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Flash and silverlight cause high cpu usage when watching movies online - high temperatures, loads of fan noise, high power consumption...

But on a newly created test account everything works fine (and it used to work fine on my own user account.)

So yes, I can use the new account to watch iplayer and LoveFilm and everything, but...

how do I find out what is going on?

Clearly there is something in the user files that is messing things up, but how should I go about finding what?

I can open the user library and clear the caches, but other than that I can't see anything that pops out as something to investigate.

Any ideas anyone?

osx 10.8.2, all stuff up to date. Happens on all browsers (though you could probably find some obscure ones I haven't!)

I've tried changing varioius application settings (hardware accelleration and not etc.)

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I wonder if the apps learn what playback settings are possible and the older user is asking for a higher quality version of the same stream. The Activity Monitor will be of use in watching the bitrate of both accounts to make sure you are comparing the proverbial apples to apples. – bmike♦ Dec 7 '12 at 20:25
Thanks - bike... I have to ask the question... how? I've been hunting around searching, but can find no explicit references. My only common sense idea is to play the same thing and compare data read/second... Although I have to create another user first - the second one has started getting the same symptoms – theTechnaddict Dec 8 '12 at 1:18
The other thing that could change would be if the plug in downloads advanced codecs and also grabs a different video from the server after a while. As long as you are counting both the download rate and the size of the downloads - you should be able to determine the cause. Sadly, in the end you might need h.264 to reduce the CPU or just live with players that have less control / more CPU activity. – bmike♦ Dec 8 '12 at 2:25

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