how to watch youtube videos on OpenBSD?

[lucas34]

I tried some tutorials but none worked!
Thanks.

[J65nko]

I have been using OpenBSD for more then 12 years, but if I really have to watch a video I just boot a Linux Mint liveCD

[jggimi]

I use either x11/smtube or www/youtube-dl.

[Beastie]

x11/mplayer with www/youtube-dl, e.g.: mplayer -cache 2048 -cache-min 10 `youtube-dl.py -gf5 -- XCnK3B7Ftow`

This works for me on FreeBSD, so I guess it should also work on OpenBSD.

[hanzer]

www/cclive is another option to download the video [and save it] and watch it on a local media player. It supports more flash video sites than just Youtube. Doing it this way may seem cumbersome at first but there are many advantages, e.g., you will no longer be forced to sit through those obnoxious advertisement videos Youtube now shoves in everyone's face.

[Oko]

Install Firefox or other HTML5 cable browser (Xombrero comes to mind). Go to youtube and opt for HTML trials. If that doesn't work OpenBSD has at least one sometimes two packages per every popular scripting language (Perl, Python, Lua, Ruby) to download videos from YouTube. Since I work a lot lately with Python I go with youtube-dl but I also like Lua based scripts.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by J65nko

I have been using OpenBSD for more then 12 years, but if I really have to watch a video I just boot a Linux Mint liveCD

Why? I have done some semi-serious video editing and encoding on OpenBSD. If you need something better than OpenBSD for your video work next stop should be OS X and some kind of proprietary software.

[LeFrettchen]

Originally Posted by Oko

If you need something better than OpenBSD for your video work next stop should be OS X and some kind of proprietary software.

Why ? You can edit videos with Blender, no ? (with an i386/amd64 CPU, I mean).
But you're a bit off-topic, no ?

[hitest]

Originally Posted by J65nko

I have been using OpenBSD for more then 12 years, but if I really have to watch a video I just boot a Linux Mint liveCD

I dual boot Slackware and OpenBSD so if I want easy I can boot into Linux. Also, I have VLC and youtube-dl installed (Firefox) on OpenBSD.

[Holubecois]

HTML5 stuff works fine for me, you can also try using the embedded link and or videodownloadhelper plugin to watch them.

[yei0K]

I have the "youtube-dl", "zenity" and "vlc" packages installed and I am using a keyboard shortcut, "Mod4-y", that runs the following script:

#!/bin/sh

xterm -e 'youtube-dl --no-part -f 18/0/h264-sd -o $HOME/video.vid `zenity --entry` & \
sleep 8 && vlc -f $HOME/video.vid vlc://quit; \
mv $HOME/video.vid $HOME/video.vid.old; \
pkill -n xterm & ksh'

To watch a YouTube video, I copy the URL to the clipboard, press "Mod4-y", paste the URL into the dialog, the video begins to download and after 8 seconds, vlc streams the video in fullscreen.

I've set up youtube-dl to download videos in medium quality for youtube, liveleak and vimeo ("18" selects medium quality for youtube, "0" for liveleak and "h264-sd" for vimeo). If you want to choose a better quality, run "youtube-dl -F URL" and replace "18/0/h264-sd" with your choices.

"youtube-dl --list-extractors" gives you a full list of supported sites.

There certainly are better ways to do this. Also, this script can be dangerous, because the last line always kills the last opened xterm (which should be the xterm the script runs in, but you may leave the video open to watch it later). This is no problem for me, as I am always running tmux on top of xterm, so if the wrong xterm is killed, I just have to reattach tmux.

[lucas34]

Thanks for the replies.Unfortunately no procedure worked.When I try watching a video keeps saying I need to install flash.I tried with FF, Chromium and Xombrero.
(google transl.)

[ocicat]

Originally Posted by lucas34

When I try watching a video keeps saying I need to install flash.I tried with FF, Chromium and Xombrero.

x11/youtube-dl does not integrate itself into a browser. It is a command-line Python application which is used as an intermediate step.

As an example, assume I want to watch the interview with Theo de Raadt found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mahBZ4lSZHQ. To view this with x11/mplayer as a media player, use the following steps:

1. Download the interview in MP4 format with the following command:
   
   $ youtube-dl -f 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mahBZ4lSZHQ
   
   The -f 18 option is used to limit downloading to MP4 format.
   
   Downloading may take several minutes depending upon your network connection. youtube-dl will update download information until completed:
   

   $ youtube-dl -f 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mahBZ4lSZHQ
   [youtube] Setting language
   [youtube] mahBZ4lSZHQ: Downloading video webpage
   [youtube] mahBZ4lSZHQ: Downloading video info webpage
   [youtube] mahBZ4lSZHQ: Extracting video information
   [download] Destination: mahBZ4lSZHQ.mp4
   [download] 100.0% of 134.86M at  230.96k/s ETA 00:00
   $

2. View the MP4 file with any media player. I have successfully used x11/mplayer and/or x11/vlc. Using mplayer as an example, use the following command:
   
   $ mplayer mahBZ4lSZHQ.mp4
   
   Note that mplayer & vlc are X applications.
3. When finished, save or delete the MP4 file as desired.

Yes, youtube-dl requires manual intervention, however with minimal imagination, one can write a simple shell script to take out some drudgery. The advantage of downloading locally is if videos are worthwhile, you now have a local copy which you can store yourself. Stuff posted on YouTube tends to vaporize at rather inconvenient times.

[lucas34]

Is there any virtualization program for OpenBSD?I could put a distro like mint in the virtual machine only to watch videos.It would be more practical.

[jggimi]

I recommended smtube, in my post above. It is a GUI for searching and playing youtube videos with smplayer.

[lucas34]

smtube works!Goodbye Flash player.

[comet--berkeley]

I tried using mplayer but got this error message:

           ************************************************
           **** Your system is too SLOW to play this!  ****
           ************************************************

But this is running on a quad core computer!?

The problem is that mplayer is only using one core and each of my cores are running at less than 3 Ghz...

I made mplayer use two cores by changing the ~/.mplayer/config

lavdopts=threads=2

It worked ok but then I saw this error message:

It seems there is no Xvideo support for your video card available.

So I added another option and my ~/.mplayer/config looks like this:

lavdopts=threads=2
vo=x11

[Martillo]

Waiting for the new version of SMtube to be ported. The actual does not swallow well the Vevo's tricking.

[jggimi]

gonzalo@ introduced the port and has been making the recent updates.

I use smtube, and so I will try to work up a patch for 1.8 this evening; if I get it working I'll post a patch here for you, and send it to gonzalo@ for consideration.

[censored]

I've looked at youtube-dl. I've never used it, but I did take a peek at the code.

The user agent it sends (ends in "Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 (Chrome)") is fairly identifiable as coming from youtube-dl. Type it into Google to see for yourself. I have no idea what Youtube's opinion towards youtube-dl might be, or if its usage would be considered to be outside of their policy limits, but still - I wonder why the author chose that user agent.

At least, the copy of the program that I looked at had the described user agent, as default.