YouTube and the CLI

[RoyGBiv]

I don't know if this an issue specific to Firefox, KDE, SuSE, or Flash on Linux itself, but I have a horrible time viewing videos on sites like YouTube. I can see them just fine, even hear them, but progressively over the course of the video, the sound and video begin running out of sync, and on longer videos, it becomes quite annoying. If you run the Windoze version of Flash under wine, the problem doesn't appear, but that can be quite a bit of hassle. This solution isn't hassle-free, but it's friendlier, imo.

I ran across this little script at Linux.com that allows one to download the video file from YouTube and save it (as an .flv file), after which you can view it with MPlayer or any video player that uses ffmpeg, or so the page says. I had no problems with MPlayer, but some of the videos I got for testing didn't play properly in other players/front-ends.

Anyway ... just follow the instructions on this page. It points to another page you can save as a script, make executable, and use from the CLI to download the video. You need to find the video you want via a web browser, copy the URL, and use it as an command line argument for the script.

http://enterprise.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/08/11/197251&from=rss

[charlie]

1. There's also a few online services

that'll convert Youtube, Google, etc URLs into downloadable links if you want to do it within your browser:

http://keepvid.com
http://javimoya.com/blog/youtube_en.php

[RoyGBiv]

2. Cool, thanks ...

I had also seen an extension for Firefox, but I never bothered with it for some reason.

[charlie]

3. Have you viewed flv files with mplayer, Roy?

I may be interested in mplayer if it works. My regular vid player, MPClassic, won't handle them. I have to use a special standalone called flvplayer. It's a nice little inobtrusive program, but it lacks a few amenities I like, such as time remaining and the ability to move forward/backward in the video.

[charlie]

4. Ho! Nevermind!

Just found a little tool that adds metadata to the files and now I can use the slider to scroll backward and forward through the video. Good enough for me!

If it turns out you need a metadata injector, this BSD-licensed program is supposed to work with Unix-y OSes (scroll down to the 4th comment for instructions).

[RoyGBiv]

5. Glad to be of help :-)

Sorry ... I went to bed after my last message.

I have had need of such a thing in the past, so I'll grab that and see if I can use it when the need arises again. Thanks for the suggestion.

As for MPlayer, it worked flawlessly. I am not the fan of MPlayer that some are, at least not the default configurations in the GUI. (Mplayer from the CLI can work wonders, however, and I use it a lot for video editing, converting, DVD authoring, etc.) I compiled the version I use from source, added a few options, etc. Still don't like the GUI.

[charlie]

6. Thanks, Roy

I'm glad I don't need to switch because I'm happy with MPC, but it's good to know about mplayer for future reference, should my flvs reach a large enough mass that I might want an all-in-one video solution.

Sorry about hijacking the thread. As small recompense, I offer something amusing from the Department of Because They Can -- Firefox, EMACS version :)

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060529.html
http://conkeror.mozdev.org/

[RoyGBiv]

7. No worries ...

I didn't consider it a hijack. I'd been trying to figure out how to deal with YouTube without using wine, and now I know of two ways. :-)

An EMACS version of Firefox ... now *that* is something you don't see every day.

I like browsing with lynx sometimes ... the web seems so much simpler.

[RoyGBiv]

8. About MPlayer ...

As an all-in-one solution, I suppose it is. A lot of other things are simply front-ends for MPlayer.

However, a small word of caution for your nerves. Getting it to work the way you want it to work can be insanely tedious. It's not hard exactly, but the thing has tons of dependencies, and those dependencies have dependencies, and then you have to make sure you have the right codecs and engines installed, in the right places. Nothing totally out of the ordinary there, but, at least when compiling from source, it can get weird. Version 1.1 of such and such dependency needs version 8.2 of that other dependency, but if you want to enable option BR549, you need version 1.2 of that first dependency, which then requires version 3.7 of a third dependency, which conflicts with version 8.2 of the second dependency, so you need libs a, b, c, d, e, and f, ignore the second dependency and get a fourth dependency, compiled with a gcc < version 2.0.

Or, you just fill out the standard S stroke 1798 requisition form and write in 'Pizza' where it says 'Machine Gun.'"

:-)

[qnr]

18. mplayer handles .flv with no problem, I see that has been covered though.

Me, I might use the GUI once out of every 800 times.

[Syrinx]

9. What I do...

When there's a youtube video that I want to save, I just let it play from the web. I'm on dialup so sometimes this is an ugly process, but I'll go have a cup of coffee or go grocery shopping or something. Then I go into the Firefox browser cache directory, sort the files by modification time. Then I copy the last-modified file over into my home directory and rename it, with an flv extension. Kind of crude, but it works for me.

[charlie]

10. Geesh

*smacks forehead*

That's what I would've been doing if I'd thought of it. That's what I will be doing from now on. Thanks!

[Syrinx]

13. glad to be of cervix

Wait that's not quite right... :)

[RoyGBiv]

11. Also smacks forehead ...

Ya know, I did that under Windoze all the time for everything else. If you use the mplayer plug-in with Firefox, it will dump the file in the /temp directory, so I'd get those. Only problem with that was that some videos stream in such a way so that you only get parts, and the plugin would delete the previous part when the new part started. You never saw this when the video was playing. It was a behind the scenes thing, and for that, you could just use mplayer from the command line and a few handy switches to dump the whole video to one file.

