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YouTube ends all support for Flash Player

vwestlife

vwestlife

Veteran Member
Joined
May 2, 2008
Messages
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Location
central NJ
Up until a few years ago YouTube gave users a choice of using either Flash Player or an HTML5 player to play videos. HTML5 eventually became the default, but browsers and operating systems which lacked HTML5 support for all of the video codecs and resolutions that YouTube uses would automatically fall back to Flash as necessary.

Then they ended the automatic Flash fallback; as long as your browser supports some HTML5 playback, that's all you'll get, even if it means you can only watch videos at one resolution (usually 360p). But with a browser extension you could still force YouTube to play via Flash, as it would on old browsers and OSes which lacked any HTML5 support. You could even still watch YouTube in Windows 98 using Flash Player 9, with low resolution and limited functionality.

But now as of a few days ago, YouTube has dropped all support for Flash Player, even as a "last resort" fallback. As the author of one of the browser add-ons to force Flash playback noted:

"July 27, 2017: YouTube has made changes and it looks like it's no more possible to watch videos using Flash Player. Not really surprising since Adobe has announced the end of Flash ( https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html ). So please stop sending me emails, there's nothing I can do, add-on is working as expected, it's just YouTube that forces the use of the HTML5 player. Open the console (Ctrl + Shift + K), type "yt.msgs_.YTP_HTML5_FLASH_DEPRECATED" (without quotes) and press Enter."

I know Flash is a security risk and most people are glad to get rid of it, but older PCs -- even some Core 2 Duos -- will often bog down quite badly and drop a lot of frames when beginning to play any YouTube video via HTML5, even in Windows 7 64-bit, so it was nice to be able to use one of those browser add-ons to force it to use Flash, which played much more smoothly on older PC hardware.
 
Guess I won't be able to download and play YouTube videos on my Amigas anymore, but I haven't tried that in probably a decade so have no idea if it even still worked prior to this.

I don't think I'll miss flash otherwise. I was looking forward to a new standard for HTML, but I'm guessing that HTML5 doesn't go in the direction I had hoped.
 
Good riddance!

If you're having playback issues on a C2D then you may need to adjust/enable HTML5 video codecs in your browser and/or install something that supports accelerating them. On Linux systems, for example, there are some gstreamer plugins that Firefox will use if available which significantly improve video performance.

My wife is still using a C2D ThinkPad T60 as her only laptop, and I know she regularly watches YouTube videos on it. I also know there's no Flash installed, and there hasn't been for several years. I know Windows is going to be heavier/slower than Linux (especially since she runs a lightweight window manager), but still, a C2D should be plenty fast enough for Internet videos!

If all else fails, try youtube-dl (or whatever its equivalent is on Windows) and just watch the resulting file with your player of choice.
 
Now if YouTube will focus more on the spam problem that's going around. A friend of mine had his account striked, for making a video about the spam he's getting. They called it "bullying" and "harassment".

VWestlife, it was literally no different than the one you made. I saw the video before it was pulled.

I actually don't know what to think of it. They are allowing accounts that are nothing but spam bots to send out mass spam, yet if you make a video about them, they pull the video and give you a community strike that can't be appealed.
 
evildragon said:
I actually don't know what to think of it.
Click to expand...

I actually do know what to think of it. Someone (likely one of the alleged spammers) reported the video and the YouTube employee who is given a list of hundreds of reported videos to quickly review decided they didn't have enough time to investigate the whole backstory of the video, and determined that since anything that can be seen as bullying or harrassment doesn't necessarily become allowed just because the target of it is a known spammer/criminal/really bad person/etc., the easiest solution was just to take down the video. And especially on a Friday afternoon, the easiest solution becomes the best solution.

And community guidelines strikes can be appealed, except if you've had a previous appeal denied within the past 60 days:
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/185111?hl=en
 
You would think the subject of the video would have tipped them off. Let alone the first few seconds of the video, which said right away what was going on. But you know, there's hundreds of reports on these spammers, and those accounts are still here months later, and his video was only up for a day.

I'd say YouTube is pretty dead as a platform, and Google ruined it.

"I know I'm in your spam folder, I'm sorry, but check out my page at www.instagram.notgonnatellya! - sub 4 sub".
 
evildragon; but check out my page at [URL="http://www.instagram.notgonnatellya" said:
www.instagram.notgonnatellya[/URL]! - sub 4 sub".
Click to expand...

