YouTube on the Big Screen

Shawn Powers — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 15:32:58 +0000

For years I've been jealous of folks with iOS devices who could just send their phone screens to their Apple TV devices. It seems like the Android screen-mirroring protocols never work right for me. My Sony Xperia has multiple types of screen mirroring, and none of them seem to work on my smart TVs or Roku devices.

YouTube is a completely different story. It doesn't matter if I'm on a laptop, iPhone, Android device or Chromebook, I can "cast" the video to any of my Roku devices or smart TVs without any problems at all. It works and works well. The great part about casting is you can shut off the connection from the sending device, and it keeps playing! Because 95% of the stuff I want to display on the TV from my phone is YouTube videos, I couldn't be happier. Plus, I can check email on my phone while the family watches the latest "Bad Lip Reading" video on the big screen! Take that Apple TV!

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FlashVideoReplacer - Use Native Video Playback Facilities On Sites Like Youtube

Michael Reed — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

FlashVideoReplacer is a Firefox add-on that strips out the Flash video on sites such as YouTube, automatically replacing it with a standard video file that is re-embedded on the page. In a nutshell, this means that a native player is used instead of the embedded Flash player. This can offer a huge performance benefit for web-based video playback, particularly full-screen playback.

Flash video performance on Linux is quite poor compared with that of Windows. Even if the playback is acceptable for a given situation, it tends to be inconsistent, often slowing down periodically. Full-screen video playback is particularly poor, often becoming unacceptably choppy. This high CPU usage also slows down the rest of the system.

There is a solution, although it has some limitations, in the form of a Firefox add-on called FlashVideoReplacer. This add-on dynamically changes the website sourcecode in order to replace the Flash video with a format that can be played using a native video playback plugin. This means that sites should look much the same but the videos themselves playback smoothly and consistently while using very little CPU. Best of all, it makes high quality, full-screen playback viable on Linux.

The main limitation of the add-on is that it currently only supports three sites, YouTube, Blip.tv, Vimeo. Fortunately, these are three of the most popular sites and FlashVideoReplacer wont interfere with video playback on sites on which you are already using standard flash playback.

Another problem is that seeking doesn’t work on material that hasn’t yet entered the cache. This means that you sometimes have to wait a while before seeking forward, although, once the whole video has loaded things begin to work as expected.

The familiar YouTube display, yet not so familiar?

Installation

I installed the add-on from the Mozilla Firefox website in the usual way. Following the advice on the add-on page, I installed the MPlayer-based Gecko Media Player using the Ubuntu package manager. Upon restarting Firefox, YouTube videos weren't replaced as expected due to a conflict with the FlashBlock extension that I had installed. Not to worry though, I simply added YouTube to the whitelist inside the FlashBlock preferences. Following this, I reloaded the page, and sure enough, the YouTube video popped up inside an embedded, but native, video player. Right-clicking on the playback window allows the user to access the preferences for the video player itself, giving a lot of options for video and audio quality.

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