But for some reason, I never even thought of doing that with YouTube or similar types of videos.

Damn I feel dumb.

[Syrinx]

12. I didn't know there was a MPlayer plugin for Firefox

Thanks for that nugget!

[RoyGBiv]

14. It's cool ...

Much better than gstreamer, imo. It's for Mozilla generally, not just Firefox.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mplayerplug-in/

Dunno what distro you use, but there's an RPM and DEB package for it. There's even a Slackware package.

It has some quirks. The thing where you can go to the /temp directory and copy the file it is playing is supposed to be an actual function of the plug-in. That is, while the video is playing, after the entire file is downloaded, you should be able to right-click and "Save As ..." but that doesn't always work for reasons I've never been able to figure out. (You can even see the file name, but it's greyed out.) However, in most cases, you can leave the page where the video you were playing is located, then go back to it immediately, and *then* you can "Save As ..." It's weird.

You can also have videos display in full screen while playing, but this function doesn't work if you have another video player loaded in memory. For example, if you have the KDE desktop, you might have the Kaffeine video player. If it has been opened and is in memory, full-screen won't work. You'll just see a small video window inside the full screen. Close Kaffeine, or whatever, before you start the video, and it'll go full screen no problem.

Judging from SoureForge's link, it hasn't been updated since 2005, but it does work.

[Syrinx]

15. I will check it out

This may help out with some sites that I run into sometimes. I have Flash for Linux installed. And I have Windows Media Player setup through Wine. And these work great with most websites. But occasionally I'll come across a site that doesn't believe that one of those programs is available, and I'll have to get sneaky. ;)

I'm not currently using a distro. I've compiled everything from source, and that was cool for a while. I guess I probably learned some stuff doing it that way, and it gives a lot of power in doing things exactly the way you like it. But it's also getting to be a supreme pain. I think when I get that new computer, I'm going to pick a distro to use. Do you have a recommendation?

[RoyGBiv]

16. Since you've compiled from source ...

Slackware or Gentoo. IMO, those are the two best distros to use for people who understand the system and can "do it themselves" when need be. Gentoo has the best documentation but requires the most work. Slackware is probably the easiest to use for a do-it-yourself-er. You can set up a system that basically works for most things in a couple hours. Gentoo will take much longer; it's one step up from Linux from Scratch. Funny thing is I use Gentoo docs when messing with my Slackware box. :-)

SuSE is on my so-called "production" system, but it's not high on my recommendation list for people who know what they're doing, and the release of 10.1 has reduced it to something I don't even recommend for newbies. I use 10.0, heavily modified, but 10.1 is just plain broken. All the breakage can be worked around, but what's the point of fixing things when you can just configure things with other distros.

I've been slowly converting myself over to a Slackware box. The main reason I don't use it as my main system currently is I have gigs of data that need to be transferred, and I haven't worked up the motivation to do that yet. I also have a lot to learn about certain config files (getting my shell to function the way I want has strangely been the biggest challenge so far), but if you've compiled from source, that shouldn't be an issue for you.

[Syrinx]

17. I'm no computer genius

I used Linux From Scratch as a guide to getting the basic setup going, and from there it was mostly "configure... make... make install" :D

I think Slackware was the very first version of Linux I ever checked out, but I haven't looked at it in years. I guess I'll give it another look. And there seem to be a lot of Ubuntu fans around, so I guess I'll look at that one too.

You're always helpful, and I appreciate it. :hi:

[RoyGBiv]

19. Well, that's relative ...

With most of the people I meet every day, even understanding what the phrase "compile from source" means makes you a genius by default. Knowing it involves configure...make...make install just shoots your brain into the outer reaches of the universe for brilliance. Hell, I'm convinced I got my current job simply because I knew how to use "ping" in a Windoze DOS shell.

But anyway ...

I hear good things about Ubuntu. I've personally never tried it mostly because in getting away from SuSE, I wanted to go with something that forced me to learn the system a bit more, and I've been able to fix things on my SuSE system because of that. From what I hear, Ubuntu is great for the "it just works" factor, and if that's what you're going for, I would certainly suggest you consider it. (And I suggest staying the hell away from SuSE 10.1 ... sorry for the obsession with this, but it just irritates me that the developers seem to have taken a perfectly good distro and made it worse, and I *paid* for 10.1 :mad:.)

Slackware has version 11.0 coming out soon. What's being called RC1 is out now, which is really just the Slackware -current version and with which I've had no issues in terms of the things that normally negatively affect a distro in a release stage. The developer is obsessive about stability. And speaking of stability, the default kernel will still be the 2.4.x series, but pretty much everything else it includes by default is the most current, stable version, and it includes the 2.6.x kernel in the "testing" directory of the install CDs if you need that.

Of course there is always the distro on which qnr is a developer. I know nothing of it, but the commands seem cool, and if he's on the development team, it must be worthwhile.

[hunter]

20. I've always been Debian, and now I'm very fond of Ubuntu

The last computer I built really did just work with Ubuntu -- well, after I tweaked a few things.

Especially when Opera was released for Ubuntu, I was convinced.

[FormerDittoHead]

21. Use the videodownloader extension (link)

https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/