I'm trying to narrow down the possible causes of broken playback of YouTube clips on my wife's PC. Admittedly, it is old and low-spec, but is it old enough and low enough to cause the problem? 1.7Ghz processor, 1.5 Gb RAM, old 37Gb HDD. Windows XP Professional.

Playback breaks up on YouTube
Also breaks up on Ukrainian Friends' site
Occurs with both Chrome and Firefox
Seems fine on Skype.

I've disabled hardware acceleration, disabled Pepper Flash, tried reducing the resolution of the clip, but still the same.

What possible causes does that leave?

Does it get better if you lower the quality setting on the clip you're watching?

I haven't checked very carefully, but I don't think so. It is frustrating because the PC is not in this house, and I don't have immediate access to it.

Here is what unfolded:

The problem with YouTube was originally apparent using Chrome. I used about:plugins/details to disable Pepper Flash, although I couldn't see any other version in there. After that the clips still played, but with no improvement.

Then I downloaded Firefox to see if that would be different. It still breaks up the playback, but possibly not as much as Chrome. I don't think I installed Flash on Firefox.

I am now just reading that to update Flash Player it is necessary to use Firefox, and then go back to Chrome after installation is complete. Does that make sense? Could it be just that I need to update Flash properly?

I've had endless problems with Firefox/Flash. I've ended up binning it altogether and moving to chrome. Not the same issue, I realise, but could be related.

No, not exactly the same, since our problem started in Chrome.

But did you fix it by using Chrome?

Flash content always looks crap to me in Chrome, even on my gaming PC. I always use IE for Flash (YouTube, 4OD, iPlayer etc) to guarantee I'm getting the proper native Flash player in use.

Flash seems to be very processor-heavy. On my old laptop, the fan would always start up when Flash was running. Is there a YouTube Mobile site you could try instead?

It isn't that. I have just downloaded Chrome to my own XP Professional PC, which is also pretty underpowered, and straight out of the box, Chrome produces broken playback in YouTube. No problem with Firefox.

At least now I can explore the problem.

Here is an extended discussion thread about the problem. It seems that no-one has actually resolved it. I've just tried most of the suggestions that occur in that discussion, to no effect.

Fascinating!

After disabling all plugins, and getting no effect on Youtube, I then tried to play a clip on the BBC News site, and it said I couldn't, because Flash player was required. I had to enable one of the Flash installations to enable it to play. And yet YouTube still played when they were disabled. How does that work, then?

Once I had enabled the non-Pepper version of Flash, there was a noticeable improvement on YouTube. I'd say it plays almost flawlessly at the default 360p, but starts breaking up at 480p. At that quality, Firefox is fine. Firefox even plays almost flawlessly in 720 HD, whilst in Chrome that would be hopeless.

Youtube provides many videos in HTML5, which may be a better bet for you: see https://www.youtube.com/html5?gl=GB

Yes, I have that set to 'use whenever possible'.

My PC is working almost normally with Chrome, now, but I just popped over to my wife's place and was unable to get similar results on hers. It has that slower CPU, I know, but it plays clips on the BBC perfectly. It must be a YouTube or Flash issue with Chrome. On hers, again, Firefox renders YouTube videos much more smoothly.

By the way, her PC has a D865GLC board (82865G video adaptor), so I don't think she has a separate video card. If we wanted to upgrade just one thing, should it be the cpu, HDD, video card or RAM?

CPU is 1.7 GHz
RAM is 1.5 Gb
HDD = 37Gb

Comparison:

Using Firefox as the browser, YouTube clips play without a hitch, even when another video-based program is playing in the background.

Using Chrome, the YouTube performance depends crucially on whether there is anything else running.

Nothing seems to change that.

Been there, wasted loads of money under the pretext of recycling some existing suff!

Judging from that board you mention, I guess we are talking about a P4 single core on a 478 socket? I have a P4 3.2 GHz from that era and it does not stream well at all even with a decent graphics card It does other stuff fine though. The most basic PC today with a 30 Pound dual-core CPU with onboard graphics will wipe the floor with these old PCs. Put the money towards a modern board, CPU and RAM. You could probably build it into the existing case with a 500GB hard drive for 130-140 Pounds. I see I could do it for 140 EUR here in Germany.

New PC stuff is really cheap. It is a false economy updating really old PCs. The performance gains are small and it means scouring ebay for other peoples junk.

Just as an example, take a look at:

INTEL Celeron G1840
ASROCK H81M-HDS
4GB CRUCIAL Ballistix Sport XT DDR3-1600 CL9
500GB HITACHI Travelstar Z5K500 (HTS545050A7E380)

Yes, I have no doubt that you are correct.

The latest development, though, is that my wife has decided to replace the whole thing with a laptop, in the January sales (which start up around Nov 30th, IIRC). So just for now I decided to put in a good condition HDD with 4x the space on it, and a higher rpm rating. We shall see whether it makes any difference to the overall performance. My machine is old too, but with specs about 40% better than hers. It works cleanly, smoothly, and without delays. That's all I am hoping to emulate.

I can see that it won't fix the YouTube problem in Chrome, as people with much faster machines have suffered from the same problem. There is a deeper issue going on there between XP, Chrome and YouTube (or Flash). The solution seems to be to ditch Chrome and use something that works.

Our old Pentium P4 laptop with 1GB ram and Windows 7 32-bit seems to do fine on youtube-like stuff IIRC. It is surprising how well Win 7 runs even near the min requirements of the OS.

A licence here only cost 25 EUR or so.

It seems to be something about XP. Don't know what, even after extensive reading and experimenting.

I'm sure you are right. We ditched our last XP installations at the end of last year and have not seen those problems with Win 7 or 8. Windows licences are so cheap here since OEM licences are valid for PCs that are not of the same brand and also not supplied with the PC, it was not worth staying with XP and the risks of unpatched security problems. However, with 9 PCs in the house, we have forked out a fair sum in Windows licences over the years!

Upgrading the disc is unlikely to help unless your system is running so much stuff it's paging like mad; video is streamed in (nominally) real time.

It's worth trying to save the video (HTML5 usually just has a right-click option; you probably need a downloader plugin for flash) and then replay it locally, either with a dedicated video player (e.g. VLC) or by pointing the browser at it - that might at least provide some indication as to whether the stuttering is a processing limit or some external issue such as bandwidth.

Just a straight comparison of the one YouTube video, played in Chrome and Firefox respectively, seems to indicate that it is a software problem of some sort. The machine is old and clunky, but it plays videos on other websites perfectly well; news clips on the BBC site look to be in fairly high resolution, but play flawlessly in both Firefox and Chrome. As I said, people with far better systems than ours are also getting the problem. So I don't expect an HDD upgrade to make much difference there. This is an XP/Chrome/Youtube conflict of some sort. I wish I could understand it.

On the other hand, the machine does just get itself tied in knots quite often, whereas my own runs smoothly all the time. Perhaps a little boost to HDD efficiency and RAM capacity will make a difference.

Rather than spend on upgrades i may have something i can donate.

Drop me a pm. Will be an upgrade on what you have for sure.

Backup your old files, format the computer and reinstall the OS.

Yes, that was all done fairly recently, but it has already accumulated a lot of unwanted junk, so I might do it again.

On the video question, I did just carry out Neil's experiment with an offending YouTube clip. I downloaded it to my desktop, and then pointed the two browsers at it and played. Same result. Fine in Firefox and rubbish in Chrome.

What a kind fellow! Thank you Reuben!

He is indeed I can't thank Reubs enough for helping me