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Try to find a low resolution video (less than say.One of the challenges in diagnosing this is that being an older model it doesn't have hardware H264/etc video decode, so videos really take up a chunk of CPU usage and thus anything that competes with or interferes with the video for CPU is going to have a high chance of causing problems. Possible hard drive issue, though since the entire system presumably hasn't started having massive issues, I would only expect this to affect certain files so it wouldn't be on the top of my list of suspects.While I mentioned Mavericks/El Capitan, it's possible that Apple may have backported patches even further (SL/Lion/ML/etc) in which case it might apply to all the pre-late-2008 models. Probably little you could do here except to reinstall and not allow security updates which obviously wouldn't be ideal. Spectre/Meltdown/etc patches: If this is a late-2008 model (running Mavericks/El Capitan), the patches put out to mitigate Intel vulnerabilities may have tanked performance enough to cause video playback to suffer on these older/weaker models.If the CPU usage is constantly high when the system is idle (and pegged when playing a video) that could be worth investigating. You can also use the menu to configure it to show usage visually in the dock. Malware/etc pegging CPU usage: Open Activity Monitor and sort by %CPU.
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Overheating: If the fan died or heatsink is full of dust, you'd probably get a situation where video plays fine the first few seconds (or after being paused) but performance falls apart quickly thereafter.Matt Gadient on Apclick here to reply Hey Lloyd, an innumerable amount of possibilities here, but a few off the top of my head, assuming these are local videos that no longer play and not specific to videos over the network:
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Feel free to tweak the value to take care of whatever freezes/stutters you were seeing – for example if you’d get stutters of up to 4 seconds, make sure you’re using a value of at least 4000. This should take care of video stutters of up to roughly 9 seconds. In the example above, I used a value of 9000. Input/codecs should already be selected on the left, so scroll down almost all the way and you should eventually see the Network caching (ms) section. With the preference pane open, hit Show All as seen in the image above.Īgain, click for a larger view.
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You start by going to VLC/Preferences in the top menu bar.Ĭlick for a larger view. The bad news is that not everyone was finding it, so here goes: The good news is that it’s much easier to find than it was before. However, the location moved when VLC 2.0 came about. The solution is to bump up the “network cache” value in VLC.
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A slightly more detailed (and technical – your Mac isn’t “crying on the inside” by any means) description is in the link above if you’re at all interested. And then it stutters/lags/gets_choppy/whatever_you_wanna_call_it.
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Short version: If you’re playing videos through VLC across the network, and if the video you’re trying to play is coming from a Windows share, it will make VLC on the Mac a little sad. Note: This is for VLC 2.x – if you’re using the older VLC 1.x see the original post here:
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