Watching Youtube in very old (even 32bits) pc’s (and in more recent ones too)

[Member PPC]

So, this morning I went on a little You tube binge… I was testing out badwolf browser on my parents very old 32bits laptop – it runs great, but with JS on, trying to load YouTube was a no no…
So I tried out smtube – videos played great there – using the default toonvid default homepage. Curious about what would happen if I tried to view Youtube’s homepage from inside smtube:

Step 1– in smtube’s settings menu > sites > and enter and select as default site “youtube.com”).
Step 2– to view a video, right click and select to open it with mpv (mpv+ytdl no longer seems to respect the default video resolution I select in smtube’s menu- always tries to play in full hd)

Youtube loads fast, even in this 20 years old laptop. Navigate YouTube’s page like in a usual way, you can even do searches.

If using a very old computer set up the default video resolution to be 360 or less, and it plays just fine! Double lick (double clicking works best) the video window to make it go fullscreen.
The only negative side? Subtitles aren’t available (I’m sure there’s a way to configure youtube-dl to download them and show them with the video, but it’s nothing I’m really interested in doing).

I spent some 45 minutes watching funny videos in a 20 year’s old laptop that ran as fast as the most modern computer money can buy. The only “problem” was that It wasn’t HD video? Is that really a problem for you? It isn’t for me- I do watch HD videos on my more powerful desktop, but don’t miss that at all on lower specs machines…

P.

• This topic was modified 2 years ago by PPC.

[Moderator christophe]

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Wow! Thanks for this, PPC.
I’ve used smtube, and switched to the youtube.com as well.
But I never right-clicked & used the options there. Playing with mpv works sooo well, as you say.

And (so far, anyway), it seems that the (unskippable) youtube.com-interface ads, are in effect, skipped using the right-click context menu.
So basically, IMO, it’s the best of everything, regarding viewing online videos on very old / 32-bit computers.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member marcelocripe]

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Hi PPC,

This is another one of your excellent topics, here on the forum.

In another topic, which I was unable to locate, you taught us (me) how to play / play YouTube videos via the terminal:

$ celluloid https://youtu.be/mUicofUy3Bk

ou

$ mpv https://youtu.be/mUicofUy3Bk

As the black window of the terminal really frightens novice users, I did several tests with SMTube on a computer with a Pentium 4 processor and 1GB of DDR RAM. In the tests that I did, Celluloid reproduced with better quality than MPV.

To make Celluloid the default SMTube player:

Menu, Applications, Multimedia, SMTube, View, Settings, General, keep the Site: Tonvid.com or change to Youtube.com, click on the Players tab, click on the “+” sign to add, enter the Name: Celluloid, in Executable: celluloid, Ok, Ok.

marcelocripe
(Original text in Brazilian Portuguese)

———-

Olá PPC,

Este é mais um dos seus excelentes tópicos, aqui no fórum.

Em um outro tópico, que eu não consegui localizar, você nos (me) ensinou a executar/tocar vídeos do YouTube através do terminal:

$ celluloid https://youtu.be/mUicofUy3Bk

ou

$ mpv https://youtu.be/mUicofUy3Bk

Como a janela de cor preta do terminal assusta muito os usuários iniciantes, eu fiz vários testes com o SMTube em um computador com processador Pentium 4 e 1GB de memória RAM DDR. Nos testes que eu fiz, o Celluloid reproduziu com melhor qualidade do que o MPV.

Para tornar o Celluloid como tocador padrão do SMTube:

Menu, Aplicações/Aplicativos, Multimídia, SMTube, Ver, Configurações, Geral, manter o Site: Tonvid.com ou alterar para Youtube.com, clique na aba Reprodutores, clique no sinal “+” para adicionar, digite o Nome: Celluloid, em Executável: celluloid, Ok, Ok.

marcelocripe
(Texto original em Português do Brasil)

[Moderator christophe]

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@marcelocripe – Good related tip, regarding adding celuloid into the context menu.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member calciumsodium]

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Thanks for the suggestion about smtube and mpv. I have also found out that smtube (v20.6.0) works also very well with vlc as the video player.

[Member seaken64]

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Thank you PPC. I will try this out on my 20+ years old machines. I have used SMTube for years but did not know of these tweaks.

Seaken64

[Moderator christophe]

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Just tried this out on my oldest – an “Athlon XP 2200 +” – from 2002, and no SSE2. It works very well.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member olsztyn]

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Thank you PPC for these tips… I did not know…
Aside from this right-click to play from mpv with ads skipped:
What is the main advantage switching from Tonvid to Youtube site? I am thinking it could be better video suggestions, anticipating viewer’s interest, not just pure search result as in Tonvid. In addition, playing such selected by Youtube queue of videos. However from my testing it appears that if you let such sequence of anticipated videos play as queued then adds are displayed as usual, unless each video is right clicked and directed to mpv separately, which means manual intervention when each video ends.
Is there any way to set this entire scheme to play such sequence of videos using mpv without manual right-click > mpv redirection?
Thanks again for bringing my attention to smtube, as it looks like less resource intensive than playing Youtube from browser…

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
https://antixlinuxfan.miraheze.org/wiki/Table_of_antiX_Boot_Parameters

[Moderator christophe]

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Hi, olsztyn,

My understanding is based on this notice at the bottom of the smtube window:

“Now you can fix the “Daily Limit Exceeded” problem by using a personal Youtube API key. Click here for more info.
Alternatively you can visit YouTube.com.”

