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I'd like to setup my Ubuntu to work without Flash (= not installed), but still be able to view videos on sites like Youtube, wisevid, etc.

I want to try this because recently Flash has crashed a couple times. It also often 'feels' sluggish. Also a couple other flash related questions here got me thinking there might be a better way of doing things.

So how should i do this?



Note: Answers that have flash + work-arounds are also welcome.

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Any reason why you don't want to use Flash? – Cody Harlow Sep 18 '10 at 22:33
2  
Yes. Recently it has crashed a couple times. It also often 'feels' sluggish. And a couple other flash related questions here got me thinking there might be a better way of doing things. – Detnuomnu Sep 19 '10 at 8:39
Are you using 64 bit Ubuntu, Chrome and Flash? – Cody Harlow Sep 19 '10 at 13:38
32 bit Ubuntu, Chromium (preferred) and Firefox and Flash. That was before the fresh install. :) – Detnuomnu Sep 20 '10 at 9:11

14 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

On sites that support it, set videos to use HTML5.

For flash only sites you could use one of the free flash implementations - Gnash and Lightspark.

If you want to avoid flash plugins completely, you can attempt to download the video and then play with VLC. There are some programs that can help to do this. The following are available from the software repositories:

  • youtube-dl (command line) - downloads videos from youtube
  • clive (command line) - downloads videos from a number of websites
  • cclive (command line) - a C++ rewrite of clive
  • abby (graphical) - A GUI frontend to clive or cclive

Not all video websites are supported but for some that aren't you may be able to find the URL of the video that is streaming and download it using wget or a GUI downloader such as d4x. Finding the video URL will require looking at the HTML code. To do this in chromium, you can right click next to the video and click 'inspect element'. You will be able to find the video URL within <embed></embed> tags. It will typically have a .flv or .avi extension. This will only work for websites that do not encrypt the URL (like youtube and megavideo do).

You can 'stream' a video (play it while it is downloading) by opening VLC and using Media->Open File... and locating the video or running vlc FILE in a terminal.

There are also browser extensions available, such as this one for firefox.

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youtube-dl does not seem to work anymore, although apparently you can use a ppa to get to the very latest version, which may. – Nerdfest Sep 20 '10 at 16:42
Yes, the various youtube downloaders regularly stop working when youtube change their site to stop the youtube downloadrs from downloading the videos. Normally this will be fixed by the developers pretty quickly but for users it often requires installing from source to maintain usability. – dv3500ea Sep 20 '10 at 20:23
1  
I would like to add my FlashVideoreplacer to your list. Although it needs flash to be installed to work, it replaces YouTube video on the site, in order to allow to use a different plugin like Totem. The user doesn't need to download the video or use any command, because the process is automagic: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161869 – lovinglinux Oct 23 '10 at 20:59
just one issue(+solution) with HTML5 at YouTube: There is a trick for the cases when there appears to be no HTML5 option available on YouTube: use the "embedded" variant. (For example: <youtube.com/watch?v=3SacL219sic&html5=True>; appears to be not watchable in HTML5, but <youtube.com/embed/3SacL219sic>; plays in HTML5!) – imz -- Ivan Zakharyaschev Dec 23 '12 at 22:48
up vote 9 down vote

If you want to avoid flash and still go ahead and watch YouTube videos, install LightSpark, an open-source implementation of the Flash Player that works well in Ubuntu. Just run the below commands in a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal):

sudo apt-get remove flashplugin-installer

The above commmand is to make sure you don't have flash installed. After that, to install lightspark, run the below commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sssup/sssup-ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lightspark

Then close and start your browser (Chromium/Firefox) again to begin using LightSpark

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1  
how does this compare to flash? and to gnash? - stability, bugs, etc. – Detnuomnu Sep 18 '10 at 18:02
i installed this, but how to use it? youtube is giving missing plugin message. – Detnuomnu Sep 19 '10 at 11:34
You need gnash for this. Lightspark should have installed Gnash. – Broam Sep 20 '10 at 17:13
Gnash wasnt installed untill i installed the plugin vinnie_f suggested. Anyways ive given it a quick testdrive on a couple of sites: Its VERY CPU intensive, and not all flash files are supported yet. The only site that actually played back well was youtube, and there the panel was unusable and the buffering 'ring' stuck in the middle during playback....... looks promising though – Detnuomnu Sep 20 '10 at 22:05
up vote 5 down vote

you may try this too: http://tinyogg.com/

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1  
TinyOgg only works for certain sites but it's awesome. – Broam Sep 20 '10 at 17:13
up vote 4 down vote

For YouTube videos you can use the minitube Install minitube

Minitube is a YouTube desktop client. With it you can watch YouTube videos in a new way: you type a keyword, Minitube gives you an endless video stream. Minitube is not about cloning the original YouTube web interface, it aims to create a new TV-like experience.

