2021 Youtube Player For G3 And Low End

[Dronecatcher]

This has been written specifically for @mectojic but will doubtless be useful for anyone trying to make Youtube work on a slow G3.

The 'engine' for this is the excellent PPCMC by @alex_free which is an invaluable Swiss Army Knife of utilities all in one place.

So, @mectojic after downloading PPCMC and placing it in Applications (must be located there) create a folder, Youtube in the Movies folder.
Download the attached archive, open and place Choob into Applications and the 3 scripts into Documents - create shortcuts for all in the Dock (scripts must be in the righthand section of the Dock.)

Choob is a TenFourFoxBox so will require TenFourFox to be already installed.
It's a Youtube browser that's loaded with a vintage Nokia user agent and a modified config file that will not allow Youtube videos to load up - this will save precious CPU cycles (quite a lot in fact - without that mod the browser uses 100% CPU.)

The 3 scripts offer playback at 144P, 240P and 144P without framedropping which is a more pleasant quality.

After searching for your video in Choob, press shift-cmd-u to copy the video url, then click your desired script shortcut in the Dock.

Youtube-dl within PPCMC will then download both the video and audio, then 'splice' these together before opening in ffplay - this is much quicker than converting the files to another format (especially on a G3.)

After playing the video is deleted.

A word of warning - not every video on Youtube will be available in the formats this utility employs, so there may be errors but as you can see in the screenshots, 66% CPU on a 500Mhz G3 iMac for 240P video with high quality m4a audio isn't too shabby!

 

[AtaruBarreau]

This is great. Can't wait to test it out with my iBook. It'll do the trick until I can get my new TiBook to boot for general PPC-streaming purposes.

 

[RogerWilco6502]

This will be fun to play around with! Thanks for putting this together

 

[Dronecatcher]

This will be fun to play around with! Thanks for putting this together

All the scripts open in text editiors - feel free to dabble/improve/modify

 

[RogerWilco6502]

All the scripts open in text editiors - feel free to dabble/improve/modify

Awesome! Thanks for the tip!

 

[mectojic]

@Dronecatcher, you sir are a hero.
As a new member to these forums, I was keeping a low profile and getting frustrated trying to follow all the different procedures on here from years ago. I had suspected they would not work, but I kept trying anyway.

Thanks so much for sharing a working method. It was easy to use and simple. This is on my 466 Mhz iBook Clamshell with 576 mb ram, and I can confirm it will run fullscreen, framerate a little low @240p. I'm determined to do as much as possible on this laptop, and you've just added a ton of functionality.

Here's an example, playing some music on Youtube. Nice and atmospheric! Playing @144p only requires 30% CPU, so I can smoothly do anything else on the laptop.

Since you were so helpful, I had a few questions/requests:

1: 360p? I know this is asking for the impossible on a low-end G3, but I feel that 360p is the minimum resolution to make something seriously "watchable" – especially something with text in the video.
2: if your script splices video and audio, could you make a script that just downloads and plays Youtube audio? (Maybe one already exists for that, but since you've got it working so well, may as well add this right?)
3: If I wanted to watch a Youtube or Twitch livestream, how could I do that?
4: my coding skills are non-existent, but here's a question. If I wanted to keep the video rather than let it delete after watching, do I just need to use the same script but remove the line "rm ~/Movies/Youtube..."?
5: Assuming I can keep a video, can I watch it using any other program? I'd ideally want a way to play/pause the video. FFplay can't do that, right?

I admit I ask for a lot here, but I thought I might as well since you guys have years of knowledge about these things, and I'm just a guy who bought this iBook last month

 

[Dronecatcher]

1: 360p? I know this is asking for the impossible on a low-end G3, but I feel that 360p is the minimum resolution to make something seriously "watchable" – especially something with text in the video.
2: if your script splices video and audio, could you make a script that just downloads and plays Youtube audio? (Maybe one already exists for that, but since you've got it working so well, may as well add this right?)
3: If I wanted to watch a Youtube or Twitch livestream, how could I do that?
4: my coding skills are non-existent, but here's a question. If I wanted to keep the video rather than let it delete after watching, do I just need to use the same script but remove the line "rm ~/Movies/Youtube..."?
5: Assuming I can keep a video, can I watch it using any other program? I'd ideally want a way to play/pause the video. FFplay can't do that, right?