I have gotten the daily limit exceeded error message, but switching to the youtube.com interface, got me back in, but with ads. So I think that’s the reason for the other interface – to show us ads, but it still allows one to view videos.

(BUT – now that I know about the right-click + mpv hidden feature, I’ve been able to avoid ads – so far.)

Further down from that notice, it says, “Developed with YouTube,” so I guess it’s an “approved” alternate interface, for lower-spec machines. (That’s my take on the situation.)

If someone knows better, please chime-in. 🙂

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by christophe.

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

[Member AlexZaz]

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Good morning to everyone,

Looking on the web, I found an interesting CLI project to parse the YouTube website directly.

The project is available at the following link:
pipe-viewer

Any advice will be very appreciated.

Thanks and kind regards

[Member AlexZaz]

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https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer

[Member PPC]

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AlexZaz wrote:

https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer

I tried a similar CLI app a while ago, but ended up going back to the regular YouTube web page (in the devices that run it well) and smtube.

pipe-viewer has to many dependencies for my taste… so I didn’t even try installing any of them, when it complained something was missing…
If you do like pipe-viewer, feel free to write up how you made it work in antiX and how well it behaves…
The GTK version does look like a nice alternative for smtube and similar programs!

P.

[Member Xecure]

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AlexZaz wrote:

Looking on the web, I found an interesting CLI project to parse the YouTube website directly.

pipe-viewer

Any advice will be very appreciated.

It looks pretty similar to mps-youtube on antiX (though mps-youtube has problems with mpv, so I need to use it with celluloid instead).

General guide for using mps-youtube to watch videos on antiX Linux
For you to be able to search and watch videos with mps-youtube. you need to configure a few things.
1. launch mps-youtube from terminal
mpsyt
2. You can see all options you can change in mpsyt with the set command inside mpsyt
set
I will enable video search, disable music search (as I only want to search for videos) and change the video player to celluloid and set the max resolution to 720p

set show_video true
set search_music false
set player celluloid
set max_res 720

With this I can search for any video, play it at 720p (if available), and all from inside the terminal.
3. Search for a youtube video. You need to start the search with “.” or “/” before the search terms. For example, searching for antix linux videos from inside mpsyt
.antix linux
Or from a terminal without having launched mpsyt beforehand.
mpsyt .antix linux
4. Play the desired videos by writing the number of the search result. You can play one individual video or create a list to play
For one individual video, just write the number and hit enter. If you want to play different videos in order (like creating your own playlist), use “-” to indicate all videos between a rage, or specific videos by separating with comas. For example, I want to play videos 1 to 3 and video 6 from the search results:
1-3, 6
5. you can also play directly using a youtube url. For example, playing dolphin_oracle video on antiX 19:
playurl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUicofUy3Bk
Or playing a youtube playlist, first giving the playlist to mpsyt
pl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HAEb5LAnIE&list=PLTRkAa6x1htVkf5ObKGY2uFZfFwaIY7-W
and then playing all videos from the first in order
1-
Or shuffle them with shuffle if you are playing a music playlist
shuffle
and then play 1-
The only problem I experience with celluloid is that I need to close the window to move to the next video on the playlist. VLC moves to the next item in the playlist automatically, but VLC has too many dependencies in comparison. You can try other video players also.

For more about creating playlists, autoplay, downloading videos, etc, read the help information inside mpsyt or use this command.
mpsyt --help | less

It is less user friendly compared to smtube, but all this can be done from a terminal/cli interface, if that is what you desire.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member PPC]

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@Xecure: nice tips, thanks!
when trying to run any command to play videos inside msyt (or calling it from the cli, ex: mpsyt .antix linux)

I get this:

Error fetching data. Possible network issue.
Youtube Error 403: The request cannot be completed because you have exceeded your <a href="/youtube/v3/getting-started#quota">quota</a>.

P.

[Member Xecure]

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PPC wrote:

I get this:

Error fetching data. Possible network issue.
Youtube Error 403: The request cannot be completed because you have exceeded your <a href="/youtube/v3/getting-started#quota">quota</a>.

EDIT: See following anticapitalista’s reply. Links to more info to solving the API key issue. (and also the FAQ of mps-youtube.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by Xecure. Reason: Remove comment for better answer provided by anticapitalista

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

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