What are the current ways for YouTube playback on Tiger?

[Appleuser201]

The main method I used for YouTube playback on OS X no longer works at all (using the s60tube website to get http links and copy paste them into Coreplayer/VLC) but it now throws an error on every Mac I own including my new M4 Pro.

Now on Tiger on faster G4 machines, I use the mobile website of YouTube in Aquafox for okayish low res playback. Not completely smooth on my 1.25ghz eMac or 1.5ghz Powerbook, but not a slideshow either and great audio quality.

PowerFox no longer plays videos at all for me, it'll play the first few seconds of the video and then skip back to the beginning a few times before YouTube throws an error. H264ify doesn't help. V3 doesn't work at all anymore. Here's hoping we will get a PowerFox update soon that'll have the same user agent switcher as Aquafox!

As for PPCMC7.. is this still working? What are the known and best ways for streaming YouTube on a 1ghz+ G4 in Tiger? On a happier and unexpected note I downloaded a 1080p YouTube video and it played shockingly decent with only minimal stuttering in Coreplayer on the eMac.

 

[srp]

Looks like I'll have to port AquaCenter to Tiger then!

 

[Forest Expertise]

Best is to build yt-dlp through PowerPC ports, that was what powered PPCMC7. If you have PPMC7 installed you can stream to the bundled ffplay from the command line with yt-dlp, which is pretty CPU efficient on a G4. Ytcui-dl is also nice, but doesn't provide access to as many formats as yt-dlp. Tartube is a nice GUI frontend to yt-dlp for downloading. QMPlay2 will also work, but is hard on the CPU.
If you are willing to get PowerPC ports up and running on your Tiger machines, there are lots of great options that make it worth the work. Someone could make an installer for yt-dlp through PowerPC ports in a custom prefix, but they would have to update it frequently because Youtube frequently breaks third party solutions.

 

[Appleuser201]

Looks like I'll have to port AquaCenter to Tiger then!

Contrary to what some might think, the G4 can be quite competent playing and streaming media. Sure HD of any kind is out the window with streaming, but doing a mostly decently playable higher bitrate 1080p on my eMac in fullscreen with Coreplayer was wild and looked great on that CRT display. 720p is flawless.

 

[TheShortTimer]

As for PPCMC7.. is this still working?

Tagging in @alex_free so that he can give an answer. 🙂

Contrary to what some might think, the G4 can be quite competent playing and streaming media.

Are there really people out there who think that the G4 isn't up to playing media? They have to had been asleep for the past 26 years! I've even managed to get good results with media playback on my lowly iMac G3/350. 😀

 

[barracuda156]

QMPlay2 will also work, but is hard on the CPU.

This is one of the best GUI options for streaming.

 

[barracuda156]

The main method I used for YouTube playback on OS X no longer works at all (using the s60tube website to get http links and copy paste them into Coreplayer/VLC) but it now throws an error on every Mac I own including my new M4 Pro.

Now on Tiger on faster G4 machines, I use the mobile website of YouTube in Aquafox for okayish low res playback. Not completely smooth on my 1.25ghz eMac or 1.5ghz Powerbook, but not a slideshow either and great audio quality.

PowerFox no longer plays videos at all for me, it'll play the first few seconds of the video and then skip back to the beginning a few times before YouTube throws an error. H264ify doesn't help. V3 doesn't work at all anymore. Here's hoping we will get a PowerFox update soon that'll have the same user agent switcher as Aquafox!

As for PPCMC7.. is this still working? What are the known and best ways for streaming YouTube on a 1ghz+ G4 in Tiger? On a happier and unexpected note I downloaded a 1080p YouTube video and it played shockingly decent with only minimal stuttering in Coreplayer on the eMac.

ytcui should work, perhaps (it does on 10.6 ppc and, I think, 10.5).

Maybe yewtube (TUI, python) and youtube-viewer (TUI or GUI, perl) still work.

yt-x and ytsurf should work for search and download, but not for streaming.

