Can I watch YouTube videos with Midori? (Trisquel Mini)
Trisquel Mini is a light version of Trisquel and comes with Midori as the default browser. Trisquel uses Abrowser and a Gnash plug-in to play YouTube and other videos, but in my experience Midori fails on YouTube, either showing blank applet space or a perpetual "loading" throbber.
I've read various things about whether or not a plug-in is required to watch the vids, but I haven't been able to watch any in Midori. Is there a way to do it? Or do I have to use Abrowser for this?
I haven't really tried much, but one thought is to enable YouTube's "HTML5 trial", which will use the alternative player for HTML and Javascript for videos that don't have ads on them.
Another possibility if Midori supports custom user scripts (I don't know if it does or not) is ViewTube, which is a Greasemonkey script that replaces the regular YouTube video player with a different one that lets you select the quality and format and play it with the web browser's capabilities. This is usually how I watch YouTube videos on Abrowser.
I'll leave any information on how to get Gnash to work to someone else, since I don't really know about that.
Oh, right: you go into YouTube's HTML5 trial at youtube.com/html5
Tried all the above, neither worked for me. Personally, the best YouTube experience I can get on Trisquel is with a program called SMPlayer YouTube Browser (it's not perfect though, because it does not support WebM). To install it on Toutatis (Trisquel 6.0), open a Terminal window ([Ctrl]+[Alt]+[T]), then write:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install smtube
Then start the program (available from Sound & Video), click on the button with a screwdriver icon, and set player to MPlayer (and if you have a slow connection, you can also set quality to Normal). Now just search for your favourite video, double-click on it, and enjoy the playback. Btw, you can switch to fullscreen anytime by pressing [F].
Enjoy!
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You can also use regular SMPlayer to playback YouTube links which supports WebM as default format in
options->preferences->performance
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The latest version of Midori plays back YouTube fine using latest versions of ViewTube or Linterna Magica with Lightspark or Gnash. Just get the latest Midori and WebKit via PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webkit-team
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:midori
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
On Parabola I can also view videos without any Greasemonkey scripts using Gnash version 0.8.10 and Midori 0.5.2 although the video isn't smooth (probably because I'm using a netbook). The video is smooth when using ViewTube or Linterna Magica (alongside Totem plugin) as they require less resources.
Thanks for the tips, everyone.
to mYself: I tried SMPlayer and it's pretty great. After using Totem/Youtube I thought non-flash Youtube must be pretty terrible quality. SMPlayer Youtube Browser taught me better.
to aloniv: I've now upgraded Midori and checked out Youtube. While it does seem to use the Gnash plug-in, unfortunately all I get is a frozen app-box when I press click-to-play. To be fair, I have no idea how to perform any set-up to use Gnash or Lightspark with Midori, so perhaps I need to configure something. I'd also love to try ViewTube and Linterna Magica but I have no idea what they are and don't see them in the repo.
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ViewTube and Linterna Magica are Greasemonkey scripts.
Linterna Magica can be downloaded from here:
http://linterna-magica.nongnu.org/
ViewTube can be obatined from here:
https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011
Another nice script is LinkTube which provides direct links to embedded YouTube videos:
https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/119244
You can easily switch on and off scipts in Midori via Tools->Userscripts
Regarding Gnash or Lightspark: which of these did Midori find (you can see this by opening URL without quotes "about:version")?
It found Gnash. The exact output of about:version follows.
alias a=b; echo Copy carefully #bout:version
Version numbers in brackets show the version used at runtime.
Command line x-www-browser
Midori midori-0.5.2 ((null))
GTK+ 2.24.10 (2.24.10) Glib 2.32.3 (2.32.3)
WebKitGTK+ 1.8.3 (1.8.3) libSoup 2.38.1
cairo 1.10.2 (1.10.2) libnotify 0.7.5
gcr No granite No
single instance libunique 1.1.6
Platform X11; Linux i686
Identification Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux) AppleWebKit/535.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/18.0.1025.133 Safari/535.22 Midori/0.5
Video Formats H264 [x] Ogg Theora [x] WebM [x]
Netscape Plugins:
Shockwave Flash Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.
Gnash 0.8.10, the GNU SWF Player. Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Gnash comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. You may redistribute copies of Gnash under the terms of the GNU General Public License. For more information about Gnash, see http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash.
Compatible Shockwave Flash 10.1 r999.
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Viewtube and linterna-magica are greasemonkey scripts and are not
packaged in the repos. Greasemonkey is a browser extension; you'll find
it in the addons manager for abrowser; not sure how to add those things
in midori. Once greasemonkey is enabled, go to
linternamagica.nongnu.org; you can install the lantern from there; I
chose the link labeled 'user script-uncompresed', or the like.
I tried ViewTube in Midori recently (though this wasn't on Trisquel) and it seems to work perfectly. Same goes for Epiphany (Web) and Arora. For one of them you actually had to right click on the Install button where you download ViewTube and click a menu entry that said something like "Install Greasemonkey script"; I'm not sure if that was Midori or one of the others I tried.
If you copy and paste the YouTube link into VLC (Open Network Stream option), it will play the H264 or WebM video. I have run into issues with this method if its a streaming event in Flash or if the video is forced to Flash only by the author.
I finally discovered the solution to playing streaming media inline with Midori on Trisquel Mini.
None of the userscripts mentioned above were allowing me to play any video. Midori plays such things in Trisquel (not MINI) usually, so I figured there must be a missing plugin in the default Mini software. Finally, I found something in the Midori FAQ here under "HTML5 Video doesn't play": http://midori-browser.org/faqs/ . According to this, Midori does use Gstreamer. I looked in Synaptic on Trisquel Mini and found gstreamer...-pulse missing; after installing that, videos now play. For some formats I suspect more missing plugins need to be installed from the repo.
I hope this helps anyone else who finds Trisquel Mini unable to stream internet media!