Since yesterday, every youtube video I've watched has been struggling like it's maxing out my CPU. They skip, the audio is constantly popping, and switching to fullscreen mode is a 5+ second affair where I can watch the window resize itself in slow motion. I've tried disabling Chrome's built-in version of Flash (I don't know if youtube even still uses Flash but it was worth a shot) and disabling Adblock, but nothing so far has helped. Except switching to Firefox where there is no problem at all. Is anyone else seeing this?
Is this on a Mac? Chrome on Macs seems to have a longstanding bug where it pegs the CPU at 100% while downloading the rest of the video stream, though it's never really interfered with playback smoothness for me.
I think it does indeed still use Flash, but (for me at least) the flash player included with chrome is hopelessly borked. You can however, still install flash player directly from Adobe, and then make sure to disable the in-built one from Chrome:
I had issues with Flash in Firefox yesterday. I uninstalled it, restarted, reinstalled it, and it worked.
Yeah, this is what I did. Same versions of Flash and all. No change. I'm not on a Mac and I'm on the stable channel of Chrome, not the beta one. It looks like youtube is rolling out a new player with variable playback speeds. This video uses the new player and this video uses the old one, and the old one plays fine.
I installed beta Chrome and I'm still seeing the issue. That means it's probably one of those awesome PC things where six different drivers are intersecting to create a problem that will only affect one person out of a million. Bleh. Well, thanks for checking. Edit: Hmm, the new player isn't Flash but the old one is.
You could try the Youtube HTML5 Trial. As I understand, only some videos are HTML5 compliant. However, it could be a good test to see if it's flash related.
Holy shit, that was it! I was already in the trial, and the new player I was seeing was the beta HTML5 player. It says "Some users of supported browsers are automatically entered in to the trial." So they decided to fuck shit up without telling me. Gee, thanks, Google. But I was able to opt out and now things work again. Thanks for the help. And BEWARE! You could be next.
No problem! I don't use Youtube much anymore, since for some reason I have really sporadic buffering issues, so I'd probably never even notice if I were opted in automatically.