1: That's the first thing I tried and couldn't get a reasonable framerate on my iMac - so assumed your iBook would struggle even more.
2: Yes, I've done this many times before with different methods and versions - I'll do a new version soon.
3: PPCMC7 does that already
4: Yes, that's correct - just move the video so it's not overwritten.
5: Yes, FFplay certainly can - again you can use PPCMC7 for that, or one of my MPlayer scripts that are on the forum.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Incidentally @mectojic if you want to try the streaming 360P option, I've attached the script.

 

[mectojic]

Thanks for that. As predicted, 360p is a no-go. I suppose CorePlayer, RealPlayer, VLC, Quicktime all don't work anymore?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Thanks for that. As predicted, 360p is a no-go. I suppose CorePlayer, RealPlayer, VLC, Quicktime all don't work anymore?

Coreplayer never worked on a G3. My Mplayer script mViewX can play h264 360P on my G3 iMac but only just.....

 

[nbrb]

wow this is fantastic. i absolutely love that the community keeps these relics going. my first iMac and i loved it

 

[alex_free]

@Dronecatcher, you sir are a hero.
As a new member to these forums, I was keeping a low profile and getting frustrated trying to follow all the different procedures on here from years ago. I had suspected they would not work, but I kept trying anyway.

Thanks so much for sharing a working method. It was easy to use and simple. This is on my 466 Mhz iBook Clamshell with 576 mb ram, and I can confirm it will run fullscreen, framerate a little low @240p. I'm determined to do as much as possible on this laptop, and you've just added a ton of functionality.

Here's an example, playing some music on Youtube. Nice and atmospheric! Playing @144p only requires 30% CPU, so I can smoothly do anything else on the laptop.

View attachment 1702628

Since you were so helpful, I had a few questions/requests:

1: 360p? I know this is asking for the impossible on a low-end G3, but I feel that 360p is the minimum resolution to make something seriously "watchable" – especially something with text in the video.
2: if your script splices video and audio, could you make a script that just downloads and plays Youtube audio? (Maybe one already exists for that, but since you've got it working so well, may as well add this right?)
3: If I wanted to watch a Youtube or Twitch livestream, how could I do that?
4: my coding skills are non-existent, but here's a question. If I wanted to keep the video rather than let it delete after watching, do I just need to use the same script but remove the line "rm ~/Movies/Youtube..."?
5: Assuming I can keep a video, can I watch it using any other program? I'd ideally want a way to play/pause the video. FFplay can't do that, right?

I admit I ask for a lot here, but I thought I might as well since you guys have years of knowledge about these things, and I'm just a guy who bought this iBook last month

The Power Of PowerPC, Streaming Twitch At 160p With A 300MHZ G3 On Panther.

In the latest update of PPCMC, Twitch.tv can be streamed at 160p, 360p, 480p, and 720p. The Mac mini could just handle 480p, but did the iBook G3 Clamshell stand a chance at 160p? Turns out, for streams that VLC 0.8.6i can handle (the last Panther VlC) the answer is yes. FFMPEG handles the...

forums.macrumors.com

Also, I think 240p is my bare minimum to play videos. I mean, VHS was 240p, it’s not too bad especially on a 12” screen. That’s why I recommend converting videos to 240p MPEG-1.

FFplay can play/pause with the space button, skip through videos with the arrow keys, and many more things (look up the FFplay documentation) but I don’t recommend it on a 300MHz G3. You really need more speed, VLC/Mplayer is gonna be better for just 300MHz.

 

[mectojic]

I can confirm that mViewX and FFplayer work well, with play/pause etc. Choob is great and efficient for finding videos.

I also managed to stream live Youtube videos with PPCMC.

For some reason, when I try to download a video instead of stream, the download speed is quite slow, even @144p. Did I miss some kind of internet speed-up hack for G3 on Tiger?

