Best way to view YouTube on PowerBook G4?

[Lastic]

And to hijack this thread also , this is the reason I bought an identical 2nd Powerbook G4 12" with an Nvidia FX5200 so I could keep one running OS X 10.5 which I use as my daily commute laptop and the 2nd one to experiment with.

For the NVIDIA 5200 G4 12"

I found that Ubuntu Mate works fine with 3D acceleration but no brightness control and no hibernate or suspend since they have the good Mesa version , unfortunately Debian Jessie doesn't unless I missed any updates.

Openbsd has a lot more lightweight DE's than Debian , but unlike FreeBSD (which has the good Mesa version) no 3D acceleration.

And now I'm going to reinstall Debian , Gentoo will be next if I have a free weekend to do all the compiling .

Final thought , maybe we should start a thread installing different Linux,Unix flavours on the Nvidia 12" G4 ?

 

[Dronecatcher]

I'll be getting the last 12" iBook G4

I have one, unfortunately it has the airport socket disease but other than that, it's a great laptop, feels very strong, great to lug around and very quiet too - no fan noise.

 

[swamprock]

Powerbook G4 running Debian Jessie with YouTube demonstration with Midori (Firefox-ESR has issues with some html5 video where they won't load/play).

 

[Dronecatcher]

Powerbook G4 running Debian Jessie with YouTube demonstration with Midori

Great looking setup...and thanks for introducing me to Lucifer

This video does bear out my impression of OSX outpacing Linux though.

Your boot time was 2 min 30 seconds and launching Midori to track playing was 27 seconds - you also said the CPU was pegging at 100%

I've just tried a like for like test on my 1.33 Powerbook, which has a slower CPU has 768Mb RAM and the inferior 5200 graphics:
Boot time 47.8 seconds (like yours, no auto-login)
Launching Webkit to track playing (the same video) 8.9 seconds - after a 5 second or so spike, CPU varied between 70 and 85%

I fully realise the benefits of Linux and having upto date apps but from my own experience I still maintain OSX is faster.

 

[swamprock]

Great looking setup...and thanks for introducing me to Lucifer

This video does bear out my impression of OSX outpacing Linux though.

Your boot time was 2 min 30 seconds and launching Midori to track playing was 27 seconds - you also said the CPU was pegging at 100%

I've just tried a like for like test on my 1.33 Powerbook, which has a slower CPU has 768Mb RAM and the inferior 5200 graphics:
Boot time 47.8 seconds (like yours, no auto-login)
Launching Webkit to track playing (the same video) 8.9 seconds - after a 5 second or so spike, CPU varied between 70 and 85%

I fully realise the benefits of Linux and having upto date apps but from my own experience I still maintain OSX is faster.

I'm in total agreement with you on speed. I'm all for keeping things up to date, personally. I guess it's all in what you want from your system. Thanks for the info.

 

[crammedberry]

I'm in total agreement with you on speed. I'm all for keeping things up to date, personally. I guess it's all in what you want from your system. Thanks for the info.

I don't know if you've given other browsers a try but personally I'm a fan of QupZilla in Debian as I was playing youtube videos in a 600Mhz G3 using that browser – Its incredibly lightweight and efficient, you might want to check it out.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I'm in total agreement with you on speed. I'm all for keeping things up to date, personally. I guess it's all in what you want from your system. Thanks for the info.

Yes, it's whatever works best for your needs - my test was on Tiger and Webkit 4.1.3 - not exactly secure
[doublepost=1469571229][/doublepost]

I don't know if you've given other browsers a try but personally I'm a fan of QupZilla in Debian as I was playing youtube videos in a 600Mhz G3 using that browser – Its incredibly lightweight and efficient, you might want to check it out.

When was that? The problem with Youtube is it seems to be constantly updated and something playable one week isn't necessarily playable the week after.
I provided a workaround on here to play lo-res Youtube on G3s recently - within three days Youtube had changed their playback policy to break it!

 

[crammedberry]

Yes, it's whatever works best for your needs - my test was on Tiger and Webkit 4.1.3 - not exactly secure
[doublepost=1469571229][/doublepost]

When was that? The problem with Youtube is it seems to be constantly updated and something playable one week isn't necessarily playable the week after.
I provided a workaround on here to play lo-res Youtube on G3s recently - within three days Youtube had changed their playback policy to break it!

I wiped my Debian partition a few weeks ago so fairly recently, yes youtube is constantly changing. The videos would stutter here and there on the G3 but they were playable for the most part which is more than I'd expect from OS X. Also I never used midori or ice weasel or any of the other Firefox iterations. I think Firefox is inefficient no matter what OS you're using so when I found qupzilla I was pretty amazed at how well it worked in old systems. For reference – I also had it completely set up with 3D acceleration on my iBook G4, at the time only with 512MB RAM (now 1.25GB), and that was more than enough to browse the web and stream online videos – not just youtube.

 

[Dronecatcher]

when I found qupzilla I was pretty amazed at how well it worked in old systems.

I can't remember the reasons but I never got it work when I tried it. Sounds good - does it play HTML5 video or have some kind of built it mpg streamer?

 

[crammedberry]

I can't remember the reasons but I never got it work when I tried it. Sounds good - does it play HTML5 video or have some kind of built it mpg streamer?

Straight HTML5 – That's what was so great about it!

 

[Dronecatcher]

Straight HTML5 – That's what was so great about it!

I'll give it a whirl on my LXLE X86 laptop.

 

[crammedberry]

And to hijack this thread also , this is the reason I bought an identical 2nd Powerbook G4 12" with an Nvidia FX5200 so I could keep one running OS X 10.5 which I use as my daily commute laptop and the 2nd one to experiment with.

