Recommend light browser with functioning video plugin (midori & qupzilla failed)
 

Been trying the past few days to get qupzilla and midori to work with youtube and other video streaming sites but failed.

Any recommendations of any lightweight browsers with working video plugin?

What I did:

- downloaded and installed alienbob's vlc package

- recompile midori (without gtk3) and all required deps (libunique, vala, webkitgtk) but midori crashed while loading webpage with embedded video

- recompiled gst1-plugins-base/good/ugly, then qupzilla and all required deps, but qupzilla video playback failed with error, also tried qupzilla youtube html5 options, with/without netscape/webkit plugins

Now, firefox video playback failed too after upgrading system with gst1-plugins

Anyone got midori or qupzilla working with youtube? thks

ps: I'm using 14.1 x86_64, multilib enabled

I'm not familiar enough with the browser scene to provide you suggestions, but until you can find a browser that fits your needs, there are several projects that provide online video playback via commandline, the most popular probably being mpv (which can use smplayer as a front-end). This way, you can at least browse for the videos and then copy the link to mpv or smplayer to play the video back.

I found that this situation is greatly improved with the latest qupzilla-2.0.0. It will build with the version 1.8.6 SlackBuild from SlackBuilds.org, but the difficult part is that you need Qt-5.6. I built this myself, but unfortunately, I don't have a SlackBuild for it, as I did it in a kind of messy hacky way. I see that Alien Bob has it available as a prebuilt package now for -current, though, so you might try his SlackBuild on 14.1, or wait until he builds Qt-5.6 for 14.1.

By the way, I really like qupzilla-2.0.0. It is VERY fast. And videos from youtube and most other sites I've come across worked for me with no extra trouble, whereas this was not the case with previous versions.

hi, thank you for the replies

gonna try qupzilla 2.0, but will QT 5.6 break my slackware? lol

Not if you use a SlackBuild/package from SBo or Alien Bob's repository. It will install alongside Qt4, and the Qt5 version of qmake will be renamed as qmake-qt5 so that it doesn't overwrite the Qt4 version. Actually, I forgot to mention this, but you will have to modify the qupzilla SlackBuild to run qmake-qt5 instead of just qmake.

By the way, if you've never done it before, you should know that Qt5 takes a very long time to build, so it may be worth waiting to see if someone else has another option. You could always just use a second browser for videos and the like until SBo updates Qt5 to version 5.6 or Alien Bob compiles it for Slackware 14.1. (I don't know if this will happen or not -- you'd have to ask him.)

took me a few hours, but I did it, compiled qt-5.6 using alienbob's script and recompiled qupzilla-2.0 (SBo).

qupzilla 2.0 is faster loading than firefox, and youtube works now, but tumblr videos isn't, what did I miss? tumblr animated gifs do work

https://www.youtube.com/html5 shows

working
HTMLVideoElement
WebM VP8
Media Source Extensions
MSE & WebM VP9

not working
H.264
MSE & H.264

I did installed x264 though, thks

I think qupzilla may need gst-plugins-ugly to play H.264.

Or gst-libav, because Firefox needs it.

Some time ago, I gave the Seamonkey browser a spin, and it's not a memory hog like Firefox. The old LFS Live CD even defaulted to it at the time. Back in the old days, it was possible to rebuild Seamonkey - like Netscape - with only the browser enabled and without the whole kitchen sink like mail client, chat client and webpage composer. I don't know if that's still possible.

Cheers,

Niki

did compile all gst & gst1 packages, & recompiled qupzilla-2.0, tumblr still no go,

still not working
H.264
MSE & H.264

https://www.youtube.com/html5

based on https://github.com/QupZilla/qupzilla/wiki/Knowledgebase, I already installed qt-5.6 and all gstreamer-framework packages available from SBo, so what's missing?

do I need to recompile all gst/gst1 packages, including the ones from stock slackware dvd?

what about webkit related packages?

results from http://html5test.com/, oh bugger

Video
Audio track selection No ✘
Video track selection No ✘

Video Codecs
MPEG-4 ASP support No ✘
H.264 support No ✘

Audio Codecs
AAC support No ✘
MP3 support No ✘

guess I need to recompile ffmpeg, lame, faac, x264, coz they're not from SBo

As a work-around, while you are trying to find a browser that does what you want, for youtube at least there is youtube-dl, which will get the video and save it to disk, so that you can watch it with mplayer or whatever.

I'm glad you were successful in building Qt-5.6 and qupzilla-2.0. I'm sure I am missing the same codecs that you are still struggling with now, but I guess they never bothered me. I also have Chrome on my system for Netflix and the rare (for me) video that doesn't work on qupzilla, but I'd still be interested to know if you are able to get everything working. I'd like for Chrome to be for Netflix only. Plus I'm sure people are having this problem with other browsers.

I was debating mentioning youtube-dl in my comment, but it would be a two step process (download the video with youtube-dl, then watch it with your favorite player). mpv will stream the video without requiring you to download it first (although, I believe it requires youtube-dl as a dependency, but it is still a single step once you have mpv).

thanks for all the replies, hope to get qupzilla working with all the codecs, compiling now.

can anyone help me with this part below? Do I edit qt5.Slackbuild before building qt-5.6? thks

source

Seamonkey is a great option and included with full install.

PS: Kikinovak, the whole kitchen sink is only "employed" if you click and open all of the options, if you only use the browser the mail client, WYSISWYG editor etc... are not taking up any memory. Also, when mail and browser are open it is still less mem and CPU then Firefox.