Benad's Web Site

When I want to watch some YouTube clips on my TV through my Mac Mini, I usually end up settling for XBMC, because it’s fast. The thing is, sometimes YouTube change their web site in a way that breaks the YouTube plugin for XBMC, and also I want to be fair and let YouTube play some ads rather than using some hack to circumvent them.

So I used YouTube Leanback, or at least I tried. The keyboard interface works quite well with my remote, logging in to your account works quite well, the user interface is well suited for TVs, and so on. But performance just sucks. Using last years' Mac Mini model, running Leanback full screen (1080p) takes an entire core and barely makes it 30fps. I tried it on 4 different browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera), and performance equally sucked in each. I even upgraded my Flash plugin, but that made little difference. Is it their new HTML 5 video player that isn’t video card accelerated?

So… Back to XBMC it is. Yes, I can use the iPad YouTube app and use Air Play and AirServer to stream the video to my Mac, but then at that point XBMC just feels much easier to use. Couldn’t Google make a proper YouTube Mac and Windows application? Or do they insist on Google TV, which by the way can be bought only in the US but also sucks? Or I’ll just shut down my TV and use my iPad instead: Uses less electricity, and it works.