(no subject)
As far as I can tell, flash has three uses: advertising, games and youtube. I don't want the adverts and I can live without the games, but youtube is a pretty damned handy feature. It is therefore with a certain measure of annoyance that I discovered last week that the flash player had started to occasionally just freeze up the browser for half a minute while loading a video. I uninstalled it and tried gnash, but that didn't work either.
I've now taken a new tack and installed mplayer-plugin. Combined with a greasemonkey script, this replaces the built-in player and does the job nicely. The only problem was that without a flash player installed, youtube doesn't attempt to insert its player so the usual technique for extracting the URL doesn't work. However, that's populated from a javascript variable which is still in scope once the file has executed, so with a bit of messing around I was able to get it working.
In my opinion, it's an improvement over the default. I think the next big thing in internet video could well be to just provide the file and have a plugin in the user's browser provide a consistent interface without the need for flash support. Oh wait, nevermind.
I've now taken a new tack and installed mplayer-plugin. Combined with a greasemonkey script, this replaces the built-in player and does the job nicely. The only problem was that without a flash player installed, youtube doesn't attempt to insert its player so the usual technique for extracting the URL doesn't work. However, that's populated from a javascript variable which is still in scope once the file has executed, so with a bit of messing around I was able to get it working.
In my opinion, it's an improvement over the default. I think the next big thing in internet video could well be to just provide the file and have a plugin in the user's browser provide a consistent interface without the need for flash support. Oh wait, nevermind.