YouTube + Flash Plugin + Firefox = CPU Cook

[Stephen Coates]

That video on your site took my processor up to 100%, but still no serious slow down.

Can I highly recomend Windows Media Player or Quicktime? Or maybe even just puting a link to the video so that nothing has to load up and then people can just download the video if they want to watch it?

[Teho]

Norwegian tech-news site Itavisen.no had an article recently concerning what to do if you had troubles with Flash. Or actually, it said that if you have problems with your browser crashing for no good reason it's often the Flash component that's messed up. It suggests reinstalling it, but running Adobe's own Flash uninstall tool (found here) first, which will completely remove any trace of flash from your system. Could perhaps be worth a try.

[Bloodwych]

Thanks for trying. I'm going to try and sort it out now. The fact that CPU usage drops dramatically when I simply cover the embedded player onscreen with Task Manager hints at a Flash/video driver conflict or issue.

Strange issue is, it is repeatable on both an AMD desktop and Intel Laptop. Only similarity between the two is the software used.

That video on your site took my processor up to 100%, but still no serious slow down.

Mine, yours and others too! The fact is, although you still get a responsive PC, others including myself are getting a sluggish system that takes minutes to complete tasks rather than seconds.

Flash still should not be running CPU's up to 100% usage - it increases temps, reduces battery life, causes cooling fans to rev up and is straight out annoying!!! It's unacceptable behavior from something that's becoming an internet standard.

This is working against the operating systems "green" functions as well as interfering with multitasking - all while you're doing the simple task of surfing the web.

Can I highly recomend Windows Media Player or Quicktime? Or maybe even just puting a link to the video so that nothing has to load up and then people can just download the video if they want to watch it?

Thanks for the suggestions. I initially used YouTube because it's very popular and wanted a vid of ClassicWB to popup when peeps do a search on there.

Now that flash suddenly is causing this issue, I'm seriously considering following through with your suggestions. I think I'd use Xvid however, as that's a universal freeware format and I don't like exclusive commercial orientated players like Real, Quicktime or WPM.

Norwegian tech-news site Itavisen.no had an article recently concerning what to do if you had troubles with Flash. Or actually, it said that if you have problems with your browser crashing for no good reason it's often the Flash component that's messed up. It suggests reinstalling it, but running Adobe's own Flash uninstall tool (found here) first, which will completely remove any trace of flash from your system. Could perhaps be worth a try.

I'll check it out - as you said, worth a try. Thanks for the information.

[Harrison]

If you did want to explore XVid then you can embed DivX/XVid videos into a webpage just like youtube and utilise the DivX browser plugin for playback. Just as Stage 6 does.

[Bloodwych]

Thanks for the info Harrison. That's what I'll probably use - I'll get much better quality too!

I never knew about that Stage 6 site - looks interesting!

I went back to an earlier install and the issue lies with Flash 9 and Firefox 2 on these machines. Tried disabling hardware acceleration on the graphics cards and in the Flash settings to rule out a conflict, but it made no difference.

Internet Explorer with the ActiveX Flash 9 has much lower CPU utilization. 20-30% on playback, 1-3% on a paused embedded player and about 20% for animated menus. That's both on YouTube and my own ClassicWB Features page. About what you'd expect and what I was getting before recent software updates.

Nothing I can do really - YouTube needs Flash. All I can hope is that Firefox 3 and Flash will work better on these two machines, or I may have to go back to Internet Explorer - especially on the Laptop.

[Bloodwych]

Above, I kept on mentioning how a Google search soon brings up loads of threads about this issue.

This article in particular really describes the problem in detail:

http://robertlindsay.blogspot.com/20...x-cpu-bug.html

....and lays the blame at the closed source Flash player, although admits Firefox has some issues itself. Since users of other browsers have reported similar issues, I tend to agree that Flash really needs to sort out its non-ActiveX plugin.

[Harrison]

It's a little more complex. The problem with Active-X is that the technology is Microsoft exclusive, so other browsers/platforms don't utilise it. If this reason it is normally bad coding practice to use Active-X control in flash moves to call external browser control when you want a flash file to be cross browser compatible.

As for blaming Flash because it is closed source, just imagine how quickly Macromedia, and now Adobe, would have lost their ground in the Shockwave/Flash market if they had allowed the whole code base to be open source. The made the final output format SWF open source so that other application developers could support it and make it a universal online vector format, which was a great move, but I support the decision to keep the actual Flash source code closed. Imagine if Microsoft could suddenly get their hands on the open source for Flash. It would mean the quick death of Adobe!