is doing more work on optimizing Flash for Intel Macs than it is for PowerPC Macs. Every time I come across a site with Flash, the fans always ramp up high on my iMac.

sjorlo · #7 December 15th, 2008, 08:16 AM

I've found some free software called Gnash, which appears to be a flash alternative. I think I might give it a go. Has anyone any experiences of this?

nixgeek · #8 December 15th, 2008, 06:24 PM

I've not had much luck with Gnash on GNU/Linux computers, even in Ubuntu where it's pre-compiled. I've never been able to compile it from scratch either, so I don't think it's going to be much luck for you on Mac OS X. I didn't see a pre-compiled binary for OS X on the Gnash website either.

Even if you were able to get it to run on OS X, the support for much of the Flash-enabled websites out there isn't that great yet. It's unfortunate because it would give other operating systems that Adobe doesn't support the opportunity to access Flash-based websites, but such is the case with proprietary software...especially proprietary software on the web.