YouTube on old hardware

[chrispop99]

MX works incredibly well on really ancient hardware, but at the bottom end of the scale, video playback on YouTube is pretty much unusable.

I have a Thinkpad T41 that uses a Pentium M CPU, and even at the lowest quality settings, YouTube video stutters, and eventually stops altogether.

I have found a website that plays YouTube video in a more efficient way:

https://hooktube.com/

You can either search directly on Hooktube, or find a video on YouTube, then change the 'you' part of the URL to 'hook'. In either case, change the quality setting to 640x360 mp4, then click the settings icon to save your quality preference to a cookie.

For anyone running on really old hardware, it's well worth giving this a try.

Chris

[cyrilus31]

Hi Chris
SMTube is already included in MX and antiX and works well. I use it quite often. Did you try it before?

[chrispop99]

Hi Chris
SMTube is already included in MX and antiX and works well. I use it quite often. Did you try it before?

Yes, SMTube works well, but I don't find the interface as convenient. Good to have all these choices!

Chris

[anticapitalista]

mps-youtube is another option.

https://download.tuxfamily.org/antix/do ... mpsyt.html

[KBD]

Those old Thinkpads are hard to keep down :)
Just curious, have you maxed out to 2gb ram and/or added plenty of swap? I was always impressed how much better my old netbooks with just 1gb ram would run when I added 2-4gb swap.

[chrispop99]

Those old Thinkpads are hard to keep down :)
Just curious, have you maxed out to 2gb ram and/or added plenty of swap? I was always impressed how much better my old netbooks with just 1gb ram would run when I added 2-4gb swap.

This machine is not used for anything other than testing what will run on a low-end system, so I have deliberately kept it at 1GB RAM. The MX install on it has 2GB swap.

Chris

[spidermouse]

There are browser plugins that add options in the context menu. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... en-in-vlc/
I don't like this because it adds extra step to play the video, right-click select play in vlc.
Other than smtube, QMPlay2 can play yt videos. It works good on older hardware.