Mac Air 2011: system very hot during youtube playback

Question

I have a Mac Air 2011 (13 in + SSD), OSX 10.7.2. Every time I play some YouTube videos the system gets very hot, especially the right up corner. The charger got very hot too. Anyone know why this is and if there is an solution?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Some youtube videos use flash. What I've observed is that when flash websites are running on my macbook, it uses more processing power (because flash is not as efficient as other methods) and gets significantly hotter. When you close them, it cools back down.

There has been a lot of controversy with Apple not pre-installing flash on their computers and not supporting it at all on iphone/ipad. This is one of the reasons and the web is moving away from flash-based sites and components towards html5. If you right-click a youtube video, you can check to see if it's using flash.

Answer 2

Get a cheap 20$ cooler stand... That fixes most of the notebook and ultrabook heat problems on PCs and Macs. And that stand is a must have if you do any video rendering on that Macbook Air. Plus you can always open the laptop and clear the dust that usually helps a bit. Maybe its just a hardware malfunction on the battery or the charger.

Answer 3

If you use Safari, install the ClickToPlugin extension. It will block Flash and provide HTML5 substitutes for most online video services (including most Flash-based YouTube videos). 1080p video loaded through a HTML5 substitute from ClickToPlugin has little more overhead than if you were playing it in QuickTime Player.

Another option is to opt-in for HTML5 videos on your browser. Go to http://www.youtube.com/html5 and join the HTML5 trial. This will have YouTube switch over more videos to HTML5 than normal for you.

Google Chrome also has an option to block all plugins as well (though without ClickToPlugin's substitution feature).

Answer 4

Try another browser, i.e. if you're using Safari - try Chrome, and vice versa.