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Wednesday 20 January 2010

Youtube how-to with out flash or gnash

This is on Debian. But it's a similar sort of set up on Ubuntu

Gnash and swdec are to resource heavy and unfortunately not quite there on my PPC machines. Here a rehash of info on viewing youtube on PPC, that my self and others posted on the ubuntu forum. It will give you a good youtube experiance if nothing else.

How to watch youtube clips without flash-gnash etc on PPC
I just notice a lot of new PPC users struggling so thought I'd chuck this in.

I only really need flash for youtube and as it doesn't exist and gnash can be a bit cpu intensive on my old PPC hardware I use clive in terminator. Then I split the screen and run mplayer -ontop name-of-clip, works a treat. (you can leave out the -ontop bit if your feeling lazy)
No need to wait for the download, and you can be adding other clips at the same time.

Depending on your connection speed you can vary how much video to cache. On my poor 1mb connection I give 5% on small clips and 10-15% on larger ones.

In reality by the time you've split the terminator screen and typed mpla (TAB to auto complete) and read and started typing the youtube clip name (clive changes all that gobby gook to a real name) your buffer has loaded.

In debian I use mplayer from debian multimedia repo,(non gui).

as root

Code: Select all
apt-get install clive mplayer



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-KeLxxHkEY



Note: I've switched to two tilda terminals setup with F2 and F3 as hotkeys. One for clive and one for mplayer works lovely and fast. I only  include abby from the other options below now. 

my-desktop-xfce-clive-mplayer. No Flash or Gnash

Or

For a nice gui try Abby it needs clive or cclive to be installed http://code.google.com/p/abby/ I use clive or cclive if I just want to play a single youtube link and abby if I want to select from all the links on the page and down load them all for later in a few clicks.

Code: Select all
Apt-get install abby cclive

Hi I've been playing around with cclive and after read in the help things get even easier.

Make sure it's installed

#apt-get install cclive


http://code.google.com/p/cclive/
http://code.google.com/p/cclive/wiki/FA ... from_clive

try adding this to your hidden ~/.ccliverc

filename-format = "%t.%s"
regexp = "/(\w|\pL|\s)/g"
stream-exec = "mplayer -really-quiet %i"



then to view youtube just enter

cclive -s youtude-URL


And mplayer will start the video automatically

Or
Minitube a sort of youtube TV http://freshmeat.net/projects/minitube http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube
I did eventually manage to compile it. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=46571 But it failed to play on my machine. You may have better luck and it is as of today being activly developed.

Or
You could just use the customvid addon for firefox/iceweasel https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12027 (License: Mozilla Public License 1.1 (MPL 1.1)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aahiPQwb5hM

Or

If you run epiphany or iceweasel use a greasemonkey script.
First you need to install greasemonkey from the repos

Code: Select all
apt-get install epiphany-extensions


or

Code: Select all
apt-get install iceweasel-greasemonkey


And then, install this script: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771

If you run epiphany the script goes in ./gnome2/epiphany/extentions/data/greasemonkey/50771.user.js
I found it worked well on my better machines but on my low end 333mhz imac clive and mplayer was a better option and much more flexible in that it didn't restrict browser choice, and was faster and seems to use less resources.