Generally, you may be better off downloading vids and watching locally. Easier for cpu and more options with respect to apps which can do that (aside of well-known ones, ytcui-dl, videodl, any-dl etc.).

 

[Forest Expertise]

ytcui should work, perhaps (it does on 10.6 ppc and, I think, 10.5).

Maybe yewtube (TUI, python) and youtube-viewer (TUI or GUI, perl) still work.

yt-x and ytsurf should work for search and download, but not for streaming.

Generally, you may be better off downloading vids and watching locally. Easier for cpu and more options with respect to apps which can do that (aside of well-known ones, ytcui-dl, videodl, any-dl etc.).

Strongly agree that downloading is best. Both yt-cui and youtube-viewer can stream, but because they rely on mpv-legacy on Tiger, streaming has issues - sometimes no sound, sometimes funky colors, and X11 output making performance not as good as playing locally with ffplay - or coreplayer if the format is supported.
That being said, if you have a dual-G5 or better you can likely have a great time streaming with QMPlay2, even on Tiger.

 

[Smithwick’s]

ytcui should work, perhaps (it does on 10.6 ppc and, I think, 10.5).

Maybe yewtube (TUI, python) and youtube-viewer (TUI or GUI, perl) still work.

yt-x and ytsurf should work for search and download, but not for streaming.

Generally, you may be better off downloading vids and watching locally. Easier for cpu and more options with respect to apps which can do that (aside of well-known ones, ytcui-dl, videodl, any-dl etc.).

Want to second yewtube as a great option. It's my go-to on anything less powerful than the G5 (which gets the privilege of running QMPlay2).

 

[Dronecatcher]

@Appleuser201 S60tube is still working for me (you need to use a Symbian phone UA) and yt-dlp was still working in Feb on my G4 iMac:

 

[z970]

At this time, there are at least the following avenues (that I'm aware of, in any case):

PPCMC still works like a charm if yt-dlp is updated before use by simply selecting the "Update YouTube Downloader" option in the menu. Which is seriously great futureproofing since the last version was released a whole year-and-a-half ago, so compliments to the chef @alex_free.

PowerFox Tiger is considerably buggier than the Leopard release, last I checked (for instance GPU acceleration doesn't work at all and the CPU has to carry a heavier codebase than TFF, and a few keyboard shortcuts don't work), which also rules out Invidious as no other browser will connect and Aquafox will not render it properly. In the meantime, AquaWeb Plus with the new MP4 enabler (courtesy of @thewireless) will play videos reasonably well on a 1.25 G4 directly from YouTube (just append "!yt" to whatever query desired), but not far below that. Not sure about the moderately heavier Aquafox though as I haven't compared the two.

Besides that, there is also Dirpy. Simply pull URLs from anywhere else (such as AquaWeb, or alternatively append the YouTube syntax to the s60tube URLs) and feed them into Dirpy to play an embedded video in-browser, which works at least 75% of the time and in my experience is typically more reliable than Invidious depending on the client device.

In practice though, that is a far more effective venue in Leopard or newer as all browsers on Tiger are either too old to connect (TLS 1.1 required), too old to render properly (RetroZillaPPC, Camino), or lack the required media libraries to playback video (Arctic Fox PPC). Aquafox / AquaWeb Plus with the MP4 enabler do work, but CPU usage is significantly higher than even the YouTube website directly using the KaiOS UA.

Further, I recall that @wicknix's TenFourTube worked great some years back, but I'm not certain of its current status since it's been a while...

But with all of that being said, s60tube still works fine in Safari on my end even with the default UA.

So for the best ease of use and playback performance, I would suggest in order: s60tube, or failing that PPCMC, or if even that does not work, AquaWeb Plus as a last resort. And all of the above is assuming you do not want to get into MacPorts / PPCPorts as suggested by @barracuda156, which will expand your options even further.

