Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users [LWN.net]

Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users

Posted Feb 16, 2007 18:12 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428)
In reply to: Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users by ipes
Parent article: Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Designers (internetnews.com)

> Just tell your browser to use an MPlayer based plugin for the
> flash mime type

Thanks for that suggestion. I do have the mplayer plugin but have never experimented with the mime type association stuff. I have, however, tried using the Firefox "VideoDownloader" extension to grab the videos and to play them with mplayer. I've been about 50% successful with this, with mplayer failing mysteriously the rest of the time. This "VideoDownloader" thing also has the surprising feature of "phoning home" to tell its creator what you are downloading, which seems odd for something distributed from addons.mozilla.org.

More fundamentally, however, I believe this requires that you install binary windows codecs. I know that these a fairly widely available, but I'm unsure of the legality of them, and they are utterly useless for non-x86.

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Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users

Posted Feb 16, 2007 22:00 UTC (Fri) by ipes (guest, #43384) [Link]

"The highlights of this release are native VC-1/WMV3, On2 VP5 and VP62 (used in some Flash video files) decoding, which works even on non-Intel platforms..."

That from MPlayer 1.0rc1 release announcement last October.

Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users

Posted Feb 17, 2007 6:03 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

I have tried VideoDownloader, and recommend against using it. It is not very reliable, and has a somewhat clunky interface. I've had it crash firefox, I've had it break during upgrades.

I'm quite happy with youtube-dl, a python script which just downloads the flv files to the current directory. It takes any sort of semi-appropriate youtube url as an argument. http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/

Flash for Linux -- It's Not for Users

Posted Feb 20, 2007 8:07 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]

Even easier, my yousuck-script is just one line (splitted for your reading pleasure):

wget --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.4)" \
http://www.youtube.com/get_video?`wget -O - "$1" 2> /dev/null | grep \
player2.swf | cut -d \" -f 2 | cut -d \& -f 1,3 | cut -d \? -f 2`