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Safari using 100% CPU when playing wmv files

If you are using the latest versions of Safari, QuickTime, and Flip4Mac to play .wmv movie files in Safari, you may notice that once you play a movie, the performance of your computer degrades. If you open up the Activity Monitor, you'll see that once you play a .wmv file in Safari, Safari takes up 100% of the CPU. Even when the movie is done, even if you navigate to another page, even if you close Safari, it still takes up 100% of the CPU.

I found that by going back to a previous version of Flip4Mac, this problem gets fixed. In my case, I went back from 2.2.x to 2.1.3 and this completely fixed the problem. If you want to revert to a previous revision, here's how to do so:

1 - You need to uninstall your current Flip4Mac installation. You can do this by going to Applications -> Flip4Mac -> Flip4Mac WMV Uninstaller.pkg. Once you select this, you will be guided through the uninstall process.

2 - Get version 2.1.3 of Flip4Mac. If you don't still have it on your computer, you can get it here: http://www.flip4mac.com/wmv_previous.htm. Once you download it, go through the normal installation procedure.

Once you reinstall Flip4Mac, Safari will no longer take up 100% of the CPU when playing .wmv files.
Rating: 100% positive, 3 total Votes
Categories: safari quicktime wmv
Added: on Apr 23, 2008 at 8:41 am
Added By: ang

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Thanks, this solved my problem. I didn't realize that Safari was using all the CPU. But for me, the video got really slow, moving in jumps and I could hear my fan going really loud. I went back as suggested here and it solved the problem.
– Added by an anonymous user on Apr 24, 2008 at 9:54 am
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