Youtube lag

breadmonkey

There's some problem with my gf's laptop that makes it impossible to watch youtube videos due to the lag. The videos buffer without any problems and the audio stream remains uninterrupted while the video is jerky and unwatchable.

So far I have defragged the machine, run a full virus scan (clean), tried Firefox and Internet Explorer and tried different internet connections but the problem remains. There is also a huge amount of free disk space.

Can anyone suggest what the problem could be and how I could approach fixing it?

Thanks

Podman

It's possible it could be a memory issue, Vista will eat 1 gig just to operate.

Also, check your internet speed. (speed test)

It could also be the recordings themselves, some videos are made without a good enough frame rate, or with crap equipment, etc.

breadmonkey

Podman wrote: »

It's possible it could be a memory issue, Vista will eat 1 gig just to operate.

Also, check your internet speed. (speed test)

It could also be the recordings themselves, some videos are made without a good enough frame rate, or with crap equipment, etc.

Thanks. I did the speed test and got the following results:

Download: 2.17 Mb/s
Upload: 0.32 Mb/s
Ping: 40ms

I have tried quite a wide variety of youtube videos and they're always the same so I'm quite confident that the problem doesn't lie there.


I should have mentioned that the laptop is running XP and it has 1gb of memory. It's only ever been used for browsing and word processing; nothing too memory intensive I would have thought?

Looking at the task manager, I can see that there are several processes running, using between 92,000K and 264,000K (Firefox).

Podman

nothing wrong with the line speed, xp is usually okay too.

The only other thing I can think of is that the 1 gb isn't enough.. especially if the computer is doing lots of other stuff concurrently. (eg. anti-virus, running toys like free things you download, etc)

Try reducing some settings, like turning off window animation and reducing the colour depth from 64 down to 32 or 16 if you can, that might help.

breadmonkey

Gah! This is so frustrating, surely 1gb of memory is enough to watch a few piddley youtube videos on a laptop with hardly anything else running

After some more research, I came across this thread: http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/topic127307.html which proposes this solution:

Glory hallelujah, I think it's fixed!

(For the moment anyway!)

It seems that the hard drive reverted to PIO mode rather than UDMA. I diagnosed using the comments on several sites and used the fixes outlined here:
• http://neodon.blogspot.com/2006/07/little-...hard-drive.html
• http://www.thinkdigit.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57588
• http://winhlp.com/node/10
and elsewhere.

Now, the solutions outlined in the links above involve editing the registry and doing all sorts of stuff that looks totally alien to me. Obviously, I'm extremely reluctant to go messing around with stuff I don't understand. Could anyone tell me if the above could be a plausible solution?

PogMoThoin

How many processes does Your task manager say is running?

LevelSpirit

I used to get this too using IE or Firefox.
Switched to google chrome and its perfect.

breadmonkey

PogMoThoin wrote: »

How many processes does Your task manager say is running?

55 - that's a lot isn't it? Problem is, I can't really tell what's important and what isn't. Only 5 processes are using more than 8,000k.

LevelSpirit wrote: »

I used to get this too using IE or Firefox.
Switched to google chrome and its perfect.

I actually just downloaded google chrome to try it out but it didn't really work.

Interestingly, my gf just watched a vid on youtube there with no lag. I'm wondering could it be something to do with HD vids?

PogMoThoin

breadmonkey wrote: »

55 - that's a lot isn't it? Problem is, I can't really tell what's important and what isn't. Only 5 processes are using more than 8,000k.

Start-->run-->msconfig-->startup tab
Disable everything except whats essential (antivirus). Google the names of the processes so You know what they are. Turn everything from google, adobe, apple, nokia etc off, they can all be launched manually when needed.

Here's a handy prog that'll do it all for You:
http://www.windowsstartup.com/startupinspector.php

Podman

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Start-->run-->msconfig-->startup tab
Disable everything except whats essential (antivirus). Google the names of the processes so You know what they are. Turn everything from google, adobe, apple, nokia etc off, they can all be launched manually when needed.

Here's a handy prog that'll do it all for You:
http://www.windowsstartup.com/startupinspector.php

That looks promising..

It's similar to Glary's Utilities, also worth checking out.
It has lots of tools and such.

breadmonkey

Thanks for the links. I cleaned up the startup processes with Startup Inspector. Looks like it removed a lot of ones that were only using up small amounts of memory to begin with but still no change with the vids.

Is there anything in that PIO stuff I posted a little further up the thread

EDIT:I still have 35 processes running which is weird considering I only left two after cleaning up with Startup Inspector. Among these are 7 instances of svchost.exe and three of chrome.exe. I don't get why there would be three chrome processes given I only have one instance of the browser open. A quick look at wikipedia tells me that malicious programs can sometimes disguise themselves as svchost.exe but the machine is definitely clean.

Bleh

PogMoThoin

The other processes are Your operating system. Svhost is a process used by programs to interact with Your OS and chrome, unlike firefox, opens each tab as a new and seperate process.

Naikon

breadmonkey wrote: »

There's some problem with my gf's laptop that makes it impossible to watch youtube videos due to the lag. The videos buffer without any problems

and the audio stream remains uninterrupted while the video is jerky and unwatchable.

So far I have defragged the machine, run a full virus scan (clean), tried Firefox and Internet Explorer and tried different internet connections but the problem remains. There is also a huge amount of free disk space.

Can anyone suggest what the problem could be and how I could approach fixing it?

Thanks

Problem is, Flash is complete and utter garbage technically speaking. Crapware imo. You're best bet is to make use of a source rewriter script like YouTubeWithoutFlash auto and an external media player such as mplayer/vlc to view the media on youtube.
I can pm you a good tutorial if you are interested. You will need greasemonkey. HTML5 video is another option. Flash is in the same league as bonzi buddy imo. It's full of security exploits and has terrible 64 bit support across the board. It's 2010 for christ sake !

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771