# Firefox, Gnash and Youtube Videos



## lince (Nov 15, 2012)

Hello.

After having tested with no success the most famous method for watching Youtube videos, it's to say nspluginwrapper + Linux Flash Player, I've found an alternative and easier way for this purpose:

1. Install Gnash SWF Viewer

`# pkg_add -r gnash`

2. Install Firefox

`# pkg_add -r firefox`

And that's all! I didn't need any extra configuration.

Furthermore, if you want to save any Youtube video to your hard disk, there's a very useful Firefox plugin called DownloadHelper. To use this tool, the installation of the win32-codecs package is recommended:


```
# cd /usr/ports/multimedia/win32-codecs
# make install clean
```

Regards!


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## alexseitsinger (Feb 13, 2015)

Thanks for sharing. Gnash isn't available via pkgs (anymore?).


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## jrm@ (Feb 13, 2015)

graphics/gnash is in the ports tree, so you can build it yourself.  I'm not sure why there is no package.  I guess you noticed that this post was from 2012 and are aware flash isn't required for YouTube videos anymore.


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## jrm@ (Feb 13, 2015)

Oh, I see why there is no package, it's marked as broken.


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## shepper (Feb 14, 2015)

I think the adoption of html5 has taken the wind out of graphics/gnash development.  An increasing number of YouTube videos are available via a newer version of Firefox or Chrome.  For other videos I have had great success with python based youtube-dl.  youtube-dl is not as convenient as a browser plugin but you have good control over what malware passing content is run.


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## retrogamer (Feb 15, 2015)

shepper said:


> I think the adoption of html5 has taken the wind out of graphics/gnash development.  An increasing number of YouTube videos are available via a newer version of Firefox or Chrome.  For other videos I have had great success with python based youtube-dl.  youtube-dl is not as convenient as a browser plugin but you have good control over what malware passing content is run.


Just to add to that, the issue is NPAPI, which is going to be retired eventually (it was already dropped by www/chromium).  For more on that, see - http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/24/g...january-drop-support-completely-in-september/ .  There is no reason to keep developing a plugin that is going to be left without a browser.  Also, you can get all Youtube videos to load in Firefox in either 360p or 720p with the Youtube All HTML5 add on - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-all-html5/ or by spoofing a mobile device user agent.  1080p and 480p now require EME, which is why they are available via HTML5 with www/chromium but not www/firefox.  I'd also mention that the multimedia/livestreamer utility works for many websites (Youtube, Twitch, Vimeo, etc.) and allows you to pipe the video into either multimedia/vlc or multimedia/mplayer.

For a better explanation of EME, this article is worth reading. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/01/new-drm-boss-same-old-boss


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## Oko (Feb 15, 2015)

Gnash never worked as advertised. On the another hand swfdec did but active development sized 5 years ago around Flash version 8. Adobe never blinked when asked to release native version of flash for BSDs by many serious entities which needed to utilize proprietary system admin tools which required Flash (YouTube was not even mentioned in those petitions). At this point Adobe has all but dropped even Linux version of Flash. So people use HTML5 to watch YouTube. If that doesn't work for you maybe you should rethink the whole concept of FreeBSD as a desktop OS.


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## hukadan (Feb 17, 2015)

Hi,

If you really need flash, you can give emulators/pipelight a try. As far as I understood, it uses a patched version of Wine (emulators/i386-wine-compholio) to make Windows plugins (including Silverlight) work in your browser. I tried it few weeks ago by curiosity, flash was not working for me, but it was reported to work for others, and I was able to watch a video from Netflix. Also, it seems the maintainer gave up on that port recently.

However, as Oko said, relying on HTML5 is a better solution and using emulators/pipelight is closer to a dirty hack than a real solution. Choice is yours.


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## alexseitsinger (Feb 18, 2015)

Thanks for sharing. I was exploring the different options there were for flash. Indeed HTML5 video works and is much preferred, as does the ndis wrapper.


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## sidetone (Mar 9, 2015)

I want to try to figure out how to get pipelight to run. Perhaps, download the latest .exe plugin file, and run it with native FreeBSD Firefox through pipelight.

I tried a similar thing with using a Linux wrapper to use native Linux plugins, it worked sometimes.


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## retrogamer (Jul 27, 2015)

Just a heads up, since this was bumped, there are quite a few streaming video services that don't require EME for 480p and 1080p (meaning you can get those streams via multimedia/livestreamer or with www/firefox or any other HTML5 browser).  Daily Motion and Vimeo are two good examples, if you are a fan of someone putting content on Youtube it's worth letting them know you'd appreciate the content also being made available on Daily Motion, etc.


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