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

[Forum Admin anticapitalista]

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mps-youtube-bug-and-fix

FAQ/mpsyt

Philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways; the point is to change it.

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[Member PPC]

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@anticapitalista- thanks! The mpsyt fix worked great… But it’s a bit too spartan for me, I’ll stick with smtube – but it’s nice to know I’ve yet another (now working) alternative way to search and stream youtube videos!

P.

[Member olsztyn]

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Now as I am trying to stick to the original SMtube as perfected by PPC, just want to bring up some additional observations…
My previously reported testing was on 64bit antiX Hannie Schaft (19.2) fully updated, SMTube playing from Youtube (not Tonvid) was rather good and stable. As right-clicking manual intervention before every video in order to redirect to mvp was not very practical I typically let it play within SMTube window, but that did not kill ads, so I am still not sure how to get around this. However the main objective was to reduce memory footprint in comparison to playing in full bloat of FF.
Having reported that experience on 64 bit I have turned to my 32bit machine (T60, 1.5G), also fully updated Hannie Schaft 19.2. Here my experience is not so great trying to repeat the same test:
– Playing the same sequence in Youtube of full bloat of Firefox browser seems rock solid stable with memory footprint maintained around 520M total, as reported by Conkie.
– Playing (rather attempt of) the same sequence in Youtube (switched from Tonvid) under SMTube results with both SMTube and WiFi crashing within seconds. WiFi connection is recovered by itself rather quickly but as soon as SMTube starts playing connection is lost again and SMTube closes.

This is rather surprising to me that network connection can be effectively killed by such multimedia program as SMTube each time…
Just two cents of my experience…

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[Member PPC]

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olsztyn wrote:

Playing the same sequence in Youtube of full bloat of Firefox browser

If you don’t mind still having to right click even in Firefox, install the extra “open with”- and the stream opens in MPV (or VLC)

I don’t try to watch videos in smtube+s youtube page directly- I always right click and open the videos with mpv, it’s a bit hard to get used to doing that, but getting rid of very intrusive adds is worth it.

You can also try streamlight, but there’s nothing really as handy as smtube using toonvid’s page- click the video and watch. I changed to youtube because I do like the related videos suggestions, etc…
It’s a shame that I haven’t found a Linux app as good as Newpipe is for Android… (it’s way better than the oficial youtube app)

I have no idea how smpv can take down your wifi connection – maybe it’s trying to download the video in very hi res and that collapses your network connection because your computer can’t handle it?

P.

[Member olsztyn]

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Thanks PPC…
Thank you for suggestions. Not giving up yet on this idea you initiated, especially it works fine for me on 64bit. I like the idea of redirecting to mpv player…
Regards.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by olsztyn.

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[Member AlexZaz]

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Hi All,

Following the suggestion provided by PPC, I would like to share my experience with pipe-view.

Introduction:
– I’m a newbe regarding Linux in general and I still have many many things to learn.
– The experience was provided on a quite new HP pavillon dv7 – 11 or 12 years old with a 64 bits antiX 19.2 fully updated on stable repositories (I think that it should work on a 32 bits PC too but I do not have it to test)

Backgroud:
– I’m looking for a tool that works as Newpipe for Android, as many people I believe, that does not use the official YouTube API but instead scrapes the website for video and meta-data
– Few days ago I fell on a video “antiX Linux running on an old (15+ years) desktop PC in 2021”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVcrLesyeLc
In the video Michael Chu presents gtk-youtube-viewer (the application doesn’t work in an acceptable way on the 2004 PC) but the information caught my fancy.
Looking for more information related to gtk-youtube-viewer I discovered pipe-viewer (and gtk-pipe-viewer) that “parses the YouTube website directly and relies on the invidious instances only as a fallback method” (as reported on the project’s site)
For my understanding, but maybe I’m wrong, this should mean that the application doesn’t use the YouTube API or that it use it as fallback.

Reading on the same site, I saw that it is possible to test the application before to install it.
This requires the installation of some perl dependencies:

libwww-perl
liblwp-protocol-https-perl
libdata-dump-perl
libjson-perl

I did it and tested the application from the /tmp folder as explained.
The application associated with mpv appeared very fast and responsive, therefore I decided to go ahead and to install it.

To do this I needed to install an other dependency:

libmodule-build-perl

once done I executed the install process (surely in the irresponsible way risking to hang my antiX installation – installing further dependencies through the application script instead of synaptic or terminal interface).
Any way, once the installation completed, the system is still running as usual and the CLI pipe-viewer interface works perfectly and it is faster than any other I tested before.

The interface is pretty similar to mps-youtube and, at the moment, it works without asking to delete cache files or providing errors like “Youtube Error 403”.

In terms of ram, it requires around 11.8 MiB vs 22.5 MiB required by mpsyt (using sudo ps_mem.py) – I agree, the difference is very small, in any case we are talking about minimal programs.

