unable to watch video clips on Mac

themaccas

I have now given up trying to watch any video clips on my Mac. It keeps freezing and I was trying to watch my a 5 minute film my DS (who is a film student) had shot, it took over an hour to buffer and get to the end. After that I was able to watch it but I can't watch anything on iplayer, youtube and I have no idea what I can do to improve it. Can anyone give any advice? The situation has been getting worse over the last few months when I first got the Mac about 10 months ago I was able to watch nearly all iplayer programmes and youtube clips.

BikerEd

What browser?

If the problem is in Firefox, have you tried the same clips in Safari? And vice versa?

I had a very similar problem a while back and it turned out to be one of the add-ons in Firefox causing a problem.

Marty_J

If the above advice doesn't work, you could try reinstalling Flash Player.

themaccas

Hi
I use safari all the time. Not sure how I find out about firefox? I don't think I've got that on my mac.

I did reinstall flash player but there has been no difference.

Thanks anyway for your suggestions.

gaming_guy

themaccas wrote: »

Hi
I use safari all the time. Not sure how I find out about firefox? I don't think I've got that on my mac.

http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/firefox/

i use it on both ubuntu and windoze and find it very good

Mummy_Jo

Use firefox it's loads better than safari. It's an alternative to Safari and Internet Explorer. It's also free. Just type it into google and download and install.

Flash can be much slower on a mac as there is little support for it.

You could also try using disk utilities an repair you hard drive its in applications and then utilities.

Hope it helps.

Marty_J

Mummy_Jo wrote: »

Flash can be much slower on a mac as there is little support for it.

There's little support for Flash on a Mac?

Where did you get that from?

And I wouldn't say that Firefox is "loads better" than Safari; not on a Mac anyway. The latest Safari 4 beta is one of the fastest web browsers there is. It's also got standards compliance coming out the hoo-ha.

gaming_guy

Mummy_Jo wrote: »

Flash can be much slower on a mac as there is little support for it.

if adobe support Linux, then i guess they support Macs

thescouselander

Flash runs well on my mac. I did notice with my old ibook that safari was a bit of a resource hog, especially when playing video - its not a problem on my new mac book.

Dont bother with internet explorer, its useless on mac. Firefox is the best alternative to Safari IMHO.

The other thing is that you need to maintain your mac. The easiest way is the get a maintenance program.

Assuming you are running OS X 10.5 I recommend this one - its free

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/onyx.html

Clear your caches and run all maintenance scripts and see if things improve. As a minimum you could try emptying the safari cache from the safari menu.

asininity

Take it back to the apple shop tell them to fix it, this is shocking. Macs that dont do video is like windows not doing spreadsheets! Does it play music ok?

Marty_J

asininity wrote: »

Take it back to the apple shop tell them to fix it, this is shocking. Macs that dont do video is like windows not doing spreadsheets! Does it play music ok?

I assume it still looks beautiful while it's not playing the videos though, so it's not all bad.

OP, we really need to know more in order to fix this. Does it only affect watching videos online? Can you watch videos stored on your Mac OK? Can you give us an example of something you can't play, and detail exactly what happens?

The reason I ask is because you said the videos take a long time to buffer, and I'm wondering if it's an internet issue rather than a Mac issue.