How to watch youtube (and others) without flash

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gonkbag
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How to watch youtube (and others) without flash

#1 Post by gonkbag »

Ok guys
how to almost completely ditch Adobe Flash
I have only tried this with Firefox but I can't see why it shouldn't work with SeaMonkey.

first thing you'll need are 2 firefox addons: greasemonkey and unplug. Now restart firefox

I couldn't get this to work with the gxine plugin but it works with the old mplayer plugin and newer gecko/mplayer plugin so you'll need to install mplayer and mplayerplug-in pets
I haven't tried vlc but that should also work, with the moz plugin.

Now go to userscripts.org and install youtube without flash.

Right, that's it you can now watch youtube and none of that crap adobe flash chewing your cpu to death :D
When you first use it, it is set to use the highest quality by default, so I'd set to a lower quality in preferences for a quicker response and if you're using vlc you might need to change player from generic to vlc

So that's youtube sorted, now other sites, there are thousands of userscripts to choose from so to narrow it down you can install greasefire Right-clicking on the monkey icon will show you all the scripts available for the site you're on, popular sites like facebook, google and youtube have hundreds

alternatively you can use unplug (the little fish in the top right). Click on it and a window will come up showing all the alternative versions (mplayer can play just about everything), you can download or view in a new tab or window.
unfortunately some sites are exclusively flash so you'll still need flash for some :cry:
here's a script that might help low power cpu's with flash content: flash quality changer.

ps this also works on other linux's and windows (with vlc)

and thanks for sorting the url's whoever did that, still can't work it out (see above edit)

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BarryK
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Great stuff!

Quirky has SeaMonkey 2.0.4. I found that a very recent version of Greasemonkey supports SM:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamon ... on/161980/
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Makoto
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#3 Post by Makoto »

I've also found a Firefox extension called "Low Quality Flash" (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/80205/) that's supposed to force Flash to always open in low-quality mode. Not sure how well it works, though, because FF3.6 is always chewing up most of my 128MB of RAM, anyway, on this old system. :oops:
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nooby
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#4 Post by nooby »

cool you took time to share this with us. Much appreciated.
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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Aitch
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#5 Post by Aitch »


gonkbag
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#6 Post by gonkbag »

Hello again and thanks
like all the best ideas I nicked it from someone else :D

For those of you interested in youtube and other web based video streaming/providers there is some quite interesting progress (of sorts) going on, namely vp8
This site/developer http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=377 probably has the most objective and informed (read "blunt") write up of this format.

Although there is a feeling of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" about it, (swapping adobe for google) google have made it clear that vp8 (as untested [by the masses] as it is) is open source, progress, yeah maybe, but http://techrights.org/2010/05/23/larry- ... ling-webm/ trouble on the patent horizon methinks.

Adobe are by no means throwing in the towel though http://www.netbooknews.com/3876/demo-of ... e-io-2010/ (those of you with the unplug addon should try it with this vid) so I guess adobe will be clinging on for some time to come.

This of course leads us to the next question, what, if any linux/firefox/seamonkey etc solutions are there, well mplayer have released a vp8 patch http://code.google.com/p/webm/downloads ... 2&can=2&q= as yet untried by myself.

Well whatever happens adobe/flash has at last got some competition, which, although vp8 doesn't look like the best solution can only be a good thing.
Watch this space

ps does this method (youtube wihout flash) work ok with quirky ?

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BarryK
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#7 Post by BarryK »

[url]https://bkhome.org/news/[/url]

nooby
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#8 Post by nooby »

Update on using webm instead of Flashplayer coding.

http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011 ... erved.html

Some 30% of all videos have now been converted from Flash to the webm format that should be in every modern Firefox?
all new videos uploaded to YouTube are now transcoded into WebM. WebM is an open media file format for video and audio on the web. Its openness allows anyone to improve the format and its integrations, resulting in a better experience for you in the long-term. As we work to transcode more videos into WebM, we hope to reduce the technical incompatibilities that prevent you from accessing video while improving the overall online video landscape.

Transcoding all new video uploads into WebM is an important first step, and we’re also working to transcode our entire video catalog to WebM. Given the massive size of our catalog - nearly 6 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day - this is quite the undertaking. So far we’ve already transcoded videos that make up 99% of views on the site or nearly 30% of all videos into WebM. We’re focusing first on the most viewed videos on the site, and we’ve made great progress here through our cloud-based video processing infrastructure that maximizes the efficiency of processing and transcoding without stopping. It works like this: at busy upload times, our processing power is dedicated to new uploads, and at less busy times, our cloud will automatically switch some of our processing to encode older videos into WebM. As we continue to transcode the remaining inventory, we’ll keep you posted on our progress.

In keeping with our goal of making videos universally accessible, we will continue to support H.264 as an important codec for video on YouTube. We are also committed to continuing to develop our HTML5 video player that we announced last year,
Have any of you found such a video so one can see how it ends up in the cache and if one can save them to HDD the way we could with older Flashfiles?
I use Google Search on Puppy Forum
not an ideal solution though

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stiginge
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#9 Post by stiginge »

BarryK wrote:Great stuff!

Quirky has SeaMonkey 2.0.4. I found that a very recent version of Greasemonkey supports SM:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/seamon ... on/161980/
It appears that greasemonkey is now disabled, according to the above link :(

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