Playing Videos Overheat my Mac Book

James,

TV shows from network sites. Any video really. I download videos with MIRO and watch them. Youtube of course. Seems anytime I watch any video my macbook fans kick in after a minute. I tried making my own video with the built in camera and mic. The noise from the fans made it impossible to hear so I had to use a headset earphones that had a microphone to get away from the fan noise. I love my macbook and OS X is the best operating system. I'm just shocked that a computer known for its arts software profile would overheat so easily.

I watch a video of Lab Rats, a video show about PC and Mac computers and one of the hosts showed a video using his mac book pro and I head his fan on his mac book pro immediately kick in. Darn. Even the pros overheat.

I'm really shocked at this. I often keep my mac book on for 17-18 hours a day and it gets hot which is to be expected. It's great until I try to play videos. Even when I first turn my mac book on in the morning a video will cause the fans to come on.

It is sad. The new aluminum mac books are out and I wonder if they run cooler when playing video. Again, you'd think a Corporation with the best OS and a reputation as a art computer would overheat like this.

Maybe its time to wish OS X could run on a pc gaming machine and there wouldn't be overheating?

I bought a pad with slots for air circulation as I keep my mac book on for long hours at a time. Instead of making a new mac book to satisfy the green movement that Apple had made a new mac book to satisfy actual users for a better cooler users experience.

Again, any video play overheats my mac book. I won't even go into the fact that an edge of my mac book broke off and I have it taped up.

If not for OS X I'm not sure Apple was a good choice for the hardware.

Well, processors always generate heat when in use, and more powerful processors typically generate more heat.

The fans are more of a precaution to prevent overheating. If they only kicked in when your computer was overheating, then it would suffer some internal damage due to the heat.

I have a mid-2007 MacBook Pro and all four fans are almost silent, yet running frequently. I can also record audio using the built-in microphone with no audible fan noise. If you find that your fans are unusually loud, I recommend taking it to an Apple Retail Store or authorized service center as one of your fans may be unbalanced or damaged.

I'll check that out James. The fans were loud when newly purchased. You may be right though. Thanks

The problem is that Flash, which is the video format that many sites like YouTube use, is a flawed product, as stated in many technical review sites. Firefox3 makes my MacBook's fan run at max when watching flash videos and sites with lots of flash. Opera, an alternative browser, seems not to stress out the CPU while running Flash, not as much as FF3. This issues should improve with later versions of Flash and Firefox.

If Sid is right, try watching your Flash videos in Safari. I watch videos on YouTube and Hulu almost daily and have never had either the temperature nor fan speed increase dramatically.

James, you are right in saying that Safari stresses the CPU (and thereby the fans) considerably less than FFox3 while watching Flash vids, at least in my 5 month old black MacBook with the 2.4GHz Core2Duo CPU and 2GB RAM. Should've mentioned Safari along with Opera in my previous post. I don't like using Opera much because of the weird way it handles some popup boxes that I click on in certain websites, opening them in a new tab rather than popping up a small window like all the other browsers do. The look and feel still aren't up to Safari standards either.

John, try Safari to play Flash videos and tell us if you're seeing less spiking of the CPU and fan work-load. I usually prefer FireFox3 to surf because of ScriptBlock, Master Password Timeout and a few other awesome extensions that Safari doesn't have yet.

Thanks Sid and James, I'll give Safari a try with video. I use FLOCK.

Well my late 2007 Macbook and Early 2008 Macbook Pros both overheat while watching videos on Hulu or netflix. Flash is a beast in Safari as well as Firefox. CPUs run full speed... fans are like airplanes taking off and overtime the wireless connection starts to drop as it overheats. Its a shame that apple has not come up with a viable alternative to Flash that is widely adopted on those popular sites because watching movies is not a very nice experience that way. Movies in Quicktime are still quite a bit better but your lap will still get hot.