Are they equal? Or does some cope better with flash and ads and
what settings could help?

My experiences is that my Windows XP SP2 survive almost infinite numbers
of clips and going next and next and doing <- back to the previous again
and again without ever hanging or acting strangely while in linux ...

Using linux they only survive a few clips or rather many but very soon
end up hanging and one have to kill the browser to get out of it.
some even hang only after two clips.

Many distros don't have flash at all forcing the newcomer to try to
install it. Which is not easy in some distros if you have never done
it before.

I don't praise Winxp and I don't talk linux down at all.

I want to get rid of winxp ASAP but if youtube doesn't work what
usage does one have of the computer? Music is one of the most
important part in my life. Only written words is not enough.

So what combination works best in your set ups there? How do they cope?

The most care-free linux distro would be Linux Mint. It comes with virtually every codec on earth. In fact, it's probably better than Windows in multimedia support. On windows, you're likely to run into problems running clips that isn't microsoft or realplayer supported and so the codec isn't automatically downloaded (these would be clips that said can't find codec when you play them in Windows Media or Real Player).

Clip playing performance will largely depend on driver support. Machines with open driver support will play back clips with hardware acceleration. If hardware acceleration isn't supported, the cpu will have to render the video, resulting in possible drop outs.

There is only one (proprietary) browser flash-plugin (gnash aside) for linux - and it must be written poorly judgeing from the performance of it.
Or can it be that I'm doing someting wrong? When I watch a flash-movie my CPU is working hard (80% - 100%) depending a little on the screen-size.
And that is just one little movie - it gets worse with more...
I have 1.6 GHz Pentium M and HW accelerated graphics - this is not where the problem or limit should be - therefore I suspect the quality of the plugin to be the cause.

Am I alone with this?

Sadly their site has been hacked

I want to download a "live" cd iso not the install iso.

I have tested a Linux Mint on Virtual Box but that is not comparable
due to the delay that the vbox give. And it uses the real windows machine
so one doesn't really know if it can find the ethernet card and sound
and so on. Knoppix failed on my machine. Aopen MZ915

jomen, Gento is a famous distro so I 'm surprised it didn't work well.

I've downloaded two iso:s now. which one of them are the Live cd version?
Which have the latest codecs?

LinuxMint-4.0-KDE.iso
or
LinuxMint-5-r1.iso
???

How does one set up frugal install with it?
I make a cd now to see it if start to install
instantly or if it allow me to use it live?

I'm writing this from within linux mint 5 rc something and have not set up Swedish
keyb so I don't know where the chars are. I test our national TV stations free news streaming vid now.

It takes one of them playrapport.se better than most linux distros.
Most distros have jaggered or erratic sound, flutter, jumping in volume output on that news channel while mint live cd had stable sound and stable picture. That is very good.

But it failed to have the needed MPlayer plugin for
TV4.se anytime the free news channel due to copyright only seem
from within sweden. I test it on cbc.ca/national now.

nope it failed due to lacking needed mplayer plugin.

does one have to activated it or what?

Nimblex linux had both and played these news channels without problem. Nimblex maybe with a bit flutter and sometimes
losing pixes in picture. Now you tube which could take
time if it hangs which most linux distros do.

It is firefox 3.0 and I have not set any prefs yet so
maybe me have wrong prefs?

I like this vid on youtube
Little Richard & Tanya Tucker - Somethin' else

search for it. Funny and sound kind of 1955 or something.

It survives very good. Doesn\t have stops when you look for other
things like most distros does. So Mint is good.

If it only could get the mplayer thing and I have not tested
real player media rm files yet. BBC news maybe use rm?

It plays the sound but not the vid on the one minute news.

Xine works with .rm realmedia files I had and the picture program was good too and I could change my menu.lst and it did my akward Marwell youkon ethernet without me having to do anythign and sound just worked and it connected to internet from sratch too.

As far as I know it only lack the mplayer thing needed for some news channels. BBC one of them and CBC.ca Canada national news.

That is kind of sad. But maybe easy to install if one knows how to.

so I like mint. I is one of my five faved distros.

So thanks for reminding me of its existence.

Do tell me how to activate the mplayer plugin in firefox 3 three.

I have not tested if it shut down properly and if it saves
changes to the cd?

It didn't shut down properly and I don't get any question if I wanted to save changes?

Maybe it is not supposed to?

I lost connection to internet suddenly so that could indicate that the ping
my isp do each 22 minutes got now answer due to stealth set in iptables?

Now I only have to get indo on how to do the menu.lst for ming and the mplayer plugin.

