MacBook Mid 2007 full-screen flash performance

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Apologies if this has been discussed in another thread - the search feature wasn't very helpful.



My question: will the Intel GMA 950 chip in a MacBook (mid 2007) support full-screen flash video (ala YouTube, Hulu, etc.) without being choppy?



I know that on this model the vram is fixed at 64MB in OS X, even though more can be allocated in Windows via Bootcamp.



If anyone has any "real world" experience with this and could share, it would be much appreciated.



I'm considering buying a used/refurb MacBook to replace my wife's dying laptop.



Thanks!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,322moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jazzguru View Post


    Apologies if this has been discussed in another thread - the search feature wasn't very helpful.



    Yeah, it doesn't work all that well. Google does a good job of indexing the site though so one option for searching is to use the site syntax in Google to search Appleinsider. For example, if you type in:



    site:forums.appleinsider.com mac mini



    Google will only return threads on Appleinsider about the Mac Mini and do it much quick than the internal search.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jazzguru View Post


    My question: will the Intel GMA 950 chip in a MacBook (mid 2007) support full-screen flash video (ala YouTube, Hulu, etc.) without being choppy?



    It depends on the resolution you choose. I'd expect 720p to playback ok but 1080p might not. It's not really dependent on the GPU because Flash isn't hardware accelerated on that model so all the decoding happens on the CPU.



    With Youtube you get the HTML 5 option though and this plays back using half the CPU power under 10.6.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by jazzguru View Post


    I'm considering buying a used/refurb MacBook to replace my wife's dying laptop.



    If you can, get the one with the 9400M, not the GMA because the 9400M is supported by the new Flash hardware acceleration not to mention OpenCL is supported should there be any future software update that uses it. All Apple's refurbs should have the 9400M.



    Definitely avoid the old Macbooks with the 80GB drives because those HDDs were sloooow.



    This one would be fine:



    http://store.apple.com/us/product/FC...co=MTU5MjkwMjk



    or the metal one from eBay:



    http://cgi.ebay.com/MacBook-13-INch-...#ht_500wt_1154



    Neither have Firewire 800 but that shouldn't cause any problems.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    jazzgurujazzguru Posts: 6,435member
    Great, thanks for the advice!
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