@Dronecatcher I had no idea YouView still worked, I thought it's been dead for well over a decade! I wonder if TenFourTube still works for URLs as well, and how idle resource usage compares between them?

 

[barracuda156]

And all of the above is assuming you do not want to get into MacPorts / PPCPorts as suggested by @barracuda156, which will expand your options even further.

Just to note, it should be possible to install, for example, mentioned above Python packages without involving with ports (if the latter is unwanted for w/e reason). Or in principle anything: ports do not do any magic, everything can be replicated by hand (or re-implemented in some other sane package manager), if there is a lot of free time and motivation.

 

[Appleuser201]

At this time, there are at least the following avenues (that I'm aware of, in any case):

PPCMC still works like a charm if yt-dlp is updated before use by simply selecting the "Update YouTube Downloader" option in the menu. Which is seriously great futureproofing since the last version was released a whole year-and-a-half ago, so compliments to the chef @alex_free.

PowerFox Tiger is considerably buggier than the Leopard release, last I checked (for instance GPU acceleration doesn't work at all and the CPU has to carry a heavier codebase than TFF, and a few keyboard shortcuts don't work), which also rules out Invidious as no other browser will connect and Aquafox will not render it properly. In the meantime, AquaWeb Plus with the new MP4 enabler (courtesy of @thewireless) will play videos reasonably well on a 1.25 G4 directly from YouTube (just append "!yt" to whatever query desired), but not far below that. Not sure about the moderately heavier Aquafox though as I haven't compared the two.

Besides that, there is also Dirpy. Simply pull URLs from anywhere else (such as AquaWeb, or alternatively append the YouTube syntax to the s60tube URLs) and feed them into Dirpy to play an embedded video in-browser, which works at least 75% of the time and in my experience is typically more reliable than Invidious depending on the client device.

In practice though, that is a far more effective venue in Leopard or newer as all browsers on Tiger are either too old to connect (TLS 1.1 required), too old to render properly (RetroZillaPPC, Camino), or lack the required media libraries to playback video (Arctic Fox PPC). Aquafox / AquaWeb Plus with the MP4 enabler do work, but CPU usage is significantly higher than even the YouTube website directly using the KaiOS UA.

Further, I recall that @wicknix's TenFourTube worked great some years back, but I'm not certain of its current status since it's been a while...

But with all of that being said, s60tube still works fine in Safari on my end even with the default UA.

So for the best ease of use and playback performance, I would suggest in order: s60tube, or failing that PPCMC, or if even that does not work, AquaWeb Plus as a last resort. And all of the above is assuming you do not want to get into MacPorts / PPCPorts as suggested by @barracuda156, which will expand your options even further.

@Dronecatcher I had no idea YouView still worked, I thought it's been dead for well over a decade! I wonder if TenFourTube still works for URLs as well, and how idle resource usage compares between them?

I'll try the S60 UA for S60tube. It still does not work at all on any Mac I own in the default Safari UA or even in Aquafox. No idea why, maybe the site owner blacklisted my IP for excessive use.

 

[f54da]

Which version of opengl does tiger support? You should be able to get mpv working without x11 without too many changes, basically all you need is a way to render the opengl texture. Software decoding is the main bottleneck though, most youtube streams these days are vp8 or even av1

 

[barracuda156]

Which version of opengl does tiger support? You should be able to get mpv working without x11 without too many changes

Isn’t it working right now?

@Forest Expertise Could you say what is the status on Tiger?

 

[f54da]

>Isn’t it working right now?
Almost certainly the current state uses x11 as the vo.

 

[barracuda156]

>Isn’t it working right now?
Almost certainly the current state uses x11 as the vo.

In any case GL is not a stopper, I think, since it is not required: both sdl2 and mpv support building without opengl variant.

