Stop using flash? Or improve the flash experience?

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.

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

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