Antix on P4 Lenovo 2Gb RAM

[Chriske]

Hi,

Yesterday I did install Antix on a somewhat older desktop (Pentium4 - 2Gb RAM). Just wanted to know how much faster Antix is compared to Linux Mint(I use on all my computers).
Well, it is faster indeed. I even installed a Slicer(3D-Printing software) and compared it's speed with the Linux'version'. Two exactly the same PC's were running side by side. I must say I was very impressed.
Playing (some) YouTube movies was disaster. Some high resolution movies did stutter a lot. Most of them ran good.

Wonder, would FluxBox run on other Linux OS as well...?

Chris

[Fornhamfred]

IMHO if the other machines you refer to are higher spec that the p4 then perhaps MX17 would be a better choice, but having said that Antix would certainly run.
What are the specs of the other machines?

[fehlix]

(Pentium4 - 2Gb RAM)
Playing (some) YouTube movies was disaster.

Suggest not runnin big apps like browser and play video's for such a low spec device.
Rather use antiX provided yt/video download tools and choose lower resolution e.g 720x for download videos (if available)
and view after dowloaded finished, might be of help. At least it helped me a lot for low spec pc's.

[Buck Fankers]

Playing (some) YouTube movies was disaster

I wonder if may be missing some codex or not using or have installed proper driver?

[Stevo]

SMTube to the rescue!

[PPC]

Playing (some) YouTube movies was disaster. Some high resolution movies did stutter a lot. Most of them ran good.

Chris

Hi. Chis using very demanding websites on modest CPU's can be really hard, I know. But there's a few good alternatives for viewing YouTube videos other than Firefox:

1- Try Google Chrome, not chromium, not any Chrome derived browser. I dislike Google's attitude, but I have to say, on Linux, Chrome is the fastest browser, according to my experience ,to view YouTube and streaming video. You you have 3d acceleration or hardware video decryption, activate that on Google Chrome options menu (on Firefox you have to run trhough some hoops to activate video acceleration and, in my experience, for some reason, it's never as fast as Chrome's...).

2- For web browsing- try other browsers, Palemoon is derived from Firefox and a little lighter on it's hardware requirements...

3- for viewing YouTube videos- SMtube is the closest thing to a Linux YouTube app (like the ones that exist for Android or IOS). On very low specs machines a video can take about 10 seconds to fire up, but the viewing experience is great. There's also a pretty good plus: no adds (so, in fact it's better than a native YouTube client)

4- View YouTube or other streaming videos directly with your media player- mplayer and mpv are you best friends for viewing any kind of multimedia file on a low specs machine- you can copy the YouTube video full address, and then from the terminal run a something like this: mpv https://www.youtube.com/full_video_link
SMtube uses external video players, like mplayer or mpv to view the videos, this way, you can use you browser, browse to the video you want and open it on mplayer/mpv, cutting the "middle man"

5- View the videos off-line.
Use YouTube downloader, from the terminal, download the video, open the video with your preferred multimedia player.
Tip: for using youtube downloader first use the -F setting (or else I belive it always downloads the best quality file), for example, like this:
youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
This checks for all the video/ audio / video and audio versions that particular video offers. Choose the number that corresponds to the option you want (for a modest PC I recommend video-audio with 360dpi's) Then enter exactly the same command but with the option "-fnumber"
Example: youtube-dl -f140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
You can use SMtube as a front-end for youtube-dl or install a GUI for it if you so desire (try installing youtube-dl-gui )...
There's also a pretty good Firefox extension (that I can only get to run right on the older FF ESR) called Ant video downloader. It checks almost 100% of your webpages for video links and then allows you to download the file you want. If your computer is fast enough (my netbook is) you can begin downloading the video file and then begin playing it with almost no delay! :-)

As for using mplayer/mpv- check the options- you can do almost anything since choosing to automatically skip frames for a more smooth viewing experience to auto-resume videos (even on-line videos, in fact!)
I use mpv with this settings (the first activates video acceleration if available, the second is self explanatory):
mpv -hwdec --save-position-on-quit video_file

You can check on-line how to add the options you want to mpv configuration files, so that it always runs with those options activated. Or you can associate the video files you want, in your file browser so they always open up with mpv and the desired options (Ex: open Thunar, navigate to your video file, right click it, select open with - other application - command - type the command you want -example: mpv -hwdec --save-position-on-quit. Run it once and if you happy with the results, do it again and tick the box to always use that option. You have to do this for every individual video file type you have (once for mp4 files, once for mkv, etc... It works in a similar way if you are using antiX's SpaceFM, but I'm doing this from my MX box, sorry)

I hope this options make your browsing and multimedia experiences more tolerable...

P.