 

[Forest Expertise]

Which version of opengl does tiger support? You should be able to get mpv working without x11 without too many changes, basically all you need is a way to render the opengl texture. Software decoding is the main bottleneck though, most youtube streams these days are vp8 or even av1

Isn’t it working right now?

@Forest Expertise Could you say what is the status on Tiger?

You all are right and I was wrong, it can launch with both X11 and without. When launching without, I get the spinning wheel, I will attach a picture later. But my understanding is that is just a quirk of the libsdl-cocoa port. I don't know why I always launched it with X11 before - maybe because GTK stuff requires X11 anyway so I just got into the habit.
Unfortunately, everything in PowerPC ports is not really possible to build until gcc16 gets fixed
As regards GL: Tiger Client has 1.5, Server Universal has 2.0.

 

[barracuda156]

Unfortunately, everything in PowerPC ports is not really possible to build until gcc16 gets fixed

If you prefer, we can peg 10.4 to gcc14. Since it is not officially supported anyway, there is no policy, and we can do as we please )

 

[Forest Expertise]

If you prefer, we can peg 10.4 to gcc14. Since it is not officially supported anyway, there is no policy, and we can do as we please )

I don't mind this in the short term, but I do intend to fix gcc16.
There are only three issues
1. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73167 - which affects at least Leopard and Tiger on 32-bit, and I suspect even 32-bit on Snow Leopard.
2. The Makefile for c++20 https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc++-v3/src/c++20/Makefile.in needs to be patched to add -fpermissive around line 460 - I have a patch for this, and it appears to be working, but compiling on a G4 in reduced mode takes a week.
3. The Makefile for c++23 https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc++-v3/src/c++23/Makefile.in needs to be patched because the sed commands are throwing errors. I think switching to gsed might fix it, but I'm less confident in that fix than the one above.
libstdc++.modules.json: libstdc++.modules.json.in
relpath=$$($(toplevel_srcdir)/contrib/relpath.sh \
$(abspath $(toolexeclibdir)) \
$(abspath $(includebitsdir))) && \
sed "s,@MODPATH@,$$relpath," $< > $@

# The uninstalled manifest uses the relative path to builddir.
stamp-module-manifest: libstdc++.modules.json.in
@-mkdir -p ../.libs
sed "s,@MODPATH@,../c++23," $< \
> ../.libs/libstdc++.modules.json
@$(STAMP) $@

Everything else built in the first gcc build, it's an open question whether it can bootstrap itself with these changes.

 

[f54da]

>, since it is not required: both sdl2 and mpv support building without opengl variant.

Sure, but then you're just moving the implicit opengl dependency into sdl2 right? Or I guess maybe it could end up using Quartz2D for the drawing, but that seems worse since you're just adding more indirections when your ultimate goal is to push pixels into vram so WindowServer compositor can take over (and ultimately windowserver needs everything to be a texture on gpu).

>Tiger Client has 1.5, Server Universal has 2.0.

Thanks for this info. mpv requires at least 2.1 for some time now for anything like scalers. You might be able to get `opengl-dumb-mode` working, but at that point maybe it's just equivalent to letting SDL handle the drawing to a texture and blit to screen.

 

[barracuda156]

>, since it is not required: both sdl2 and mpv support building without opengl variant.

Sure, but then you're just moving the implicit opengl dependency into sdl2 right?

Neither sdl2 nor mpv require GL support, AFAICT (there are options to control it):

SDL/configure at 5d249570393f7a37e037abf22cd6012a4cc56a71 · libsdl-org/SDL

Simple DirectMedia Layer. Contribute to libsdl-org/SDL development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

mpv/meson.options at 2339eb72767517fc5a113283939f59076946fbc1 · mpv-player/mpv

🎥 Command line media player. Contribute to mpv-player/mpv development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

 

[Forest Expertise]

>, since it is not required: both sdl2 and mpv support building without opengl variant.

