What's the deal, these days, with Linux and video on the web?
Hi, i consider myself new to Linux, despite having tried it a couple of years ago and abandoning it due to hardware fail. I went back to Windows for a time, before everything failed again. Now, here I am, on the precipice of giving Linux another go...
My question is about YouTube and other video sites. It wasn't until I purchased my first Android smartphone recently, that the question of video formats currently used on the web was raised. On hearing that Adobe Flash was no longer supported by Android, I wondered how on earth it would be possible to view a video through my phone's browser! Yet lots of websites play video nicely on my smartphone, using non-Flash supporting browsers! Asking how this was possible, I asked around and was told it was HTML 5. I know a bit of basic HTML but don't understand how video works without Flash. Then someone told me videos on most popular sites, (including YouTube) are all MP4s embedded in the HTML code these days. Anyway, part of the reason I ditched Linux two years ago, was because Flash videos would not play properly on the web, which made it pointless as an operating system for me. I want to know : has the web really gone over to MP4 now and does this mean I will be able to get videos working properly through my browser on Linux, instead of that 'stop/ start', jerky crappiness I kept getting on Ubuntu? I'm having Linux Mint set up at the moment and want to know if I'm going to get better online video performance, overall, this time round or not. Please excuse the 'noobyness' of my post but I've still got a lot to learn, obviously. Thanks in advance. |
While it is true that a lot of video on the internet has now migrated away from Flash not all video is available as HTML5 style. In fact I found that not even all YouTube videos are available as HTML5. Once you step outside of YouTube it's a bit of a mixed bag with most TV stations requiring Flash for their online content and some require something called HAL which is being ditched from Linux distributions or, even worse, Silverlight as most paid-for online video uses.
That said if your machine is reasonably new then Flash ought to work fine under Linux -- well, it'll hog your CPU but it should play as smoothly as it does under Windows. |
Thank you for your quick reply, 273. I'd day that if our Sony Vaio laptop can handle video, on Linux,as well as Sony's cheapest Droid (which I'm using here) I'll be happy!
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Like you, flash was important to me and for some years I dual-booted for this exact reason (actually using Win for days if I was to leave youtube singing in the background :P )
But recently Google Chrome still has Flash support, actually the best flash support available for Linux, in my opinion. I use it for sites requiring Flash... As for Adobe discontinuing Flash for Linux... Well, they did an horrible job anyway.. And the guys from Google proved that it can be done... The only downside is that you are limited to one browser for flash sites.. As for Android, discontinued doesn't mean that some browsers don't keep using the last available flash player... Of course, most of the major websites now support HTML5 videos as well so today lack of Flash isn't really an annoyance. |
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Personally I found a regression in Pepper Flash in the way it behaves on a system with two displays that stops me using it though I can't say it seems much better (or worse apart from the one bug) than the latest NPAPI version. |
Thanks for clarifying that.. But still, all this years they had terrible problems with it, and now, on Google Chrome it just works. If you say they wrote it for Chrome as well, well that's kind of interesting.. Makes me wonder how much interest did they have in Flash for Linux before this..
As far as "much better" goes, in my experience, it is... visible and clearly.. No sound syncing problems with videos, no unusual fails.. Prior to this, I have never gotten a stable and reliable Flash player in any of my Linux systems along the years.. I always faced some sort of problem with it.. |
I'm still using Flash 10, since the last Linux version (11) won't run on a 32-bit AMD processor, and it usually works. Actually I keep Flash disabled, except when I specifically need it, for security reasons.
There's also the open-source Gnash, which does a reasonable job in most cases. |
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Qualifying Notes: * If you are using an older computer with less than 2GB of RAM, choose one of the lighter weight desktop environments for installing Mint. Best to use either the Xfce or Mate versions of Mint in that situation. Cinnamon & KDE versions will likely not work well on older systems. See here for all version of latest Mint 16: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php. * If system is very old and youtube videos don't play at all, you may have a CPU that Adobe discontinued Linux support for in its latest flashplugins. In that case, you will need to purge the current flashplugin and revert to an older one that does work. Doing that will result in "warnings" to upgrade it due to being out of date and subject to "vulnerabilities". When that happens you'll need to click the red warning circle and tell it to stop warning you and save those settings for that site. (Don't upgrade -- you'll end up back to not being able to view videos if you do.) If you have security concerns, just disable the plugin when you don't need to use it and re-enable it only when you want to view videos. Here is a Mint tutorial that applies to older computers that cannot use the latest flashplugin: How to Fix Flash Video Problems on Older Computers |
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http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/pe...player-plugin/ Alien Bob also provides a tweaked version of wine, wine-pipelight, and pipelight that will allow you to use the latest flash, sliverlight and one or two other plug-ins for ms-windows. http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/pipe...inux-browsers/ |
What is 'Slackware'?
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http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major Quote:
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