Can a Pentium 4 even decode Youtube ??

[virajk]

Ok, so I've got an old P4 system that I salvaged from somewhere along with my 3 other PC's and I've always wanted to use it as an HTPC.

Long story short, I did it. Win XP with full updates along with VLC plays back x264 like butter. But then YouTube comes along and messes it up for me. The video is slow and choppy with CPU usage maxed out. The chipset in question is an Intel 865.

And its not like I'm trying HD, with my internet speed being so slow I can only muster 240-360p and I'm totally ok with that !!!

I do have a Geforce 2 AGP lying around ( you heard it ) that may solve the issue but I'm not even sure if its working and I may have allocated video memory to the integrated GPU low so that's there.

So what do I do, before I give up on this thing.Try the Geforce 2? Buy a new AGP card? Increase the video memory?

Or maybe the cpu is indeed so old that it just isn't built for youtube (guessing it uses vp9) which is surprising considering it decodes x264 pretty smooth.

 

[William Henrickson]

a dx9 gpu may help with chrome lol

 

[mrmez]

Much of youtube is still flash, which despite being so basic can cripple an older system.
Some videos are multiple formats. You can delete or disable flash. Many videos simply won't work, but those that do could be significantly faster.

At least you'd know the culprit for sure.

 

[unreal9400]

It can decode 720P youtube videos with a dedicated 9400 GT.
You need flash player plugin and firefox youtube flash player add on.
Even with the 9400 GT the pentium still stutters sometimes overall CPU usage is lower with flash when compared to HTML5.
(This is based on my experience)
A single core pentium 4 with no hyper threading.

 

[virajk]

Ok, ill try that. Right now I'm checking the classified for a good AGP card and that's gonna be hard. I'll update once I have something on my hands. Thanks a lot guys !!!