Cannot Play Youtube

[tlcmd]

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I am currently using my "back up" computer while mine gets a new sound card. I have taken advantage to do a pristine install of both Windows XP SP3 and LMDE (Mate) after an equal partitioning of my 320 Gig HDD. Also wanted to get the Windows XP as up to date as possible since support ceases in April of 2014.

I am running "Oldie," a 12+ year old cpu which has a 1.4 Athlon chip, 1536 RAM, and actually runs both Windows XP and/ the upgraded LMDE (mate) remarkably well on a dual boot. I am in the process of switching my OS completely to LMDE, especially since JRivers has come out with their Media Centre 19 in a Linux format (which they are still fixing). Had to load LMDE with Unetbootin from my external HDD since "Oldie" has only cd drives, but no dvd/cd drive.

Interestingly, this unit will play Youtube videos fine on Firefox on Windows XP, but not on LMDE.

Any suggestions as to how I might fix this problem?

My newer computer plays those Youtube videos fine on LMDE (Mate).

Thanks for your interst and help.
tlcmd (AKA Dick)

[cwsnyder]

Is it particular Youtube videos, or the Youtube site in general? And are you using Firefox on Mint, or Chromium/Chrome or one of the other Linux browsers? I have been told, although I haven't looked into it, that there are at least 3 different ways in which Youtube videos may be accessed: Shockwave Flash, HTML5, and the native encoding (see https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en ). This makes it difficult to diagnose in a forum what your particular problem may be. Youtube tries to make their site as accessible as possible, and Mint usually includes all of the proprietary codecs needed to watch the on-line video sites, but Firefox/Chromium and other free/libre browsers are limited to Shockwave flash to version 11.2.202.327 or older because Adobe dropped support for Linux.

For the newer Flash games and some Youtube videos, you need to watch them using Google Chrome browser, or at least the Pepperflash plugin which comes bundled with Google Chrome.

[tlcmd]

Thanks for the reply. I did have to install the latest Shockwave Flash manually and not being able to play youtube videos on LMDE (mate0 is not really a hardship. i just wondered why it would play on Windows Xp and not play on LMDE on the same old ancient computer.

[py-thon]

Does it work to download the video with youtube-dl and watch it in totem?

I use Opera with mint-flashplugin and it has always worked fine (but I am no youtube-addict so I might just have been lucky so far).