YouTube on older thinkpads

[Jaster]

I've just dusted off an old T21 (PIII 750Mhz) for my sister to use (she need a laptop in a hurry) - put a fresh install of XP SP3 and an ultrabay DVD drive and all is well, however YouTube is so skippy it's unwatchable. This is odd as I'm sure it was fine on my old 600X (PIII 500Mhz) in circa 2004-2005. Also odd is that the T21 plays DVDs quite happily.

Anyone else experienced this?

[fleming164]

YouTube in older laptops is a bit useless due to flash.

If you use Firefox you can download an add on called "Low quality Flash" which might help but will make it very pixelated!

[Jaster]

Thanks - my sister has taken the T21 to another city but next time I get my hands on it I'll experiment.

Maybe I was seeing things through a very thick pair of rose-tinted spectacles when I thought I remembered watching YouTube on the 600X!

[twistero]

The YouTube website, the videos there, and the Flash Plugin all changed a lot since 2005. It's not surprising that a lower end machine may run YouTube videos very well in 2005 but not in 2013.

[pianowizard]

Besides Flash and web sites getting increasingly bloated, XP has slowed down dramatically over the years as well. About 10 years ago, I routinely used XP on computers with only like 300MHz PII or even Celeron, and 256MB of RAM, and speed was acceptable. In fact, Microsoft's original system requirements for XP, published in 2001, were only 233MHz Pentium and 64MB of RAM. You can convince yourself of this by installing the original XP (i.e. without any updates) on an ancient computer, and it would feel quite snappy. But after adding the three Service Packs and countless security updates, I think the minimum requirements should now be revised to 1.2MHz Pentium III and 1GB of RAM, i.e. a maxed out Thinkpad T23. In my lab, I have a Dell desktop with 800MHz PIII and 768MB RAM, and XP is sooooooooo slow on it.

[pkiff]

I agree with what others have said about Flash being the main culprit: it was always slow (for video streaming), and more recent versions of it are more CPU intensive than before. Also, some Youtube videos now force you to view the video as a constant stream rather than allowing your browser to download the video in full while you are watching it. They do this so that they can control ad pop-ups better and prevent you from saving an offline copy. However, it prevents you from pausing the video and waiting for it to be fully downloaded before playing it in order to avoid choppiness due to slow Internet streaming speeds.

To get around this, you might try using services like KeepVid (http://keepvid.com), which allow you to download a Youtube video as a file and then play it using VLC Player or some alternate player instead of through your browser. I used to do this on my 600X and was thereby able to play almost any Youtube video smoothly up to about 800x600 resolution.

You may also be misremembering the smoothness and quality that you used to get from your 600X machine. You should certainly be able to stream Youtube videos at 320x240 resolution without any trouble on your 600X, and that is probably what the resolution was back in the mid-2000's, but nowadays, the normal or default resolution on some Youtube videos is higher. You can try adjusting the quality while playing on Youtube and see if that helps (click on the gear symbol in the bottom right of the Youtube player window).

Good luck!

Phil.

[gdrunk]

It's a shame, but flash is far too resource intensive for older ThinkPads. I'd agree with using services like keepvid. I use a Firefox plugin called Video Download Helper, or Flash Video Downloader in Opera.

One thing that may be worth looking into is HTML5. Youtube runs a trial which you can enrol in here. Sadly not all videos are supported yet.

HTML5 on its own is still way too resource intensive, but that can be improved with layers acceleration. Recent browsers have been starting to use OpenGL or DirectX video card acceleration in browsers, and can be used on a much wider range of graphics hardware.

To enable it on Firefox you can do the following:
1: Type "about:config" in the address bar and promise to be careful.
2: Type "layers" in the search bar.
3: Change the value "layers.acceleration.force-enabled" to true.
4: Restart

I believe you can also set whether you use OpenGL or DirectX to accelerate in Windows. On my Linux machines there isn't such an option so I'm afraid I'm not sure of the value you need to change.

The results are quite astonishing. On my X41 I can watch 360p Youtube videos in fullscreen with about 55-60% CPU usage! Likewise my X40 (which is slower and has a much weaker graphics card) can do the same with about 95% CPU usage. Even more surprisingly my 1.6GHz A31 with a 16MB graphics card can view 360p fullscreen too, though on my machine it occasionally shutters while caching the video, after which playback works fine.

It might be worth a try. I would love to hear any results people have running it. I shall also try it on my trusty A21p, assuming I can get the Linux driver to behave!

[kenzking]

Part of the reason Youtube is horrid on older thinkpads is due to their video adapters. They have none or very limited hardware acceleration.

I harvested a 850mhz p3 out of a dell laptop for my 600x. The dell could run most youtube videos just fine, my 600x fails to even somewhat run anything at full screen. This was the same processor in both laptops so its the video adapter causing issues in my case.

[ilakast]

It IS possible to watch youtube on older TPs. The following is from my A30p and it runs smoothly!

[axur-delmeria]

The A30p has a Radeon 7000 graphics (with 32MB video RAM) and a 1.2GHz Pentium III-M CPU.

It's far above a 600X's Neomagic 256ZX (with 4MB video RAM) and 650MHz Pentium III.