How can I play flash media on my system?

[Jalopy]

How can I play flash media (eg YouTube, live sports) on my system? Do I need an add on or ? I know I might have to upgrade soon but can I continue with my system for now?
- eMac 1Ghz 384mb ram
- OS 10.2.8
- Firefox 2.0.0.20
- Adobe Flash Player 9.0
Thanks.

 

[cocacolakid]

Unfortunately you won't be able to play Flash videos or games in a browser. Some people have luck with TenFourFox and a hack to make it play Flash, but my experience with that only gets choppy, freezing, stuttering videos, especially on a very old PPC with not a lot of RAM like your eMac. (Obviously a G5 with a lot of RAM works better than an older G4 with limited RAM) But you can play Flash videos from Youtube in MacTubes, a standalone app that works great. I set my brother's eMac up with MacTubes and it works great.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/28608/mactubes

Bookmark that because they do release updates occasionally. Sometimes Youtube changes something on their website and MacTubes has problems, but the developer normally releases an update in a day or two and things work perfectly again.

Once you download MacTubes, go into the Preferences, under the Player tab, and check Video Player. Not Flash. I've had problems with it not working if I check Quicktime, but Video Player plays Flash videos just fine.

You can even download videos from Youtube with MacTubes. (play back downloaded Flash or any type of files with VLC Player http://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html)

If you're going to use your eMac regularly you might consider upgrading the RAM, it's very easy to do. Your model eMac uses PC133 SDRAM and the maximum it can take is two sticks of 512mb each. Maxing out the RAM will give that eMac new life. It will boot faster, open and run apps faster, etc. If you can't afford two sticks of 512mb, buying one and swapping it for the 128mb stick you have in there will still help tremendously. (Just make sure you take out the 128mb stick, not the 256mb stick)

Here is the Everymac page for your model, which is full of every spec you can think of:http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/emac/specs/emac_1.0.html

And here is how to install RAM on an eMac:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1319

 

[Imixmuan]

Cocacolakid...

.. gives good advice. I have never had a problem with using Quicktime with mactubes however. Mactubes is the best method there is for youtube playback, by far. Its not completely accurate to say you can't play flash in a browser. You can, but its a security risk, and realistically you would will need to set your player to 240p. Mactubes is a much better solution. BUT before you do anything else with that emac:

You definitely need to at least OS 10.4 (Tiger), get more RAM, and a better browser. With Tiger your web browser choices are Tenfourfox, Omniweb or Camino. Camino is the fastest, Omniweb a close second. Tenfourfox will have the most extensibility. Depending on how important playing web video is to you, I'd recommend tenfourfox and the awesome downloadhelper extension. With it you can almost always see the video file on any site. You can also copy the url of the video to the clipboard, this allows you to paste the video stream into quicktime, vlc, niceplayer, whatever....this makes previously unplayable video...playable.

You can also use greasemonkey extension and the viewtube script, both in tenfourfox and omniweb (its possible even in Camino, though a little hacky) this allows you to bypass flash and use the quicktime embedded player. You will need the latest version of quicktime for ppc (7.6.4) and Perian.

 

[Jalopy]

Thanks for the great info. You're both correct that MacTubes would be the way to go for YouTube video. I couldn't find a version for my current OS 10.2.8 however. Looks like I may have to upgrade OS and ram before I can upgrade the other software.

You mentioned that the flash player may be a security risk. I've heard of this before, but what kind of risk is this? I can still play some older flash video with my Adobe Flash Player 9. What kind of security risk am I taking?

 

[cocacolakid]

I'd look to upgrade to Tiger. Leopard will run on your eMac but you would definitely need more RAM to not have it run very slow. Also, while Leopard has the most features and can run more software than Tiger, the price of Tiger is significantly less than Leopard. Leopard is in high demand because it's the final version of OS X for Power PC's, and as such, the price seems to however around $80-150+ for a retail disc (more often 100-150 or more). Tiger is slightly less expensive. Your other option is to buy the eMac specific Tiger disks.

Here is one on eBay for about $75 U.S. shipped (this is not my auction).

http://www.ebay.com/itm/17-CD-s-MacOs-OSX-OS-X-10-4-Tiger-iLife-05-for-eMac-/150903804306

 

[Imixmuan]

Another option

if you are brave and don't mind command line and linux is to consider mintPPC or lubuntu PPC 12.04. You still won't have flash (no flash for PPC linux, at all, ever, forever ever), but you would have a free, mo-dern, up to date system with a plethora of browser and software choices. There are a ton of workarounds to the no flash issue on PPC linux. Viewtube, Gnash, lightspark, minitube (new version 1.9 is fantabulous, almost up there with Mactubes, but not quite) etc. Just a thought and worth a stab.

http://www.mintppc.org

 

[Jalopy]

Thanks for the info. Just out of curiosity, I looked at the Firefox add ons page and there's an add on named "Download Flash and Video" version 1.17. It claims that it works with my older Firefox 2. Has anyone heard of this add on or used it?

 

[ihuman:D]

Thanks for the info. Just out of curiosity, I looked at the Firefox add ons page and there's an add on named "Download Flash and Video" version 1.17. It claims that it works with my older Firefox 2. Has anyone heard of this add on or used it?

You should update your browser to Camino, AuroraFox or TenFourFox there are many other good ones too but those are based on the Mozilla Core(or whatever it's called) . I also think TenFourFox can use plug-ins too but someone will have to verify that for me.