Watching youtube heats up Macbook Air

[Raj-Nepali]

I have recently bought my macbook Air laptop, with the Nvidia 9400 graphic chip. So far I love the machine as it has amazing features in it. But why would watching any video, for example, a short YouTube video heat up the machine so fast. The CPU quickly reaches to 60-75 and more and the fans kick in. The same thing occurs during a video skype call. I know that these machines are known for heating up but under a certain usage, but simply watching a simple youtube video causes the processor to heat up so badly . According to me the main problem is with the hardware or with the chip of my system and not with the software. But then to please suggest me what should i do now..

[Antonio1]

I had the same problem with my laptop and was tensed as it was my first and brand new laptop which i had bought just few days back. But then when i read solutions on the internet related to this issue i found out that modern video and audio compression is CPU intensive. So yes, its quite natural that your computer will heat up while doing video playback. It also includes skype video chat and audio chat. It includes Windows media player also. Websites such as youtube tend to use Flash for video playback. Flash tends to be a CPU hog even at idle condition, which makes your computer work even harder in the simple situation.

[Crespin]

The main issue is not due to air , but the main issue is how intensive the Flash is on the website.. But when you try to download some video on your Hard disk drive (By simply pressing CMD+ALT+A and then when you double click the flash file while pressing alt ) and then try play the video via VLC player or any other flash player, then the thing doesn't even reaches 20% of CPU usage while if same thing is done on mac, it takes around 60-70% resource and temperature hits 80C.. This kind of problem occurs in most of the Macbooks. What i do is i just download the videos and then play it on the VLC player. As i dont want my Macbook to heat up again..

[Florence_USA]

I have some solutions over this. You can simply use a cooler pad for your laptop. A cooler pad can be attached at the bottom of the laptop through USB and then the fan which is been installed in it will absorb maximum heat it can from the laptop and try to make the laptop cooler. Or else you could simply use "Click To Flash" option. After clicking on it you will be able to watch videos on youtube as H.264 (As you usually watch on apple iphone ) instead of flash, which uses most of the CPU's space thereby putting more load on CPU and ultimately heating up the system..