One more amateur question, I tried adding the "-skip_frame 8 -skip_loop_filter 48" options in the PPCMC Prefs, but it doesn't seem to save the settings; when I go to edit prefs again, what I typed is gone.

Anyway, I can say I'm extremely satisfied with the results. Being able to stream music while working on a word processor should cover a large amount of my needs, were I to do the PPC challenge.

 

[alex_free]

I can confirm that mViewX and FFplayer work well, with play/pause etc. Choob is great and efficient for finding videos.

I also managed to stream live Youtube videos with PPCMC.

For some reason, when I try to download a video instead of stream, the download speed is quite slow, even @144p. Did I miss some kind of internet speed-up hack for G3 on Tiger?

One more amateur question, I tried adding the "-skip_frame 8 -skip_loop_filter 48" options in the PPCMC Prefs, but it doesn't seem to save the settings; when I go to edit prefs again, what I typed is gone.

Anyway, I can say I'm extremely satisfied with the results. Being able to stream music while working on a word processor should cover a large amount of my needs, were I to do the PPC challenge.

Are you saving the text edit window opened by prefs? CMD+S

 

[Dronecatcher]

@mectojic Here is the script to stream m4a audio.

Volume is controlled by keys 9/0, m is mute, spacebar to pause/play, arrow keys to skip, w to toggle scopes.

 

[mectojic]

Thank you!

 

[Dronecatcher]

I've updated the 144HQ script to playback at a default width of 600px and uploaded a video of it in action.....

 

[philgxxd]

Thanks a lot @Dronecatcher !
It's slow but still awesome to see my iMac's G3 could potentially see some YouTube use for my kids whenever i decide to hand them over their first computer in the near future

 

[Dronecatcher]

Thanks a lot @Dronecatcher !
It's slow but still awesome to see my iMac's G3 could potentially see some YouTube use for my kids whenever i decide to hand them over their first computer in the near future

Thanks. The processing/downloading speed I've found to be highly variable - might be better to download videos (either by altering script or using PPCMC7 directly) and save a collection - you don't want to test your kids patience too much

 

[alex_free]

Thanks. The processing/downloading speed I've found to be highly variable - might be better to download videos (either by altering script or using PPCMC7 directly) and save a collection - you don't want to test your kids patience too much

One performance improvement you could make is to unzip youtube-dl and call the python main script directly which is how the in development next version of PPCMC 7 works. The next version will also drastically improve download speed on Leopard and somewhat on Tiger.

 

[Dronecatcher]

One performance improvement you could make is to unzip youtube-dl and call the python main script directly which is how the in development next version of PPCMC 7 works.

I actually thought you'd done that already in PPCMC7 as, despite being slow on a G3, it still executes faster than it did when I did the same routine years ago using youtube-dl independently.

 

[Imixmuan]

I've updated the 144HQ script to playback at a default width of 600px and uploaded a video of it in action.....

Now this right here is the REAL PowerPC challenge. I'm really surprised at how buttery smooth that 144p is...

 

[ultrasaw]

help! followed instructions... everything seems to work until the very end, i get this error and the terminal closes.

ERROR: YouTube said: Unable to extract video data

on an iBook G3 300mhz running Tiger (Trimcelerated)
Am I missing something here?

 

[nickdalzell1]

Why is it always requiring 10.4!? Why isn't anyone willing to do this for Jaguar?! I can't get RAM to my G4 to make 10.4 work. It's stuck with 128MB forever, so I can't even do 10.3 well. There has to be some help for us 10.2 users!

I have tried and failed multiple times to make RAM upgrades work. Have to resort to supposedly 'compatible' modules from Amazon, and twice now it's been wasted money since they all just make it go beep beep beep and no display.

I do have a server doing cetificate authority to make older browsers do HTTPS, by it taking the requests and returning valid legacy certificates to force the older browsers to work, but YouTube still won't cooperate. It loads, but no video displays, just a black box.

 

[Dronecatcher]

help! followed instructions... everything seems to work until the very end, i get this error and the terminal closes.

In PPCMC7 update youtube-dl