slow videos

I have had my iMac since April 07, everything was going good, a bit of a learning curve, but good. Recently when loading a video off my hard drive to view or burn on a DVD, it takes several minutes to load. Everything else seams to work fine.
This is my system
2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4MB shared L2 cache
1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM
160GB Serial ATA hard drive

Any help would be great.

Thanks
Rick

Sounds normal - nothing to be alarmed about, video files are large and will therefore take time to import, export etc

I thought I just saw some thread describing slow video loading. It was regarding some decoder or codec that I can't recall right now. So, what is the codec type of the file your trying to watch or burn?

I just tried a 3GB Quicktime movie (960x540 pixels) and it took only a few seconds. I think I have at sometime in the past seen it not be so quick.

Being only semi literate in computers, the video format are "avi & mp4" files using Quicktime and Toast 8 Titanium. And it has been just the last week or so that it has slowed down. It used to only take a matter of seconds to load or the file put into Toast for burning. Now it take about 2 or 3 minutes for the file to be ready watch or burn to disc. I have also used "OnyX" to help clean up my hard drive thinking this may be the problem.

Rick

First if you haven't done it yet, reboot. Even Macs sometimes get into wonky states.

Have you loaded any thrid party Quicktime add-ons to, you know, play things like AVI files. That could be causing problems.

Other things to check...

How full is your drive? A drive near its capacity limit can cause a slow down.

To get a possible hint of what might be up you could start Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.

First Click on the Disk Activity tab then try opening one of those problem files. If you are getting a lot of green peeks that would be expected. It should be breif if the file does not automatically play. Then hit the play button a few seconds later and the green should rise again.

Start over and concentrate your attention to the CPU usage. You shouldn't be using a 100% I would expect.

From a cold start, this time check the System Memory. Do you have a lot of free memory, or is it down to just a few megabytes.

When I use Activity Monitor I like to sort the big window by CPU usage with the bigger numbers floating to the top. This can tell you if a process is hogging the system. It won't tell you why, but it is a lead. Also, it might be normal for the process.

This kind of thing can be difficult to track down.

Thanks Xstep, I think you solved my problem, I did add to my Quicktime, I will check it tonight when I get home. I know I have lot of hard drive soace, over 100GB. Thanks again, I will check.

Rick

I removed the add ons in Quicktime, this did not seem to work.

Started the Activity Monitor and did what you sugested. Started Quicktime and loaded a movie (about 700MB) and the CPU %usage was up to a 100.90% and it took about 2 minutes to load. Once it loaded and played it went down to 20% usage. Like I mentioned before, this just started about a week ago.

Rick