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When reading a video online (i.e. youtube), I often get freezes (application hangs) when the video is not fully downloaded, and I can't get why? I am sure however that it's a freeze of the application, not network/download related: there is enough "downloaded video" to read (the video buffer is not empty).

I have the latest Macbook Pro, with all the extra options so it's as powerful as a Macbook pro can be. I've tested (and reproduced the problem) with at least 2 Gb RAM free, no other applications open, after restarting, using Firefox and Safari, fullscreen or not (though it seems fullscreen is worse)...

I can't understand that in 2012, with a pretty powerful computer, a low res youtube video can make Firefox or Safari hang... It's very subtle but it drives me crazy: I can play fantastic games but have trouble reading online videos with my computer.

What is the source of my problem? Is that the computer (I doubt it though), the fact of decoding/reading a flash video (I don't know, maybe that's stupid), the application (should I change of webbrowser, chrome maybe?). Maybe this is normal/accepted behavior and I should just accept it (do you get that too?)?

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I also got this on my own Mac, however, using flash on Windows through bootcamp does not show the same problem, so I think that the problem is completely with Flash and the way it integrates to OSX. I know several people with Macs that exhibit the exact same problem you have, and, I have found no fix what so ever... ...so, I won't post as an answer. –  William Hilsum Feb 18 '12 at 23:47

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I know a couple of people having this problem. It does seem to happen more often when the Mac has been to sleep - if you shutdown, wait a few minutes and then restart, it seems to happen less frequently (and sometimes not at all).

The guide here has worked for one or two people, but most have just gotten the newest version of Firefox or Chrome and started using YouTube in HTML5 mode for the time being (HTML5 Mode).

Except for using YouTube in HTML5 (which doesn't fix other sites using Flash), the only "real" fix at the moment is to go back to using Snow Leopard until Lion is fixed up. There may eventually be a fix, but I wouldn't hold my breath at the moment.

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The problem - shader-based H264 decoder runs out of data. and it waits for this data to come from network (i.e to fill double sized buffer and on and on and on)

You can try FLV (360p) or html5 versions instead - maybe they work differently

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