Playing Youtube videos on my limited-resource notebook

[n1ksn]

Greetings, all.  My Gateway LT40 notebook computer runs a dual boot with LL and AntiX's MX-15.  (LL is my preferred distribution, but I like to play around with alternatives.)  Playing Youtube videos has been a challenge on this little machine. 

To avoid browser issues, I installed SMTube in both distros, with VLC being the player it calls.  Well, with this setup LL did OK playing the videos at about 80-90% CPU usage.  But MX-15 ran with 100% CPU usage and usually the image froze while the sound played.

After some bumbling around I went to the SMTube settings menu and found that it could use several different players.  I installed and tried SMPlayer with better results than VLC, but with the video lagging the audio by about 1 second in MX-15. 

Then I tried mplayer, which is a command line program.  Bingo!  With mplayer the backend to SMTube, Youtube videos played just fine in both distros.  LL still uses less CPU than MX-15, but they are both way down from using VLC or SMPlayer.  I did have to reduce the desired resolution to 360 to get the full video frame, but I blame my 1240 x 600 display for that.  Also, there are fewer controls while watching the video, but this doesn't bother me. 

In retrospect this all makes sense, because as a command line program I'd expect mplayer to use fewer resources.  But it took me a while to figure this out.  I thought I'd pass my experiences along to the LL forum in case this would help someone else.  Linux Lite could actually play the videos without changes, but by using the SMTube and mplayer combination the CPU usage is down to something like 10-15%, a big jump downward, and I like that.  If I'm playing a music video just to listen, I can minimize the video window and do other things at the same time.

Cheers,
Andy N1KSN

[Valtam]

I use mplayer for watching broadcast TV because it seems to have the least overhead of all the players when dealing with high quality video.

[n1ksn]

Thanks for your comment, Jerry.  I need to spend more time exploring what's available on the command line, especially when resources are on the light side.  Maybe I should replace that dual boot distro MX-15 with Arch Linux and learn to do everything the hard way.  ;->

Andy

[anon222]

Mplayer is very light and should play videos on a very low hardware. I recomend mpv - video player based on MPlayer/mplayer2

Code:

apt-get install mpv

Instructions on how to use it are in man pages.

Code:

man mpv

I mostly use QMPlay2 which can play YT videos http://ubuntuguide.net/install-qmplay2-q...untu-linux
It's preety quick and has a modular GUI

[torreydale]

What about just using MiniTube as your YouTube client?

[n1ksn]

Thanks for the suggestions.  I will check them out for sure.

By the way, I decided to replace the dual booted MX-15 with Arch Linux, just for giggles.  After one false start it has gone pretty well and I have a working LXDE desktop (just to try something different from my favorite Xfce).  I got the SMTube/mplayer combo working there, but if I can go more minimal even better.

Cheers,
Andy N1KSN