Watching Sunday Night Football on MacBook Air

At a holiday party over the weekend, I was talking about how my work-supplied first generation MacBook Air was pretty abysmal when it came to watching flash videos (yes, I attend geeky parties). And even though I harbor a strong dislike for Flash -- mainly due to it's proprietary nature, it's clear that to watch video on the web, Flash is currently the way to go. To that end, I have found myself enjoying NBC's netcast of Sunday Night Football, which unfortunately, isn't terribly awesome on the MacBook Air. I got some push-back on this topic however, and more data was requested. So, I tried watching tonight on my 2.16Ghz 24" iMac.

First, here's the size of the video that I was trying to play:

flash_nfl_video_size_sm.jpg
Giants down by 4, beginning of the 4th quarter (click for full size)

As you can see, the video isn't full screen (it looks like it's about 800x400 resolution). When I try to watch this on the MacBook Air, the machine gets pretty hot, and it drops frames. I'm not sure how to measure the frame rate of the video played back in the flash app, but when I first started on the iMac, it was actually worse than the MacBook Air. However, after quitting several open applications, the video stream settled down, and I had a much better experience than with the MacBook Air.

However, my iMac was working pretty hard:

Processes:  74 total, 4 running, 2 stuck, 68 sleeping... 326 threads    19:43:44
Load Avg:  2.64,  2.10,  1.22    CPU usage: 65.18% user, 24.11% sys, 10.71% idle
SharedLibs: num =   16, resident =   52M code, 1368K data, 3644K linkedit.
MemRegions: num = 15525, resident =  626M +   18M private,  163M shared.
PhysMem: 1062M wired, 1191M active,  637M inactive, 2895M used,  177M free.
VM: 8608M + 371M   496020(0) pageins, 39755(0) pageouts

  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
 1000 Safari     141.3% 25:33.09  26   245   1829  173M    16M   236M   478M 
  283 vmware-vmx  20.0%  5:22:29  24   170   1152 7712K    22M   515M   928M 
 1968 top          7.7%  0:00.92   1    18     29  516K   200K  1112K    18M 
    0 kernel_tas   3.7% 29:24.22  58     2   1396   39M      0   249M   239M 
  280 vmware-vmx   3.2% 47:48.03   8    96   1282 8748K    15M   570M   859M 
  124 WindowServ   2.8%  4:04.69   5   268    641 8504K    48M    52M   307M 
 1028 Terminal     2.5%  0:03.83   3   106    124 2684K+ 8036K  8120K+  232M

That is the output from "top -o cpu", showing that Safari was taking up 1.5 cores (of my dual core machine), and that I only had about 10% idle CPU. I also had very little free RAM, which is why quitting some applications helped performance.

Now I didn't upgrade to Flash 10 for this test, which apparently has slightly better performance on Mac OS X. I tried Flash 10 on the MacBook Air, but it didn't make things better. Apparently, the issue with poor flash performance on Mac OS X is due to the NSPlugin architecture. The point I was trying to make yesterday is that I felt that a lowly Netbook, with a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom, running Windows XP, would perform better for watching video in Flash than the MacBook Air. And while I don't have a Netbook (yet!) to test this on, I can confirm that the MacBook Air that I have can't handle complex flash videos very well, and my year-old iMac just barely can.

-Andy.