Minitube does not use the Flash Player.

http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

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up vote 3 down vote

There is no need to install any extra software like minitube. Your totem, the default movie player in Ubuntu itself is able to play YouTube videos for you.

Check this link. Hope this will help .

http://findasolution.in/component/content/article/38-ubuntu/50-watch-youtube-videos-without-flash-player-in-ubuntu

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good tip. i like solutions that dont require any extra software. – Detnuomnu Oct 31 '10 at 20:35
up vote 2 down vote

in addition to @Bilal Akhtar answer I suggest to install the browser plugin in order to make it work on firefox & chorminium

sudo apt-get install browser-plugin-lightspark
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I've tried the lightspark + browser plugin setup and in my opinion it's not yet on point. Adobe plugin totally suck but at least its a little bit more stable... – vinni_f Sep 21 '10 at 13:46
up vote 2 down vote

Lightspark repository for Natty, Oneiric, Precise
(ppa:sssup/sssup-ppa don't have last two and amd64 packages): 

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:sparkers/daily
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up vote 1 down vote

youtube-dl was already mentioned as an very convenient and open-source alternative to a flash-plugin. Other examples of site-specific flash substitute programs are:

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up vote 1 down vote

The GUI downloader I use is DonwloadHelper http://www.downloadhelper.net/ Works great for me (Ubuntu 10.4 AMD64 and Firefox).

Flash has been crashing for me lately as well (or so Firefox Tells me), but it still running anyway, just close the notification bar with the little "x". If you run Yahoo in a tab, then close that tab, that seems to eventually bring Firefox to a crawl. I stopped using Yahoo and switched to Gmail (plus my other e-mails like hotmail)...

Vortex

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up vote 1 down vote

You can restart the flash plug-in when the browser becomes sluggish.

In Google Chrome:

Task_Manager (Shift+Escape) -> End process on "Plug-in: Shockwave Flash"

In Firefox 3.6.5+:

killall plugin-container
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More generally, use a browser that isolates its plugins in separate processes, so that when flash crashes, the browser doesn't. Both Firefox and Google Chrome provides this, along with probably many others I'm not aware of. – Ryan Thompson Oct 26 '10 at 1:11
up vote 0 down vote

I think you can use greasemonkey userscripts for this. Here are some examples.

one

two

three

For downloading here is an app

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up vote 0 down vote

Install flash anyway... but only for the videos to "load" on the page... then, go to /tmp/ and for a video (hint: search for a video preview), and open the downloaded video in VLC for example :P
You may want too add a "flash blocker" to your browser to prevent load flash objects unwanted...

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wont a flash blocker prevent the movie from loading? Anyways will give this a try. – Detnuomnu Sep 20 '10 at 9:16
yes, but you can "click" on a blocked flash to play it.. – Axel Sep 20 '10 at 12:06
Blocked flash does not prevent the security problems or crash issues OP is having. – Broam Sep 20 '10 at 17:12
for waht i understand, flashblock can block flash before them to load... so, there are no security or crash problems, unless he decides to load explicitly a flash.. – Axel Sep 20 '10 at 17:39
Flashblock can be worked around: see hackademix.net/2008/06/08/block-rick – Broam Sep 22 '10 at 15:51
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up vote 0 down vote

For what it's worth, since installing the new ‘preview release’ of Flash Player 10.2 I've not had a single crash (which is a great improvement; previously Flash has been wicked unstable for me on both Linux and Windows).

I couple this with FlashBlock (for Firefox, though there is a similar add-on with the same name for Chrome) to avoid unwanted Flash ads, Flash-storage user-tracking and exploits.

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up vote 0 down vote

At jan-2012, you may solved the problems. But, one must have in mind that Ubuntu does not upgrade software to a newer version than that in the release. If you have ubuntu 10.04 you can enter getdeb in the repositories, by this way you can upgrade to the last version of programs, although not from the ubuntu official site. By now I have FireFox 9.0.1, it works very fine. I can see videos from many sites, including youtube of course.

64bit processors are not new at 2010, many computers manufactured by 2006 have one of those. Linux does not have problem to address 4GB of ram, but windows does, for that reason the manufacturers more recently sell their computers with 64bit windows versions, being 64bit every time more common, for that reason the absence of 64bit plugins is disappearing. Not so the monopolistic imposition of the monopoly's OS.

Firefox 9 is also working very well under w7-64.

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