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I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM. It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare c

by tyho 12y ago

I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM. It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can do: $ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer - To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer. As a side note, I found this humorous: > It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it. To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is laughable.

chriswarbo 12y ago
youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer. For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality). Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain. If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.
- tyho 12y ago
  Many sites do not have a simple url you can feed into mplayer, iPlayer being a prominet example that uses some proprietary RTMP standard or something.
ars 12y ago
Flash is not just for video. Websites use it for slideshows, games, small interactive animations (for example to demonstrate concepts such as waves and Fourier transforms), IRC, chat boxes, and more. Some of that can (today) be replaced with HTML. It couldn't not that long ago, and not everything can be replaced with HTML even today.
- 13 12y ago
  I've not had Flash installed for 2 years and the single barrier I have (streaming video) is replaced with VLC or youtube-dl. Not a problem in sight, though I originally expected there to be.
josteink 12y ago
> Google strong arms web standards (http2), Add to that Google strong-arming web-DRM into the standard to have exclusive access to Netflix on their closed-down Chromebooks.
theorique 12y ago
Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it. Yeah, but they swore they "wouldn't be evil". /s
kawsper 12y ago
Have a look at livestreamer[0] as well, its a python program that eats URLs and feeds them into your video player. [0] https://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

by tyho 12y ago

chriswarbo 12y ago

youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer. For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality). Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain. If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.

tyho 12y ago
Many sites do not have a simple url you can feed into mplayer, iPlayer being a prominet example that uses some proprietary RTMP standard or something.

ars 12y ago

Flash is not just for video. Websites use it for slideshows, games, small interactive animations (for example to demonstrate concepts such as waves and Fourier transforms), IRC, chat boxes, and more. Some of that can (today) be replaced with HTML. It couldn't not that long ago, and not everything can be replaced with HTML even today.

13 12y ago
I've not had Flash installed for 2 years and the single barrier I have (streaming video) is replaced with VLC or youtube-dl. Not a problem in sight, though I originally expected there to be.

josteink 12y ago

> Google strong arms web standards (http2), Add to that Google strong-arming web-DRM into the standard to have exclusive access to Netflix on their closed-down Chromebooks.

theorique 12y ago

Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it. Yeah, but they swore they "wouldn't be evil". /s

kawsper 12y ago

Have a look at livestreamer[0] as well, its a python program that eats URLs and feeds them into your video player. [0] https://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ https://livestreamer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/