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When I play YouTube video at 720p, the buffering process takes too much resources from my notebook. The only way for me to watch the video while it is still buffering is to shutdown all programs running on my computer, including antivirus and win defender. Because the buffering itself requires 99% of my CPU for some weird reason.

If I have a program running which takes only a few % of CPU, the video would not play fluently while buffering and the program would probably go hung (the window turns white). So I just have to wait till it's buffered so I watch the video.

Is this normal on older weak CPUs? Isn't buffering the same thing as just downloading the video into RAM/HDD? And is there any way to fix this? Once buffered, I can play the video fluently even with other programs taking CPU.

Also, when I buffer longer videos, after 10 or 20 minutes or so the video gets distorted into green noise, making ugly hi-frequency sounds and jumps slowly to the end.

enter image description here

How did that happen and what can I do about it?**

I use Google Chrome and Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo SU9400 @ 1.40GHz with integrated graphics.

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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This might be a problem with Chrome's implementation of Pepper flash API, install Flash for firefox and go to about://plugins

enter link description here

If that does not work, do the opposite, enable pepper and disable system flash.

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  • Pepper seems to be the root of the problem. Thank you very much!
    – Paya
    Commented Oct 13, 2012 at 19:27
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It might be due the following problems (fix these problems and your problem will be fixed):

  • Incorrect Browser Settings
  • Large Number of Add-ons and Extensions
  • Third Party Toolbars
  • Outdated Version of your Graphics Driver
  • Disk and Registry Fragmentation
  • Several processes running in the background
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  • It actually seems to be a problem with Google Chrome and it's custom flash implementation. Opera doesn't have the same problem. But I tried your suggestions anyway and didn't helped.
    – Paya
    Commented Sep 1, 2012 at 12:19
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Follow these points to solve this problem:

  • Update Browsers
  • Update Flash Player
  • Run disk cleanup
  • Update device drivers
  • Manage background services and optimize internet settings of your system
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  • This did not helped.
    – Paya
    Commented Oct 13, 2012 at 19:21
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I experienced almost no buffering on Youtube through Google Chrome through wifi with a laptop that's lightly used, has plenty of memory and storage, and is only a few months old. Took ten minutes to get through a 60-second video. Which meant the machine was impractical for watching anything, even though it continued to run everything else quite well.

So I tried rebooting, reloading, defragging, clearing the cache, sweeping for viruses, switching to HTML5, reducing all views to 360 from HD--everything I could find suggested on the subject, really. All to no avail.

Then I got rid of AVG and Spybot, replacing them with Avast, Malwarebytes, and CCCleaner.

Buffering returned on Youtube, to the point where long videos are watchable again. And there's a marked improvement on video feeds elsewhere.

And no, I don't work for any of these companies. I was just a frustrated end user like you. Hope this works on your machine. Best of luck.

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  • I actually used Avast and got rid of it to see if that's the source of the problem. Replaced Avast with MS Security Essentials. The problem disappeared for about a day, and then came back. Don't know what the deal is, but none of those AV found any virus... As an Anti spyware, I use Windows Defender.
    – Paya
    Commented Sep 17, 2012 at 19:11

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