I do not want to replace mpsyt that is a great tool indeed, specially if I want to search and play a full music album, but pipe-viewer seems to be a good complementary tool.

To resume:
PRO:
– very fast user experience
– no bugs identified yet (but my test was provided on a short period)
– no other application required (and related dependencies)

CON:
– some dependencies to install

As write above, the test is far to be extensive, due to the short test period and my little skills (particularly on the dependencies implications).

I do not know if I will perform a test related to the GTK version in the near future because the CLI version is satisfying my needs.

This is just my humble experience and any other advice will be highly appreciated (as wrote in my first post).

Thanks to everybody for all the support provided everyday.

Regards

[Member andfree]

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SMTube works OK on my old P4 laptop. Many thanks.

[Member rayluo]

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PPC wrote:

So, this morning I went on a little You tube binge…
So I tried out smtube – videos played great there
P.

Thanks PPC for sharing smtube! It also brings an unobvious by-product, youtube videos played by mpv would show no Ads at all!

However, it turns out there is a category of youtube videos can not be played by smtube/mpv. Those videos are full-length movie with a specific “Free with Ads” tag (in green color). Smtube and “open with mpv” would hesitate and then pop up a dialog box suggesting to install youtube-dl, which I already installed. Choose “open with mpv + youtube-dl” won’t work either, but display one message on console: “[ytdl_hook] ERROR: This video is DRM protected.” I assume this is not really a surprise, but would like to be proved wrong. 😉

[Member blur13]

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Hi!

I use ytp (https://gitlab.com/uoou/ytp). It’s written in Bash and the only dependency it needs is jq, which is a lightweight command-line JSON processor.

Hund did a nice write-up about it:

https://hund.tty1.se/2018/09/01/ytp-a-super-light-command-line-client-for-youtube.html

[Member PPC]

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@blur13 – I’m glad you provided one more alterative to access youtube videos!
The thing I like best in this smtube (browsing youtube web site) + mpv (or vlc, etc) combo, is that it provides a very close experience to that of using a dedicated youtube app (on mobile OS’s) or viewing youtube in a web browser, even in extremely old/low powered computers – you can say to a young kid/ older person- “hey, use this crappy old netbook to watch youtube videos- click here in the youtube icon, choose the video you want to stream, then right click and choose this mpv thingie and the video will pop up in a couple of seconds”. Most people are not really into using the cli, even when it provides the fastest way to do something, using the least resources… It kind of makes sense- youtube is a visual medium- so people expect, at least a thumbail of what they are going to watch.

P.

[Member blur13]

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PPC,

Yes you are probably right, easy of use and resemblence of mainstream usage is, of course, important if the aim is adoption by amateurs. If the aim is to be able to use youtube on obsolete machines then low resource usuage is of primary concern. The beauty of ytp is that you get access to the full youtube experience through the CLI, including “related” and “suggested” videos. You can view descriptions. The videos play ad-free in MPV.

If you have a bit of experience with computers then its hard to imagine the “ignorance” of someone who lacks it, and just how difficult basic tasks can be. In my experience, even getting someone to use Linux in the first place takes some work and demonstration. Conversely, you can’t really beat an iphone with the youtube app, and chromecast, for streaming videos on the TV, when it comes to ease of use. Even my grandmother manages that.

[Member olsztyn]

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PPC wrote:

The thing I like best in this smtube (browsing youtube web site) + mpv (or vlc, etc) combo, is that it provides a very close experience to that of using a dedicated youtube app (on mobile OS’s)

I should admit that in spite of my reasonably exhaustive web search (skidoo might prove my web search was deficient…) I have not been able to find a better way to play youtube videos than SMTube+mpv.
Thanks again, PPC!
The only inconvenience with this:
– Each time a manual right-click and select mpv seems necessary for every video, in spite of mpv being on top as default
– No automatic proceeding to next video on ‘suggested’ list according to preference. Such as done in the actual Youtube.
Seems not a lot of on-going development has been going on to accomplish a perfect Yutube clone…
Thanks and Regards.

Live antiX Boot Options (Previously posted by Xecure):
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[Member calciumsodium]

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Hi @olsztyn,
I use SMTube +vlc. I don’t have to do a manual right click. You just have to install vlc, and vlc would then be selected as default in SMTube. I just left click on the video that I want in SMTube and vlc automatically launches the video. You can resize the vlc screen and next time, it will remember the size.

Also, I use mpv for other applications. I have found this great link that helps me pick a certain kind of resolution to play the videos.
You have to do a little bit of reading how to set up the .lua file. But I find that it is very useful for me.

https://github.com/Samillion/mpv-ytdlautoformat

I hope this information helps you.
Thanks

• This reply was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by calciumsodium.

[Member olsztyn]

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Thanks for the info calciumsodium. I will test it out…

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[Moderator christophe]

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@calciumsodium – That bit about the resolution looks like just what I need for some old computers I manage. Thanks for the tip! 🙂

confirmed antiX frugaler, since 2019

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