If it's youtube videos, or any flash+video site like Youtube, check out the clive package. (in Debian & Ubuntu repos for sure)
You then type the clive command followed by the youtube URL, and clive saves the video file in the directory on your disk. Then you can run mplayer to watch it. For example: clive http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGyQ9LiiZ0 places this file in my directory: SFC09178FirstSoftwareFreedomConferenceofKosova2009.mp4 And it runs in mplayer... Youtube lets the player download the video content in the FLV files from URL's, but other sites may have a more enhanced video player, where they have written some custom code which runs in the Flash player, then you may need a way of running their player (from it's SWF file) for that case, check out the openswf project or other open source flash player components. If you want a seamless experience, that runs everything, and runs everything perfectly integrated in the Firefox browser - then use the Adobe plugin. It's quite reliable, has a good security sandbox model, and is generally trustworthy. Michael Sokolov wrote: > David Kaiser <[email protected]> wrote: > >> You do realize that there are free and open source Flash player >> codebases, right? Also, the file format for Flash Video (FLV) is a >> known format. Once you start taking apart the FLV file, you will >> quickly see that the audio format (mp3) and video packets (mpeg4 with >> h.264 or vp6 encoding) are known formats that are supported by open >> source software. > > That's very reassuring to know. So Dante wasn't quite right, was he? > I do not *have* to install a closed-source binary plugin in order to > watch YouTube videos in Firefox, do I? > >> So, it seems ridiculously easy to play a flash video file with open >> source software, but if you want to write a custom operating system that >> sets flags on processes that don't come with source code - you could do >> that too. > > Well, it looks like I won't have to do that after all. That's definitely > a relief. > > MS > _______________________________________________ > LinuxUsers mailing list > [email protected] > http://socallinux.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linuxusers