Sure, but then you're just moving the implicit opengl dependency into sdl2 right? Or I guess maybe it could end up using Quartz2D for the drawing, but that seems worse since you're just adding more indirections when your ultimate goal is to push pixels into vram so WindowServer compositor can take over (and ultimately windowserver needs everything to be a texture on gpu).

>Tiger Client has 1.5, Server Universal has 2.0.

Thanks for this info. mpv requires at least 2.1 for some time now for anything like scalers. You might be able to get `opengl-dumb-mode` working, but at that point maybe it's just equivalent to letting SDL handle the drawing to a texture and blit to screen.

On Server Universal (my Ibook) I have libsdl2-cocoa built with +opengl.
We are stuck on mpv-legacy on Tiger. And performance isn't great, at least on a G4 1.33 Ghz with a Radeon 9550 with only 32 MB of VRAM. Downloading videos and playing with Alex Free's ffplay or Coreplayer if the format permits tends to outperform mpv-legacy.
I am skeptical how good the opengl on Tiger is. I found a benchmark demonstrating it performed worse than Leopard here: https://www.jcsenterprises.com/Japamacs_Page/Page 1: OpenGL .html
Software rendering is probably not worse than OpenGL acceleration when the graphics card isn't very powerful.
That being said, if you are good with the mpv codebase, I am sure we would all be excited to try patches that can help performance with it.

 

[barracuda156]

I don't mind this in the short term, but I do intend to fix gcc16.

Well, then I will keep it as-is for now. It will be an unnecessary mess to change these settings back and forth.
(And it is trivial to do it locally: just revert the commit which moved ppcports to gcc16.)

There are only three issues
1. https://trac.macports.org/ticket/73167 - which affects at least Leopard and Tiger on 32-bit, and I suspect even 32-bit on Snow Leopard.

SL is fine, I build on 32-bit (there is no support for ppc64 in 10.6)

2. The Makefile for c++20 https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc++-v3/src/c++20/Makefile.in needs to be patched to add -fpermissive around line 460 - I have a patch for this, and it appears to be working, but compiling on a G4 in reduced mode takes a week.
3. The Makefile for c++23 https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libstdc++-v3/src/c++23/Makefile.in needs to be patched because the sed commands are throwing errors. I think switching to gsed might fix it, but I'm less confident in that fix than the one above.
libstdc++.modules.json: libstdc++.modules.json.in
relpath=$$($(toplevel_srcdir)/contrib/relpath.sh \
$(abspath $(toolexeclibdir)) \
$(abspath $(includebitsdir))) && \
sed "s,@MODPATH@,$$relpath," $< > $@

# The uninstalled manifest uses the relative path to builddir.
stamp-module-manifest: libstdc++.modules.json.in
@-mkdir -p ../.libs
sed "s,@MODPATH@,../c++23," $< \
> ../.libs/libstdc++.modules.json
@$(STAMP) $@

Everything else built in the first gcc build, it's an open question whether it can bootstrap itself with these changes.

I think it will be a good idea to consult with GCC upstream for an appropriate solution.

 

[Forest Expertise]

Well, then I will keep it as-is for now. It will be an unnecessary mess to change these settings back and forth.
(And it is trivial to do it locally: just revert the commit which moved ppcports to gcc16.)



SL is fine, I build on 32-bit (there is no support for ppc64 in 10.6)



I think it will be a good idea to consult with GCC upstream for an appropriate solution.

Fine to keep it as is, people can always grab earlier sources to work around current breakages. Hopefully I will fix it before end of July - compiling on a single processor G4 is just very slow.
I think me saying 32-bit is probably imprecise - this build failure is reported on G4s, but not G5s. Has anyone built gcc16 (or 15) from source on Snow Leopard?
I have filed a ticket on GCC's Bugzilla, they seem to be suggesting using GNU sed for the one issue, so I guess that is the thing to try, hopefully it has worked whenever I get to check back on the Powerbook building gcc16.