Jeffrey Needle posted on Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:34:24 -0800 as excerpted: > [Duncan wrote...] > >> Keep in mind that I [...] don't do [...] proprietary software, >> including [...] the proprietary flash player, at all.
> This is off-topic, but maybe others have the same question: how do you > manage with flash player? It seems that all browsers require it. Is > there a way to live without it? I'd love to! Thanks. As Travis says, please avoid the HTML, for this list at least, even if you must use it elsewhere. You are likely aware of what it looks like in pan, and some of us use pan for our mailing lists, including this one, via gmane.org's list2news service. Additionally, please use standard in-context quote/reply format, as it makes further replies in context /so/ much easier! I had to move your reply down below what you quoted of my post here, and that gets irritating to do very often. But to answer the question at hand... I use a mix of coping methods to do without flash. On most sites doing without flash isn't a big issue, since it's not core to the functionality of the site or page, and often, is simply used for unnecessary fluff or ads I'm not particularly interested in anyway. Youtube is the biggest exception for most people. While it does have a no-flash html5 alternative now, for whatever reason that doesn't seem to work in my firefox.[1] But I find minitube a VERY useful alternative, and almost certainly spend WAY more time playing youtube in minitube than I EVER would if I were using the browser directly. Minitube is a (qt and ffmpeg based) stand-alone youtube player that I spend HOURS with. Like many media players, it normally opens in a window, but double-clicking the playing video pops it to full-screen. FWIW, minitube is multi-platform and available for MS and OSX if you use them too, tho as I said I don't. I was a initially a bit skeptical, but once I actually installed and started using minitube, I found it worked very well for me! =:^) So while I'll describe it a bit here, I really urge you to try it out, as words really are no substitute for actual experience! When you start minitube, it opens to the search interface. You can search for keywords or channels and once you put in a few letters an autocomplete box pops up that sometimes gives me choices I'd have never thought of on my own. I normally search for keywords, simply putting in the name of a band I want to look up, or a music style, or the name of a person or place in the news that I wanted to look up, much as I'd do the same thing in the browser on youtube itself or on google. Minitube will load up the first 10 search results and start playing them, one at a time. As it finishes with one, it loads another result, so it always has 10 results available if you want to skip ahead, and there's a load more button too if you want to browse beyond the 10th result ahead. The effect is a practically unending stream of videos playing one after another, generally for as long as you want to keep it going. I've left it going for over a day, thru sleep, going to work and coming back, etc, and it's still going, tho over time the relevancy of the hits starts going down, but that is of course a good way to find even more terms to search on. =:^) Once you hit go and it starts playing, there's a refine search button in the corner of the playlist, which lets you narrow down the search by relevance, date, play-length, high-def vs all, etc. One hint when searching: If you're looking for music, add that to the end of your search phrase. Because otherwise for a lot of terms, you'll get documentaries, videos on products that happen to have the same name, etc. If you add music to the search phrase, it seems to stick to music much better. I assume the same idea probably applies to other things as well (documentaries, sports, etc), but music is the one I'm usually looking for so it's the one I know works. In addition to the search interface, there's a browse interface on another tab, with various categories (popular, films, vehicles, music, animals, sports, news...). I think these are the same categories available on the main youtube page in the browser as well, but I've never actually checked. The third and last tab is subscriptions. There's a function for subscribing to channels, which will then be listed here. There's functions (with hotkey triggers available) to do such things as pause the minitube playback and go to the page for that video on youtube (where you can read the comments, etc), find related videos (like the feature on the youtube page in the browser), find other videos in the series (if it's a part X of N video), copy the URL (for posting in an email to a friend or opening in something else), stop after this video, etc. Additionally, there's a share menu, with the usual facebook/twitter/ email/etc choices. The newest version has a snapshot function as well. Just as most people find happening with the browser youtube, I find myself coming across new groups, etc, that I'd have never known about otherwise. Spongle is a /quite/ interesting one. I'll resist the temptation to tick off a bunch more. A few months ago I was nostalgic and plugged in Enigma, then decided to look it up on wikipedia, and found their list of musical projects based on Gregorian and other chants, and began plugging them into minitube one at a time. ... Divine Works (keyword music helps here!), ElBosco, E Nomine, E S Posthumus, Industrial Monk, Lesiem... This is how I deal with news references to videos, etc, as well. While most folks might watch the video directly in their browser, I take the article as a source for keywords to plug into minitube. A few months ago I saw the controversy over Sia's Chandelier video, and having no idea who Sia was, I plugged that into youtube. The author of the article I had read said they'd not let their kid watch it, but perhaps due to my drama background, to me it was a VERY powerful statement of the evils of addiction and what it can do to you. Then I watched a bunch more Sia videos and decided I had a new performer/composer to like! Some weeks later I caught the Howard Stern Sia program (on minitube of course), and found out that my suspicion about that song being a special one for Sia due to her personal struggle with alcohol addiction was indeed true. I found Yanet Becerra, a new 9-year-old singing sensation from Mexico, via news article, then plugged into minitube, as well. Last year during the Colorado floods near Loveland, which is where I went to high school, and I was familiar with the canyon down which much of that flood came and its flood history from I think the 70s, I plugged "colorado floods" into minitube, and watched several hours of flood videos. Similarly with fukushima, I watched coverage of that on minitube. Like many people, youtube would be my biggest use of flash, but minitube is a great replacement for that case. For other sites there's a less special-case app called, umm... xvideoservicethief. I have it installed and use it sometimes, but in most cases, if it's up on some other site, youtube and thus minitube has it or will have it soon as well. As for other sites that are basically built around flash and won't function without it, I simply go elsewhere. In some cases that has likely lost the company behind a site some money, as I'm shopping and would as likely have bought the product from them as elsewhere, but they took themselves out of the running by requiring flash. To bad for them; there's plenty of other online shops willing to take my money, that don't require flash to do it. There's also projects like gnash and swfdec, with plugins that at least used to handle some flash content. However, I've not had a whole lot of luck with them. I could sometimes get them working, but it seemed like they were very sensitive to their dependencies being built/updated in a particular order, and as soon as I'd update something, they'd quit working, and it'd take me quite some time and work to hit just the right build order to get them working again. So I eventually gave up. But I think once Apple decreed iPhone was flash-free, the until then slow decline of flash's dominance sped up dramatically, and not so many sites actually require it, these days. Between that and other events, I think I read that swfdec was abandoned now, and while gnash might not be actually abandoned, I haven't read anything on it in a long time now, so I doubt it's any more viable than it was and probably rather less, these days. But fortunately, as I said far fewer sites actually require flash these days, so... But as you can no doubt see from the above, youtube is the biggest factor for me, and minitube fills that slot quite well, in some ways far better than the youtube browser does, tho not having the comments in the same window can be inconvenient, and there's no way to multi-tab browse in minitube like I used to do in the browser youtube. But minitube is certainly a good enough substitute youtube player, and I really don't miss much else as there are always other alternatives. --- [1] Youtube/firefox html5 not working: I suspect it's either because my firefox is built without gstreamer, which being on gentoo is an option, and I don't have gstreamer installed here so I turn it off, or due to lack of the ffmpeg h264 codec being in the right place for firefox to use, or because it wants a different h264 codec, or something similar. But my youtube workaround is good enough I've not had reason to spend a lot of time looking into it. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