For the NVIDIA 5200 G4 12"

I found that Ubuntu Mate works fine with 3D acceleration but no brightness control and no hibernate or suspend since they have the good Mesa version , unfortunately Debian Jessie doesn't unless I missed any updates.

Openbsd has a lot more lightweight DE's than Debian , but unlike FreeBSD (which has the good Mesa version) no 3D acceleration.

And now I'm going to reinstall Debian , Gentoo will be next if I have a free weekend to do all the compiling .

Final thought , maybe we should start a thread installing different Linux,Unix flavours on the Nvidia 12" G4 ?

If you manage to find a Debian fix for 3D acceleration for the FX5200 definitely let me know! I'd love to convert my 12inch PowerBook into a Debian machine for good!

 

[hellothere231]

Another awesome web browser for Debian is LuaKit, it's quite faster than Qupzilla or Midori on my old computers running Debian in my experiences. Only problem with it is that it's a bit tricky to learn the controls when you first open it, since it's very keyboard oriented. And if you're willing to give up tabs, Surf is an even lighter option.

 

[swamprock]

Another awesome web browser for Debian is LuaKit, it's quite faster than Qupzilla or Midori on my old computers running Debian in my experiences. Only problem with it is that it's a bit tricky to learn the controls when you first open it, since it's very keyboard oriented. And if you're willing to give up tabs, Surf is an even lighter option.

Unfortunately, Luakit isn't available for Jessie without compiling it. It doesn't appear in the repositories or in backports.

 

[128keaton]

And to hijack this thread also , this is the reason I bought an identical 2nd Powerbook G4 12" with an Nvidia FX5200 so I could keep one running OS X 10.5 which I use as my daily commute laptop and the 2nd one to experiment with.

For the NVIDIA 5200 G4 12"

I found that Ubuntu Mate works fine with 3D acceleration but no brightness control and no hibernate or suspend since they have the good Mesa version , unfortunately Debian Jessie doesn't unless I missed any updates.

Openbsd has a lot more lightweight DE's than Debian , but unlike FreeBSD (which has the good Mesa version) no 3D acceleration.

And now I'm going to reinstall Debian , Gentoo will be next if I have a free weekend to do all the compiling .

Final thought , maybe we should start a thread installing different Linux,Unix flavours on the Nvidia 12" G4 ?

That sounds like one excellent idea. I have the same one. It is really one of my only good PowerBooks, aesthetically and functionally. I've been itching to try out linux on it

 

[Lastic]

That sounds like one excellent idea. I have the same one. It is really one of my only good PowerBooks, aesthetically and functionally. I've been itching to try out linux on it

I have 3 Powerbook G4 12" currently, one is a 1.33 Ghz , the other 2 are the 1.5Ghz so I'm currently installing

Debian Jessie + Mate

Lubuntu 16.04

Ubuntu Mate Daily Yakkety 16.10

I'll post my findings in a seperate thread once I've gone through all the tweaks.

 

[Imixmuan]

Powerbook G4 running Debian Jessie with YouTube demonstration with Midori (Firefox-ESR has issues with some html5 video where they won't load/play).

Won't Midori accept Greasemonkey scripts if you enable it? Then you could run VLC or Mplayer instead of straight HTML 5 with isebaros viewtube. I honestly haven't tried that in awhile and plugins on PowerPC Linux are often, well, lets be honest, *******. Its just a thought.

In a completely unrelated an not very PowerPC moment I just put Neverware's Cloudready on my wifes old Macbook 4,1 from early 2008. Son of a beeatch flies. OS X was unusable, this macbook is now amazing, faster than my ACER CB3-111 from last year. Webcam does not work, but all control buttons (sound, brightness) and wake from sleep does.

 

[128keaton]

Won't Midori accept Greasemonkey scripts if you enable it? Then you could run VLC or Mplayer instead of straight HTML 5 with isebaros viewtube. I honestly haven't tried that in awhile and plugins on PowerPC Linux are often, well, lets be honest, *******. Its just a thought.

In a completely unrelated an not very PowerPC moment I just put Neverware's Cloudready on my wifes old Macbook 4,1 from early 2008. Son of a beeatch flies. OS X was unusable, this macbook is now amazing, faster than my ACER CB3-111 from last year. Webcam does not work, but all control buttons (sound, brightness) and wake from sleep does.

Hmm. OS X runs decently on these. I had ML rolling with an SSD + 3GB of RAM and it was very usable.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Won't Midori accept Greasemonkey scripts if you enable it? Then you could run VLC or Mplayer instead of straight HTML 5 with isebaros viewtube. I honestly haven't tried that in awhile and plugins on PowerPC Linux are often, well, lets be honest, *******. Its just a thought.

In a completely unrelated an not very PowerPC moment I just put Neverware's Cloudready on my wifes old Macbook 4,1 from early 2008. Son of a beeatch flies. OS X was unusable, this macbook is now amazing, faster than my ACER CB3-111 from last year. Webcam does not work, but all control buttons (sound, brightness) and wake from sleep does.

I think I might have been using Iceweasel when I had Debian on my Powerbook and Greasemonkey/Viewtube/Mplayer worked great.

OSX unusable on Core 2 Duo? Shurely shome mishtake...

 

[Imixmuan]

Well, it was running Lion, and being 32 bit (though can run 64 bit apps) I was under the impression it couldn't go any further than that. I believe Lion was Apple's Vista, as it ran well with Snow Leopard. It was a glitch-tastic, slow as hell experience, infinitely frustrating no matter how many re installs I did. Hardware including hard drive is working fine. Frankly one is better off on PowerPC Leopard than using Snow Leopard these days, browser support is vanishing. Thank god for Cameron Kaiser.

If you have an old macbook I can't reccomend Neverware's Cloud Ready enough.