I'm in windows again to spell better.

I use Debian 4.0. I've browsed around YouTube for hours and hours without ever running into a problem.

I use the default web browser, which is called IceWeasel. In reality, it's actually Firefox, renamed due to conflicts between Mozilla's licensing restrictions and Debian's Social Contract.
Flash does not come installed in Debian by default. The method I use to install it is to go to a site which requires Flash, but different from YouTube. Then Iceweasel pops up with something saying "Additional plugins required, click here to install"...I click on it, and it installs.

I don't really know exactly what it installs, but whatever it is works. Since this method is so easy compared to manually installing something, I never learned any other way.

Unfortunately, the site YouTube does some sort of "helpful" redirection on its web page to "assist" you in downloading/installing the Flash plugin. If I try to use this, then it downloads some sort of Linux .tar.gz tarball file...but then I don't feel like figuring out how to install it.

No, I skip the "hard" way and just do it the "easy" way. The "easy" way is to go to some other site which requires Flash and click on the browser popup to install the required plugin.

Actually a lot of Linux disto these day work with flash out of the box. I have played around with Mandriva, Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, and Suse and they all seemed to work that way.

As for hardware acceleration on flash, that's sort of iffy. See the following article:

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2...s_the_gpu.html

Also, if you have Compiz on, hardware acceleration will probably not work at all.

nooby

Gentoo... it does work well - very well, or I wouldn't be using it for more than 2 years now.
Just the flash plug-in, which is one of very few applications I have to use without being able to build them myself, does not perform well - at least not for me.

You said it yourself: lack of needed plugin
It is easy to install.

mplayer will take care of that (at least: it can if it has the codecs)

...it is not... it is a live-CD - although some provide this as a convenience feature

That could very well be the case - My firewall (very basic) does not allow to respond to anything which was not initiated by me - a ping from a provider would get no answer...

paulsiu

The link you gave seems to contain at least some hints. Thank you!
Unfortunately I have an ATI card (R300 based) and it seems to miss some of the features mentioned there that are tested before using GPU acceleration.
I'll look into that some more.

How does flash work for you (not only you - in the "all of you" sense...)?
Does it perform as bad as it does for me?

I guess I should tell the stream to get played in mplayer then and not in
the browser? I have not figured out how to tell it to do that.

The national tv news asks for the plugin and not the mplayer as a freestanding
player but maybe somewhere that is possible. Maybe one could open url in mp?

Isn't Linux Mint better than Gento? Does Gento have a live cd so one can test
without actually installing it?

thanks for this answer

I have to learn how to allow pings then.

IsaacKuo wrote "I use Debian 4.0"

Isn't that the one that says they only support Open Source
so they have no "propietery? software and thus don't do Flash?

Have you installed Flash on your own.

Such is almost impossible to do without know how to first.
I always fail to do it.

The mplayerplug-in will let you open and watch the stream inside the browser.
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/
Almost all distributions have it - eigther installed by default or installable by you from their software-repositories.
So: look there first before attempting to install it without your distributions package manager.
Thats possible too if you have a URL:
open a terminal --> type
mplayer URL
I don't know Mint yet - I'm beyond constantly trying new distro and use what works great for me - Gentoo.
It is no question of better or worse - they all have their strong and weak sides.
Some consider building all the software themselves a waste of time, unneccesary and without noticable effects.
Some like exactly that and the range of choice this approach has to offer.
Gentoo does have live-cd's but they are just to get you started building your system - not to be used as a live-system like Ubuntu or Mint or Knoppix...
You would be disappointed...the Gentoo live-cd is just a tool to build your own system - and if you already have a running linux system or live-cd, you can use that as well to build a Gentoo system. Makes no difference.

on your disconnects:
You need to know IF the firewall in Mint is the cause for this - does it even have one running by default?
find out using this command:
and it will show what rules are set - IF any.

The package-manager of the distribution does that for you - even in Debian
You just need to know:
1.) that there is such a thing - many seem not to be aware of these tools
2.) read about how to use it
Debian is especially easy in that respect for all I remember - and Ubuntu is very similar.
Isn't Mint based on Debian too?
Just point and click in "synaptic" will get you most of the way.

Thanks I have to try out these things. Would be good to not
be totally reliable on just one distro.

Yes. I described the steps I used to install it. To recap:

1) I opened up my web browser.

2) I went to a web page that uses flash (other than YouTube).

3) I clicked on the web browser popup saying "Additional plugins are required to display content on this web page". It automatically popped with something to install and I clicked on the install button.

I don't know exactly what it installs, but after that it works--including YouTube.