I have noticed that many of you are still using swfdec or gnash for youtube. The versions of these available in the repositories are very rarely if ever current, and compiling them from source can be very confusing for those of you who are new to linux. On top of that, both of them are resource hungry pigs.

Well folks, there is a very simple way of getting around all of this. This tutorial assumes you are using firefox as your web browser. Open up your favorite terminal and install mplayer, along with the mozilla plugin for it.



For those of you who have never heard of greasemonkey, it is a firefox addon that allows us to change how a webpage displays certain bits of information. In this case.. flash We are now going to install it. Go to this page:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Click the add to firefox button, proceed with the install, and then restart firefox when asked.
Now that we have that out of the way, I am going to introduce you to a wonderful website called userscripts.org. You can find scripts for just about anything here that work with greasemonkey and are one click installs. No linux wizardry needed. Go here:

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24999

Click install in the top right part of the screen. Now go to youtube, and watch high quality videos with no lag or resource mongering.

You will notice that there are a plethora of different plugins on that site, search around and try them out. As always if there are any problems please post and I will reply as soon as humanly possible.

-biscuit

Thanks It sure did improve the quality

The player itself doesn't look as fancy as the original youtube player, but has the same functionality. By dragging the sides of the player you can even make it as big as the original player, so the page will display as usual

Quipeace

Wow man ty that works great! ^^

Do i need to remove gnash, its fairly convenient for some flash based pages.

Also any thought on why i would get sound but no picture when i play stuff in this fashion?

i wonder if theirs a similar plugin for stylish i find it to work better

I was looking and there doesnt seem to be. Some nice ones for cleaning up the site make things load quicker though

ahh never mind i needed to be on x11 for videos.
and still have gnash in as some one would probably have told me eventually is fine.

Im going to check more stuff before i ask next time

Thanks Swift this works incredibly.

Edit

I want to make this work for google video and possibly divx videos if its possible. Mostly the stuff i find on 66stage.com

i tried changing the sites list in greasemonkey but it didnt go over.
Then i navigated to the hqtube.user.js file in the firefox directory open in up in nano with the terninal.
I went through and read the javascript stuff (i have no knowledge here I'm just fallowing common sense)
anyway I found this



It was the only piece of code i saw that had youtube anywhere in it. I'm planning to try to find the applicable links for google video and duplicate that right below then cross my fingers.

I think making it work for divx will require me to change other things like the format that is entering and if it needs to be changed at all..
Unless of course theres an easier way to do divx, doesnt even need to be in browser.
But yeah I posted that so that if anybody noticed I was doing anything I really shouldnt be they could let me know thanks

I have not tried to play with code at all, let me know how that turned out. The mplayer plugin should handle divx videos just fine, even embedded ones.

I seem to be running into problems with finding a code similar to the direct download code you can pull out of the you tube page source. I tried the few that looked like it seemed to be the most likely culprit but it gave me nothing in return. I havent attempted to figure out divx stuff yet at all. but yeah thats where I'm at I'm pretty sure that thats all I need to change to get it to work, aside from the regular page allowance.

Man, it ran just great. Thanks alot!

All I get is a black square that says "Buffering http://v5.cache.googlevideo.com etc" and then "Playing http:// etc".

The mplayer logo is at the top of the black square, and I can hear the audio, but no picture.

I followed the instructions. Any ideas?

hmm... try right clicking the movie and setting options, also try to go fullscreen. If none of that works then try using totem instead of mplayer. To do that just do this...

sudo apt-get remove mozilla-mplayer

sudo apt-get install totem-mozilla


Then restart firefox and try the movie again. No need to change the hqtube plugin under greasemonkey. It will work with mplayer, totem, or vlc.