Those with ancient computers, can you play Youtube videos?

[timzak]

I found some discussion at the Arch linux forum regarding this possible solution here: http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=35041

I would suggest using that as a guide rather than a howto, as it's old, and not Ubuntu based.

Thanks, I'll give it a try. Makes me wonder, though, about all the replies to this thread that seem to indicate that even slower systems are capable of playing YouTube videos smoothly.

I'll post back after I try this in case it'll help anyone else.

[timzak]

The mplayer plugin does not play videos consistently...sometimes it gets stuck at 97% when loading, and does not begin playing the movie until it is 100% loaded...BUT. When it is successful in playing a Youtube video, the playback is very smooth.

I got some great feedback from Biotube at the Debian forums...he felt that the lack of SSE instructions in the Celeron 466Mhz processer might be the root cause. He suggested that VLC knows "how to fall back to x87 instructions" while Flash doesn't. Seems to make sense to me.

At any rate, this might be the catalyst to find a midtower case so I can use a slightly faster motherboard/cpu combo. This Celeron 466 is part of a microATX system from HP, completely non-upgradeable. I have components but no case/power supply for a Pentium III 733Mhz system that should have no problems handling Flash.

Thanks for everyone's help.