sluggish video playback in itunes...

tnmiketnmike
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
I have a G4 laptop (500megahertz/ 768 megs RAM) and a G5 dual 2.7 (2.5 gigs RAM.) I have bought 3 TV shows and 1 movie through itunes and the playback on both of these computers is too sluggish and jerky to watch them. Podcasts run great. I view tv shows, movie, and podcasts using itunes. I am running 10.3.9 on the laptop and 10.4.x on the G5 dual. I have the most recent version of itunes on both computers.

I have run Onyx on both computers but the problem still exists. Any suggestions?

Thanks...

TnMike

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    richardhrichardh Posts: 63member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TnMike View Post


    I have a G4 laptop (500megahertz/ 768 megs RAM) and a G5 dual 2.7 (2.5 gigs RAM.) I have bought 3 TV shows and 1 movie through itunes and the playback on both of these computers is too sluggish and jerky to watch them. Podcasts run great. I view tv shows, movie, and podcasts using itunes. I am running 10.3.9 on the laptop and 10.4.x on the G5 dual. I have the most recent version of itunes on both computers.

    I have run Onyx on both computers but the problem still exists. Any suggestions?

    Thanks...

    TnMike





    This probably won't help you in any way, but I do confirm your observations. On an "old" PowerBook 1.5GHz, everything was "smooth as butter" under Panther, by the time it had creaked into 2006 and later releases of Tiger, along with the bloatware that iTunes 7 became, well, this was no longer the case. Video play from iTunes was sluggish and started up in jerky bursts before smoothing out after a few seconds (note: this never happened when playing video directly from QuickTime).



    In other words, my media library/iTunes were slowly becoming more and more unusable with each update (all the actual files live on FW800 eternal 7200RPM disks).



    I upgraded to a MacBook Pro and OctoCore Mac and amazingly enough (I'm being sarcastic) all these problems went away.



    Over the years iTunes has turned into everything and the kitchen sink bloatware, each new update wedges more crap in there. I understand Apple's reasoning for doing this (iTunes also runs on Windoze and they need some central app to sync all their crap/iPods/iPhones/AppleTV/whatever).



    The G5 should still be working for you, as far as the 500MHz G4 goes, I'm amazed it "runs" anything under iTunes. Try running your movies directly from QuickTime and watch them speed wayyyy up.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    tnmiketnmike Posts: 21member
    I appreciate all your sugestions. I have tried to run the video in question with quicktime and it still is jerky. And it gets worse as the video plays...to the point it looks like a slide show with audio.

    On my G5 I downloaded a movie from itunes a while back and it has always done a freeze frame kind of thing every 10 sec. or so. I have my G5 optimized for rercording music (Digital Performer. ProTools, etc.) so nothing is running in the background...just internet service for updating software.



    Funny thing is I got a receipt today from itunes of the particular download in question. It was a $1.99 purchase. They had charged me $0.00. Could there have been an error while downloading...and itunes decided not to charge me? You think they would have let me know if it was a faulty download.Weird!



    Anyhow, still trying to figure it out. I will try you guy's suggestions with different viewers and such and let you know if that works.

    If you think of anything else to try please let me know.

    Thanks again,

    TnMike
  • Reply 3 of 5
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Don't believe that rant about bloatware. iTunes has become more optimized with each release. His speed problems were a result of something else. Perhaps more programs running in the background, or a harddrive getting near capacity, or an increased library size, etc.



    With that said, I find video playback in iTunes to be quite laggy, even on a C2D machine. For some reason, it likes to constantly drop frames. I'm unsure if this is isolated to my machine or if it is normal. Most people probably wouldn't even notice the dropped frames. Ah, obvliviousness must be bliss.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    richardhrichardh Posts: 63member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dfiler View Post


    Don't believe that rant about bloatware. iTunes has become more optimized with each release. His speed problems were a result of something else. Perhaps more programs running in the background, or a harddrive getting near capacity, or an increased library size, etc.



    With that said, I find video playback in iTunes to be quite laggy, even on a C2D machine. For some reason, it likes to constantly drop frames. I'm unsure if this is isolated to my machine or if it is normal. Most people probably wouldn't even notice the dropped frames. Ah, obvliviousness must be bliss.



    Nope, not other progrms running in the background, hard drive is nowhere near full, I don't keep the iTunes library on an internal disk anyway, it's on FW800 7200RPM external disks. Now as far as the size goes, maybe this does slow it down, you go past 15,000-20,000 tracks and the spinning beachball of death shows up a lot, or it did show up, on the MBP and Intel Mac, it's back to being instant.



    I didn't mean to offend you personally if you love and adore iTunes, but it has turned from a music player/ripper into the multimedia hub of OS/X. You're going to tell me it has gotten faster? Sorry, never experienced that. But then I don't expect the impossible, I just buy new systems every 2 years and stop worrying about it.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    dfilerdfiler Posts: 3,420member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by RichardH View Post


    I didn't mean to offend you personally if you love and adore iTunes, but it has turned from a music player/ripper into the multimedia hub of OS/X. You're going to tell me it has gotten faster? Sorry, never experienced that. But then I don't expect the impossible,



    No offense taken.



    I was trying to narrow down what might be causing your slowdown. iTunes has indeed become more mature and optimized with each release, despite it gaining other functionality. Additional pref pains have absolutely no effect on browsing performance. Qualms with the functional scope of iTunes may be justified, but are a separate issue. Those features haven't affected playback or library browsing performance.



    15k - 20k tracks? Did you always have so many? If not, we've found the cause of the slowdown.



    On the other hand iTunes video playback performance has always been jerky and sluggish on all of my machines. So far, it seems unrelated to library size though. I'm sure apple is aware of the problem. It likely has something to do with not wanting to fix an api that is soon to be deprecated as video playback on OS X continues to go through a complete restructuring.
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