Seems to be a bad link?
 
Good riddance to Flash Player... I work in music production and sites using Flash would always screw up my audio clock (when Flash Player would try to steal priority) when browsing the internet while working on tunes.
 
Evildragon, you sound like me in the '90s when I first got access to e-mail, and was so annoyed at every spam message I received that I would read through the headers and IP addresses trying to trace back exactly where it came from and which ISP to report the spammer to, hoping to get them shut down.

At some point you just have to decide that it's a lost cause, not worth your time and aggravation. If spam messages are ending up in the spam folder, then the system is already working as designed. And if they aren't, you can add some of the spammers' favorite phrases to your "blocked words" list: https://www.youtube.com/comment_management

On that page, YouTube also now offers the option to block links, so that all comments containing a URL get held for review.
 
No no, I am ok with making videos about spam, the problem here is this.

An account impersonates me, my name, and sends spam tarnishing my name, and I get the death threats - YouTube doesn't do a thing. Someone makes a video showing spam on his screen and talks about it, he gets a strike.

At some point you have to realize somethings a little messed up there, and you seriously can't expect me to just sit down and allow it to happen. It's more than spam, it's fraud, harassment, and stalking. Making a video about spam is not one of those.

Frankly, YouTube IS dead, the platform is dying, and with the lack of real human support, the bots win.. They can take down accounts who mention the spam, yet can harass members and impersonate them and their family members, and get away with it.. You just seriously can't tell me this is ok. I know you would find it criminal if another account opened up using your name, and names of members of your family, and started spamming people and linking them to you. Come on man, don't tell me you wouldn't.
 
You need to either get over it, ignore it, or shut down all your internet access and stay offline.

I have hundreds of email accounts and I have one or more of them impersonated nearly every day or so. I always get returned emails that couldn't be delivered for one reason or another -- emails that I never sent!!!

There's nothing you can do about this.

Get used to it or give up all your online activities.

If you don't you won't be worth **** to anybody, yourself included.
 
Youtube has been dead to me since they introduced that dumb auto play feature. Useless, stupid, no one wants it. Just another way to redirect people to "Featured" videos with advertising. Or worse yet videos that express the opposite opinions of what I had in my video, all while making it look sort of like it was part of my video. I guess most youtubers use lead-outs anyway, but it seems almost necessary to put a disclaimer at the end that anything that plays afterward does not represent me. Yea, an individual can disable it, but go to a new machine, or open a new private tab and there it is again. Just dumb.

It sounds like with their current policies and newer attempts to monetize, they are about to implode on themselves.
 
I don't like AutoPlay. That's why I turned it off.

YouTube just isn't going away soon.
 
People were swearing off YouTube as far back as 2009. The problem is, they have no serious competition.

Vessel made a lot of noise by attracting many YouTube stars (including LinusTechTips) and offering their fans paid "Early Access" subscriptons to view their videos a week before they appeared on YouTube. It didn't work. The site shut down after less than two years.

Vimeo is great for indie filmmakers who want to post their work without having to worry about copyright claims and the unwashed masses leaving nasty comments. But for vloggers, tech channels, etc., it's useless. I have a Vimeo channel and upload many of my videos there. Nobody watches them.

DailyMotion is big in its home country of France, but not anywhere else. And it's full of softcore porn that they've never really been able to keep separate from the general content.

Other sites have come and gone over the years (multiple times, in ZippCast's case). Vid.me seems to be the latest one that people are talking about, but we'll see how long they last...
 
On my netbook (an HP Mini 5101 with a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder card installed) I had to disable webm support in Firefox a while back to force the use of flash player to be able to watch videos in resolutions higher than 360p. Youtube, in their infinite wisdom, didn't announce this change so I had to spend hours researching the problem before finally finding the above mentioned fix. Now they have disabled flash player altogether (again, with no notification*) which means I can't watch anything with a resolution higher than, say, 360p - 480p since the Broadcom card doesn't support acceleration of the webm video format. I used to be able to watch 720p or even 1080p without problems using the flash player. FML

* This thread is literally the first and only place I've found mentioning that youtube dropped support for flash player. Thanks vwestlife.
 
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