Re: [Pan-users] Unable to upload binaries in Pan

[Duncan]

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