PowerBook G4 – Slow Youtube – PART II

The saga continues – Many websites are becoming Flash 10 dependent, which is rendering my previous workaround useless:
See:

It seems corporations like Adobe, Google and Apple are not as environmentally friendly as we would hope – as their answers to the Flash 10 support for PPC question is, basically, UPGRADE! Out with the old, in with the new.

Not ideal when the Powerbook is functioning perfectly well on everything else BUT Flash! Plus considering the cost of such a venture, just to work YouTube smoothly.

So why not consider – a life without flash?????? Read on….

Life Without Flash…

Sounds daunting, but don’t be scared. It may just be possible to enjoy YouTube again on your Powerbook G4, and their answers may have been staring us in the face all this time!

Miro

We have blogged about this little gem before:  See: http://john-willis.com/2009/07/windows-apps-beat-the-recession/

Miro allows you to view Internet streamed videos “outside” of an Internet Browser. After all, the issue we’re having here is that Flash 10 under performs from our web browser. Therefore, if we take the browser out the occasion, how can flash be slow? It’s a theory I will work on later and test – but also an option for you to consider.

Update: This failed. YouTube isn’t a channel inside Miro like I had hoped.

VLC

Also mentioned in the Windows Recession article is this free movie player. If we’re considering running flash content outside of the browser, then surely we can rely on a media player to handle the content – Not Flash??

The idea here is to paste or open the YouTube link in VLC and allow the media to load.

Update: Failed – VLC didn’t play the link I tried.

VLC in Firefox?

This got me thinking…. If alternative apps can handle YouTube content, can we have such content open automatically in the our Browsers?

VLC has a FF plugin, and this is another test for me later today. I will update this article with my findings…

Source: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/14730

Update: Failed – I didn’t see any option to download the video!

Working Solutions: Greese Monkey Script

If VLC will or won’t handle the flash video for us, is there away we can have FF handle flash content in a different way?? This lead me to this link:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/50771

It’s called, quite relevantly, YouTube Without Flash.

Basically, this script places a Download option below the YouTube video so that you don’t have to stream in flash – rather play it locally on your machine. This may not be ideal – but at;east it would work. Again, more on this later after testing.

Update:

Before trying the above, I did tweak Adobe 10′s plugin settings.
Right click (ctrl+click) a YouTube video and select “Settings”.

From the First tab, I un-checked “Enable Hardware Acceleration” – sounds dumb I know.
From the Third tab, I increased the “Local Storage” to “Unlimited”.

I didn’t see any immediate difference, but after a reboot, the video’s I have tried have played smooth. Granted this was after I installed VLC plugin for FF and the GreaseMonkey script.

So far, so good?

UPDATE – Would anyone like to try this Open Source flash player and report back with results?

JW Player: http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

Related posts:

1. PowerBook G4 – Slow YouTube