I have an old P4 system but I have a Nvdia card capable of vdpau. The result is I can watch 1080p HD videos fine with acceleration but when I watch flash videos it’s all horrible and choppy since Flash no longer supports vdpau on Linux without using an old version (or am I wrong?).
I already know how to use smplayer to play youtube videos and I can do that and it works great. But is there a firefox extension or anything that will allow me to input an url or otherwise press a button or something and automatically open a flash video in mplayer without having to first download the flash video? IOW, I’d like it to be hassle free and would want it to be possible in one step.
If not does this seem like a good application to anyone else?
Hello, I tried to install a very old flash version 10.3.x and it did work with acceleration but unfortunately it’s very buggy and causes freezes of up to a minute or two and sometimes permanent freezes. There was one version in the past which used to work perfect on my system, I wish I could remember it. Of course this is probably a security nightmare to use these versions.
I’m thinking I’d like to just keep the latest adobe-flash installed but effectively disable it for most sites (using something like flashblock) and watch all my flash movies using smplayer. If I need flash for non-video use I would then simply enable it for that site. Ideally what I would like is some kind of plugin or utility where I could simply click on a flash video placeholder and it would launch the video in smplayer. It seems simple enough…in theory. I do see some versions such as Play YouTube Videos Without Flash [From /tmp, Works With Adobe Flash 10.2] ~ Web Upd8: Ubuntu / Linux blog which apparently used to work with some flash versions but it doesn’t seem to work now with the latest. I will have to try it again with the old version of flash they use and see if that works.
I found this project which is extremely promising and might be of use to many people in similar situations who are reading this quvi project but it is meant to work without any flash at all so it can only support selected sites (according to their FAQ). I need something which effectively supports almost all sites with flash video.
You should always specify the browser when asking about a browser-related question.
Assuming you’re talking about FF,
Current versions (FF 4.x?) should play flash video with its own default plugin without any problem.
Older versions (FF <= 3.6x?) required gmplayer (a derivative of mplayer) plus a plug-in to use, but that was so long ago (2+ yrs) I’ve forgotten the exact manual steps you have to make in addition to installing a plugin. As I described simple solution today should be to simply update FF and <not> use mplayer.
If you <really> want to use mplayer, re-post… Maybe the old method will still work (Google gmplayer and Firefox).
If you <really> want to avoid using Flash altogether on YouTube, there is an HTML5 version of YouTube, most but not all videos are accessible that way (Then you can turn off flash altogether if you want) https://www.youtube.com/html5
i have the same problem with my Nvidia gt7950 card. Flash no longer supports hardware acceleration, causing flash rendering via CPU. This causes major lag on the video even with 480p quality.
tried older flash versions without succes:(. The same hardware worked fine back in the opensuse 11.x days. But now, it is not useable. i’m forced to download the video and use smplayer to watch the vid. I posted a thread myself on this problem, but no solution was found.
So I wonder, does this flash issue not ocur on all hardware configurations? Because if it did, i would expect much more commotion on this issue. Since many many websites require flash…
anyway, a button which would stream the video via smplayer would be a good fallback.
It’s actually pretty much any browser. But I mainly use Firefox 18. I can play flash videos. The problem is they are of poor quality and laggy ever since adobe disabled true vdpau support on linux which my nvidia 8400 gs has support for. Ideally I just want to play any flash video externally with smplayer (which has support for vdpau and even without that is way less laggy).
Well I have been experimenting (for several hours!) with quvi and libquvi and the good news is it’s theoretically there where you can do much of what you want (the fallback loading in smplayer). The bad news is that the openSUSE libquvi-scripts package seems way out of date and has problems with certain sites even if you can get it to fully work. I’ve ran into issues hacking around with manually compiling it from a tarball and using the openSUSE repos for everything but libquvi-scripts (so that I can get a version which isn’t over six months old but without also having to compile quvi and libquvi from tarballs as well).
But I also found where I can get quvi working I can’t seem to get it to actually play anything with vlc, smplayer, or even mplayer. So it’s been one issue after another.
Also there is sniffy which is supposed to work with libquvi but I found that it looks like the author isn’t doing much work on it and many people have problems. I’m having an issue with it dying with the message “sniffy: ERROR: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘getitem’” … but in theory with the newest libquvi-scripts and a working sniffy install you could get what you want for some of the most popular video streaming sites like youtube, dailymotion and some others.
The thing is this seems so esoteric that few people discuss it. Searching on the forum shows only one other instance where someone mentioned quvi besides this thread. I wish I had the expertise and time to get sniffy working by trying to figure out what is wrong with the code but I don’t.
What we want with the ability to simply click a placeholder or choose a right click menu option to load a flash video (not just youtube) externally should be fairly simple in theory but I get the feeling adobe has done everything they could to make it difficult, sadly.
It’s a shame to have to get a new computer just to watch flash movies when you can watch h.264 1080p movies on smplayer just fine while in fullscreen mode with the exact same computer. I’m ranting now but I’m really starting to dislike Adobe. I’m half joking but I feel like I should be able to send them a bill for a new quad core desktop!
I also wonder i it might be fruitful for us and others in our situation to experiment with various previous ‘flash-player’ versions to see if one can work. I tried the current as well as one of the old 10.3.x versions. Maybe we should try a coordinated effort? Like you I’m sure I recall where it used to work almost perfectly on my same hardware. I can actually get it working with acceleration now on the 10.3.x version but unfortunately I have freezing issues as well. I’m thinking the good version which worked on my hardware might be before that one?
I installed totem, the browser plugin and gstreamer plugins. I checked and I can play .flv files fine with totem when opening a flv file from local disk. But when I go to eg youtube, firefox complains that it needs the flash plugin. (I disabled the flash plugin by the way). I checked about:plugins and the totem plugin is loaded ok. I also checked mime type in firefox and flash video is set to play with my totem plugin. But still, firefox doesn’t play flash with totem plugin, but instead complains it wants the flash plugin…
that link you provide instructs to use flash video replacer (firefox addon) in order to view flash video in the totem browser plugin, gecko media player browser plugin, smplayer etc . . .
However, if you researched a little more you’d find that the author has now withdrawn the firefox addon because it doesn’t work any more.
i got it working! i noticed that after installing the totem browser plugin, i had 2 flash plugins in the firefox plugin list. One of the flash plugins is actually a wrapper of the totem plugin. When i enabled this plugin, flash video on a website has an embedded totem placeholder. Unfortunetaly, totem doesnt actually play the video:(. Is it possible that sites like youtube encrypt their videos somehow so that only adobe flash can play it?
ps totem plugin does work with wmv, mp4, avi, … But not with flash:(
Have you tried minitube? It’s outside the browser - you can browse youtube videos inside it, and it plays in some video player (ie smplayer)… There’s also a smplayer plugin that does similar as well. And of course youtube-dl (download a video from youtube, in mp4 format and also has handy options, like just give me the audio or video from the stream)
Not quite what you were asking for, but may be worth a look…
Those are great solutions for youtube. Also smplayer has a nice interface which lets you browse and view youtube videos. Ideally it would be for other sites too though – any flash site. I guess I can live with what I have for now.
and also has handy options, like just give me the audio or video from the stream)