Laggy Youtube Videos

[Tomas_18]

Hi, I am using Google Chrome and lately, any youtube video is so laggy its unwatchable in ALL QUALITY SETTINGS. I cleared cache and history, reinstalled Chrome and got rid of most of extensions in Chrome. It didnt help.
All GPU drivers are up to date.
Here are the plugins in Chrome.



The problem still persists when I have a single tab open.
My CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 840 3.2 GHz
My GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 2gb
RAM: 12GB
My CPu usage while playing a video is around 96% !!!! RAM is, used like 27%
Thank you very much for any advice.

 

[Barty1884]

How many tabs do you generally have open? Chrome is a bit of a resource 'hog' so, depending on what else you're trying to do at the time, your resources might be tied up elsewhere.

What resolution of videos are you trying to watch? Any what are your hardware specs? If you're tying to watch 4K on older or entry-level hardware, that might be the problem too.

Have you checked Task Manager when this happens? How does your "free" RAM look? How about CPU utilization? Disk utilization?

 

[Tomas_18]

Alright, I updated it

 

[Barty1884]

....and what does your CPU utilization look like before you play a video?

What resolution are you trying to play?

 

[Tomas_18]

on 1920 x 1080 with 60fps
CPU utilization: Scrolling the facebook down uses from 52% to 74%. When I am doing nothing, its on 3%. When I am writing this message, the CPU usage is between 7% and 15% atm

 

[Barty1884]

....and this is specific to Chrome? If you use FireFox, or Edge, or Safari etc, you don't have the same issue?

 

[Tomas_18]

Yes, these issues are connected to Chrome. Firefox plays any youtube video without any problems

 

[TerryLaze]

Go to settings and (re)enable hardware acceleration,with CPU only of course it will be laggy,also find and install a plugin to use flash instead of html5,youtube switched to this some time ago and it is more demanding than flash.
I use Disable Youtube™ HTML5 Player.

Last resort use VLC,press Ctrl+n and the pasted link from youtube will show up,just press play.

 

[Barty1884]

Ah, sounds like Terry's got it there. The hardware acceleration likely isn't enabled - so it's using your CPU and negating your GPU. Chrome's default configurations (or user error in some cases) is a bit more temperamental than other browsers.

The HTML5 element would be present on other browsers too (as it's YouTube's native) so, while the recommendation is still a valid suggestion to use moving forward, it's unlikely to be the route cause here.

 

[Tomas_18]

Alright, Terry, thank you very much. It actually helped a lot, although its not still optimal. When I watch a video from a game, it starts mini lagging whenever there is some action.
Could you please describe what should I do with the VLC? Like more for the dummies

 

[Barty1884]

VLC is just a media player program/app etc. You install it, you open it & you hit Ctrl+n on your keyboard (I think you go File>New with your mouse if you want to do it that way) and paste the link to the YouTube video you want to watch - essentially just watching the video in a standalone program/app opposed to in the browser.

 

[TerryLaze]

VLC is just a media player program/app etc. You install it, you open it & you hit Ctrl+n on your keyboard (I think you go File>New with your mouse if you want to do it that way) and paste the link to the YouTube video you want to watch - essentially just watching the video in a standalone program/app opposed to in the browser.

The shortcut ctrl+n is for menu media->open network stream you can't make a new file with a video player.

 

[Barty1884]

My mistake. I just meant to highlight you could also access the function using a mouse also.