eMac G4 having Slow video Playback problem

[Panchu]

I had an older model of eMac which was running OS X 10.3.9 and its specifications were 700Mhz processor and 1gb Ram. Now I bought a brand new eMac which is preinstalled with OS X 10.4.11 and its specifications are 1ghz processor and 768mb RAM. The problem i am facing with the New eMac is that, the Video playback on New eMac G4 is slow. When Videos from sites like youtube are being watched, the playback is really slow and jerky. Is this because of low system memory? or is it because of some other hardware failure? Please help as I dont have any Idea about this.

[Bon-Z]

I dont think the problem is with your new eMac but it is with your Internet connectivity. Is the video playback slow while playing Videos which are present on the Mac? If no then the problem surely lies with your Internet connectivity. Check the Internet connection by using ping command to Ping any website and see the packets sent and received while pinging. Also see the latency. If there are some packets lost in communication, then that is the reason which is creating the jerkiness in the Video playback. Contact your ISP to check the line and ask them to provide with the bandwidth you have subscribed for.

[Regina]

Websites like youtube have many users online at the same time. Sometimes it happens that the same video is watched by lot of online users which loads the server of the website. When such a situation happens the Server is not able to provide proper services to all the users and hence causes the video to lag or produces jerks while playing. Hence it is possible that the video you are watching is also viewed by lot of users simultaneously and hence you are getting low performance while watching the video. Check if all the videos on youtube lag while watching or not. If they do then there is something wrong with the new eMac you have bought.

[Halina]

The problem might not be with eMac but with the browser you are using. The videos which are featured on Youtube are flash videos which require flash players to play them properly. If the flash player installed on the eMac is not up to date then the videos will not be played properly and problems like off-sync sound, slow playback and jerkiness will be observed. Check the settings of the browser and see if the flash player installed is up to date. If not update the flash player. If the problem persists even after updating the flash player then try using some other browsers like Mozilla firefox and Google chrome.

[Lambard]

The specifications of the eMac are quite low for a new laptop. All the videos which are present on the youtube are played using Macromedia players. To stream the videos online, the architecture of the system should be very good. If the architecture of the computer is not up to the mark then it creates problem while streaming or watching the videos online. Also the RAM is not much and most of it must be getting used up while processing the system files hence less amount of memory remains for streaming and playing the videos. Try and upgrade the RAM and see if the performance improves or not.

[Pugsly]

I think the root cause of all your problem is the operating system which you are using. The system requirements for Mac OS X 10.4 is much greater than the specifications of your eMac. As you have other eMac which is running on OS X 10.3.9, try watching the youtube videos on it. If the videos play properly then there is something wrong with the operating system on the new eMac. If you have the install disk of 10.3.9 then install the same operating system on the new eMac and try watching the videos on it. Hopefully the problem will be solved after replacing the operating system.