ninjaaron
September 5th, 2011, 05:45 AM
I discovered this firefox add-on, FlashVideoReplacer. It takes flash videos and allows you to open the stream with another plugin, an external player, or download them. It works on most of the major sites, but not some of the smaller ones, so if you watch a lot of television shows on some of the more obscure sites, you may have problems. I've taken to downloading my shows via torrent, so it's not an issue for me.
It seems to stream slightly more slowly than with flash, but you can chose to force HTML5 if it's available, which is fast. Course, downloading them with an accelerator is always the fastest anyway.
Before anyone asks, "why would you ever do this?" there are two reasons. One is ideological; to only use FOSS software. For many of us, the Flash plugin is the last piece of proprietary software we're using. The other reason is that flash is really horrible on system resources, takes a lot of processor power, and therefore slows everything else down and uses up battery very quickly.
If you choose to do this, you will probably want to install a new media plugin for your browser (unless you want to watch everything in an external browser). I'd suggest gecko-mediaplayer.
sudo apt-get install gecko-mediaplayer
It seems to stream slightly more slowly than with flash, but you can chose to force HTML5 if it's available, which is fast. Course, downloading them with an accelerator is always the fastest anyway.
Before anyone asks, "why would you ever do this?" there are two reasons. One is ideological; to only use FOSS software. For many of us, the Flash plugin is the last piece of proprietary software we're using. The other reason is that flash is really horrible on system resources, takes a lot of processor power, and therefore slows everything else down and uses up battery very quickly.
If you choose to do this, you will probably want to install a new media plugin for your browser (unless you want to watch everything in an external browser). I'd suggest gecko-mediaplayer.
sudo apt-get install gecko-mediaplayer