Whenever I want to watch any movie on YouTube in HD, it has huge slowdowns. Is this sooo hardware hungry? I have a Radeon X800 Pro GPU.
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Hmm... I'm not sure about that. I would have thought an X800 would have been enough as it does contain some hardware acceleration support for HD video playback.

I'm sure I used to run HD content from youtube on my nVidia 7800GT. When I get time I will boot up my emulation system that is now using that card and run a HD youtube video and let you know how it manages.

Are you sure it wasn't your connection being slow and causing the video to slowdown? Even fast connects can suffer at peek times.
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Don't think so, as there were no downloads or torrents started, I paused them. Normal videos run fine.
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I noticed that sometimes too. I though it was buggy flashplayer/browser related. Sometimes my pc slows down on normal vids too when It's been on too long (> two days) and starts using the page file (even though I turned it off). a reboot fixes my problem.
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It has something to do with flash. Flash has never been that great for streaming video on high resolutions (I've worked with these problems since flash MX)
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Flash, my number one internet enermy now that popups are mostly blocked in browsers. Remember my rant on here a few years back about it eating CPU cyles and causing global warming? Making laptop fans screem? All for a few animated adds?

Honestly, flash misused is a plague. It's just so inefficient and a huge CPU hog. Flashblock is one of my fav Firefox addons and makes an old PC able to cruise the web at lightening speed! Without it, an old PC on the net is like crawling through mud thanks to flash.

HD content is very CPU intensive due to the high compression, with Flash it's even worse. I don't know your CPU specs Demon Cleaner, but it sounds like it's running completely off your CPU. I think all flash runs mainly off the CPU, with the hardware accelerate option on your vid card meaning simple stuff like scaling - I don't think it uses DXVA.

Take a look at task manager while watching a vid. See if your CPU is pegged at 100%.
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Will try that, I have an older P4 2.8GHz CPU.
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Hmmm. A P4 2.8 should be enough for youtube HD without huge slowdowns so it may be another issue.
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In a few days things *might* change...

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/0...r-in-the-works

... or not, who knows...
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But such a GPU accelerated accelerator with nVidia behind it would fragment the userbase as in true nVidia fashion they would make it a proprietary technology that would only run on their own hardware architecture and drivers.

Adobe were also working directly with ATi on very similar hardware accelerated GPU solutions, but I'm not sure if they related to Flash Player, for just video production.

The big thing I hate about nVidia is that they buy up technologies such as PhysX and then code them so they are proprietary and will only work with their own hardware. Attempting to monopolise the market with people having to buy they products if they want to use the technology. Very much in the same model as Apple or to a lesser extent these days Microsoft.

ATi's approach is that rather than restrict them to their own cards, they are looking at the best open source solutions based on Havoc and OpenCL. ATi cards have a system called Stream which is very similar to that found on nVidia cards, but if utilised actually is more efficient and better performing, giving faster results. It is sad at the moment however that with the marketing weight nVidia have over ATi that this technology hasn't been allowed to become as mainstream as it should be.

The sooner we ditch proprietary technologies and go open standard so that all hardware regardless of manufacturer can take advantage of it the better. Bring on OpenCL and ditch the proprietary stuff nVidia are trying to monopolise the marketplace with.
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