Hack-Free Flash Videos On The Pandora

[dflemstr]

As we all know, we probably won't get a working Flash player any time soon on the Pandora.

Still, many of you will want to watch YouTube videos (and videos from other sites), right?

Well, I've found a way to achieve this, without lag, without massive memory usage, and as integrated as it can get.
I'll let my path of discovery speak for itself:

Situation 1:

↓

Memory usage for the whole browser (excluding shared libs): 37 mebibytes
Experience: Player seems to be a foreign object to the browser, the video tears, and there's no way of controlling the video beyond what the flash player can do.

Situation 2:

↓

Memory usage for the whole browser (excluding shared libs): 22 mebibytes
Experience: Extremely smooth video, no tearing, no lag.

This is of course just one of many solutions, but I found this one to be working better than the others I tried. This also works for sites other than YouTube if you alter the extension. Note, however, that you either have to have the official Google Chrome browser (not Chromium) or a GStreamer FLV and H264 codec + Chromium in order to be able to decode flash videos.

Yet another reason for porting Chromium to the Pandora I guess.

Comments?

 

[lulzfish]

Chromium should work, but I've also made my own Qt/WebKit browser that calls GStreamer to play YouTube videos. It also works for this anime site I like, and I'm planning to have a generic filter structure based on Lua scripts or something. It should be fun.

 

[atomicthumbs]

:3

 

[renwils]

http://neosmart.net/YouTube5/

I've had this link sitting in my bookmarks for a while. You could use this for any browser with html 5 support.

Edit: Firefox isn't going to work any time soon since this would require licensing necessary codecs. Though there is a greasemonkey script that will allow you to stream the video to an outside plugin, like mplayer-plugin.

 

[dflemstr]

Chromium should work, but I've also made my own Qt/WebKit browser that calls GStreamer to play YouTube videos. It also works for this anime site I like, and I'm planning to have a generic filter structure based on Lua scripts or something. It should be fun.

If I were you, I'd spend that dev time on creating Chromium extensions instead, so that all can profit from your work.

Or, well, we could of course also create a separate browser for each video site... It's so easy to use WebKit in Qt that it would be an actual possibility

 

[second exodous]

There are a lot of ways to get around flash, but I still hope that Adobe makes official packages for these ARM Linux devices.

 

[WizardStan]

There are a lot of ways to get around flash, but I still hope that Adobe makes official packages for these ARM Linux devices.

It'd be a lot easier if they'd just open source their player: let someone else do the work for them.

 

[Trip]

This would make an awesome test video for a portable device. Make you stagger all over the place B)

 

[second exodous]

There are a lot of ways to get around flash, but I still hope that Adobe makes official packages for these ARM Linux devices.

It'd be a lot easier if they'd just open source their player: let someone else do the work for them.

I wish, but with HTML 5 dependence on flash will ease a little.

 

[Chip]

I wish, but with HTML 5 dependence on flash will ease a little.

Actually, it should go away completely - at least for video. Flash player may be free for end users, but developers, producers and hosts pay to license it. With it's built-in streaming video capabilities, HTML5 eliminates the need to pay those licenses. You better believe that, given the opportunity, sites like Youtube will gladly switch to the free option.

 

[second exodous]

I wish, but with HTML 5 dependence on flash will ease a little.

Actually, it should go away completely - at least for video. Flash player may be free for end users, but developers, producers and hosts pay to license it. With it's built-in streaming video capabilities, HTML5 eliminates the need to pay those licenses. You better believe that, given the opportunity, sites like Youtube will gladly switch to the free option.

So companies will dump it completely! I'm happy, but I thought people might keep using containers like flash for DRM reasons. I've only read this and that so I don't know for sure.

 

[OrR]

Flash 10 for ARM should be coming next year.
If you want to watch YouTube videos without a flash player, you could always just use keepvid.com etc. iPhone, Palm Pre etc. have YouTube apps that simply stream the mp4. Somebody could simply make one or we could use a browser plugin as suggested.

 

[Etinin]

Flash sucks on any platform. It deserves a quick and painful death.

 

[second exodous]

If you want to watch YouTube videos without a flash player, you could always just use keepvid.com etc. iPhone, Palm Pre etc. have YouTube apps that simply stream the mp4. Somebody could simply make one or we could use a browser plugin as suggested.

Funny thing is if there was a plugin for firefox it would be beneficial for any platform to cut flash out of youtube.

 

[lulzfish]

I've made my own Qt/WebKit browser that calls GStreamer to play YouTube videos. It also works for this anime site I like, and I'm planning to have a generic filter structure based on Lua scripts or something. It should be fun.

iPhone, Palm Pre etc. have YouTube apps that simply stream the mp4. Somebody could simply make one or we could use a browser plugin as suggested.

I did. I used Qt and Webkit, and it took a few hours. Like I said, it's just a special browser that spawns a GStreamer pipeline to play videos. Sadly, I don't have embedding skills, so the video shows in a separate X window using xvimagesink.
It's also scaled to something like 3/4 size by default, so YouTube fits neatly on a Pandora-sized screen.
I've also added an anime site I like, and I could develop a filter for Escapist if I wasn't busy with finals. I think I could make some kind of Lua plugin system so people can add their own favorite video sites easily without bothering me to do so.

 

[Sphinxter]

Flash must die.

 

[CoMiKe]

I think that, instead of using Flash or HTML5 to play Internet media contents, the best thing would be to have a browser plugin that detects video URLs and open it on the integrated MPlayer.

That would be a lot more optimized and useful, as the browser window would take a lot of the space and there would be little room left for the video.

 

[amf66]

Flash must die.

+1 I can't wait until everyone uses the <video> tag. Hopefully it happens soon.

 

[Vorporeal]

I think that, instead of using Flash or HTML5 to play Internet media contents, the best thing would be to have a browser plugin that detects video URLs and open it on the integrated MPlayer.

That would be a lot more optimized and useful, as the browser window would take a lot of the space and there would be little room left for the video.

Fullscreen much?

 

[ImmaculateChimp]

When people on these forums mention flash support(or a workaround for flash) it always seems to be in conjunction with youtube, I can't wait for the day when I'll(hopefully) be able to run hulu flawlessly on Pandora.