Oh boy, I wondered, why the GOG.com site does take so long to load and noticed that the main page also loads and plays a movie (witcher2). Please, GOG team, think about the not so blessed people that don't have megabits of bandwitdh! A website that plays a movie stream is always bad style as it ignores the visitors with less bandwidth. Just offer the "play" button so that people can decide themselves if and when they want to watch a movie. Thank you!

The vid's got 400 kbit. See those rolling pictures in the background, showing off new games? I bet those have more.

That's true, as you and I discussed yesterday. However, for some computers, that movie can cause a big increase in CPU usage.

My desktop handles it fine, but the laptop's CPU usage never comes below 50% when open to the page with that movie. (Just something I found out since we last chatted about this. :) )

I made the mistake of viewing that page on my netbook. Took about 3 minutes to close that tab.

That vid made it painfully aware to me that my mobile has more power than my netbook ...

How on earth does that work? It doesn't really look like a resource hog.

Flash Movie Player is the most likely culprit. I always have increased CPU usage when viewing flash movies compared to HTML 5/CSS scripted animations/banners/etc. It also depends on the browser I think, some of the flash plugins for different browsers can cause interesting CPU spikes [and memory usage spikes]. I have found that Flash in Firefox uses almost twice the CPU [sometimes] of Flash in Opera or Chrome [though Silverlight in Chrome eats up more than Flash].

I don't have any hard data though - I just am going by what I have observed on my pc.

I was under the impression that the small movie was using HTML5, as reported by kazanovangel.

I'm not sure really. Searching for "webm cpu usage" does return some hits in Google.
From what I remember, the desktop and laptop both have Firefox 11, so that should be the same.

Pure guesswork here:
Could it be that it relies on video hardware? The desktop has a low-mid range card in it, but the laptop just has whatever it came with, which is nothing special, if I recall correctly. Maybe it has to use software rendering then?

Just taking a shot in the dark.

People like to whine about everything.

This is not video playing on the front page. It's just simple, looped, flash animation, nothing more, nothing else.

It makes website looking more attractive, and it's it only purpose. Disable Flash for GOG website.

Ps. Well, it seems that "annoying" flash animation is already gone, so you can all breath easier now.

In fact, HTML 5 uses lot more CPU than flash. At least on my laptop, when I tried HTML 5 player on youtube it was a big no-no for me.
So it was HTML 5 then. Use noscript for GOG.com?

At least my post had some actual content ;)

It's gone now, so meh. Have enough bandwidth and system resources to ignore it.

I don't see what good that would do against a WebM / HTML 5 Movie. :)

And by the way, I'm not complaining. I was just stating that some computers will experience a slowdown because of the movie even though the movie file itself is small. As you just said yourself, HTML5 on your laptop uses a lot more CPU than Flash. That's all I was saying, too.