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rampancy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 22, 2002
780
1,058
So I've seen ViewTube mentioned here many times as a solution for viewing YouTube videos on Early Intel Macs, but for the life of me I haven't found any guide or explanation on how to do actually do it.

The current set up I'm trying it out on is my Oreo BlackBook (MacBook 2,1, 10.6.8) running Arctic Fox 45.2 running ViewTube through the fork of Greasemonkey made for Pale Moon.

I've tried configuring it so that it will use QuickTime Player or VLC to watch the video instead of the browser's built-in HTML5 video player, but I either get a "The Video Format or MIME Type is Not Supported" error, or Arctic Fox itself complains that it doesn't understand the protocol "viewtube", suggesting to me that it doesn't know how to pass off the video stream to an external player.

I have read the instructions linked from a thread provided by dronecatcher but those look highly out of date.

Incidentally I've also tried to use the Intel version of PPCMC, but it fails with error messages about certificates, suggesting that it really doesn't like wowfunhappy's Legacy Mac Proxy.

This has really frustrated me for a while now, as I've seen lots of folks showing how they're able to YouTube working perfectly on their PPC machines and Early Intel machines, yet I've seen little discussion about how one can actually do it outside of the PPC realm.
 
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yt-dlp plus mpv. I guarantee you can get mpv working on snow-leopard, either through x11 or actually through native quartz with a bit of hacking (before snow-leopard might be more tedious due to lack of grand-central dispatch, but honestly nothing in there requires it).
 
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Make sure you have the proper browser plug-ins installed.
Plugins.png


Here's My settings.
VT-Settings.png


Here it is using the QuickTime browser plug-in via InterWeb on Snow Leopard.
VT-QT.png


FWIW it will not work with VLC on Intel OS X as there isn't a VLC browser plug-in available that i'm aware of. It does exist on 32bit Linux (both PPC and Intel) and win32 however.

NOTE: You can use this script to download videos also. Just click the down arrow and 'save as'.

Cheers
 
yt-dlp plus mpv. I guarantee you can get mpv working on snow-leopard, either through x11 or actually through native quartz with a bit of hacking (before snow-leopard might be more tedious due to lack of grand-central dispatch, but honestly nothing in there requires it).

That's all well and good, but can you link to any instructions on how to do that for an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard? All of the posts I've seen on installing yt-dlp on Mac reference installing via Homebrew, which isn't an option for 10.6, and the oldest binaries I've seen for mpv are for 10.9+.
 
Make sure you have the proper browser plug-ins installed.

Thanks so much for the illustrations; they were really helpful. I tried installing QuickTime 7.6.6 but the QuickTime plug-in isn't appearing in the list of Plug-Ins, on either ArcticFox or on InterWeb. I'm trying to figure it out but I'm mystified.

Also the VLC plug-in I tried to use was the outdated plug-in linked on their official download page.
 
QT should load automatically if it's called upon, as it is with this script. All i can think of is that most of these old browser plug-ins are 32-bit. So you need to be running a 32-bit browser in order for them to be recognized and used by the browser. 32-bit plugins will not work with a 64-bit browser.

Now as for VLC plug-in.... Thanks for the link. The plug-in they link is not supported on Snow Leopard. It's too new. You need to use the version that matches the last version of VLC that supported 10.6. So i did a little digging and found it here: https://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/vlc/vlc/2.2.8/macosx/

And, here it is installed on InterWeb:
Screen shot 2025-01-27 at 11.08.23 AM.png

(Also tested this plug-in with viewtube and it works fine)
Screen shot 2025-01-27 at 11.52.32 AM.png


Cheers
 
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That's all well and good, but can you link to any instructions on how to do that for an Intel Mac running Snow Leopard? All of the posts I've seen on installing yt-dlp on Mac reference installing via Homebrew, which isn't an option for 10.6, and the oldest binaries I've seen for mpv are for 10.9+.
yt-dlp is a python package, so install python from macports then install via pip.
 
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