[z0mbi3]

I've been hovering over the buy button on a Mini 9 for a few days now. Just mulling it over in my head. One thing that's been bothering me is this choppy youtube playback that everyone has pretty much accepted is down to the inefficiencies of adobe's flash player, paired with the relatively low power Atom processor.

Everyone's worked out that if you stick the flv files from youtube into vlc then they play perfectly, so the obvious answer would be to use VLC as the embedded player of flv files in Firefox itself (sorry IE and Chrome users, no love for you here). It's been awhile since I did this and when I did it was under Linux, so I did some research and found the following link that works for both XP and Linux:

http://netsharc.wordpress.com/2007/03/3 ... e-via-vlc/

Now I've just followed his instructions on my work pc running XP, and while I get an error when I actually go to a youtube page, the videos still actually play fine and very smoothly. I'm putting the error I got down to my crappy work laptop, but it's irrelevant really as the videos still played very well.

I've not had time to try out an HD video yet, or Ubuntu, but there's every indication that it will work fine. The only downside I can see to using this method is that the video can't be streamed. You have to wait for it to load before it will start playing. Aside from that it's seamless and perfectly embedded.

Sorry if someone else has already reported this previously, I just thought it was worth mentioning in detail as I understand the issue of streaming videos to be quite frustrating to many Mini 9 owners.

Thanks for reading.

[doggyworld]

Does this work with Hulu also?

[z0mbi3]

Negative, only youtube.com with this paticular user script.

We really need an all round solution for this. It's the one thing stopping me buying a mini 9.

[Exile]

I have tried hulu and youtube on my Dell Mini and have no issues. If I play hulu HD it will get a little choppy though.

[Ducman69]

I have never experienced choppy video on standard definition youtube videos.

The problem is with high-definition videos. So just an FYI for those that don't have a Mini 9 and are curious about that.

[Yownanymous]

Hang on, I've never encountered said problems, even with HD... How strange...

[Dr Some-what Evil]

As far as hulu and youtube, as long as you install the latest flash crap from adobe, it should play with no problems. I have on occasion DL a couple videos in FLV format, I found FLV Player to be most useful and free. It plays all my FLV files with no problems on my mini-9. Actually I havent had any issues after doing a fresh install of XP and loading all the proper drivers. I'm guessing that sometimes the standard Dell install is a bit buggy. Good Luck to those that need it.

Dr Some-what Evil

[strider_mt2k]

I don't have these problems playing Hulu or FLVs or any of that stuff.

[dianed]

This may help some of you:

I was having trouble with video--Hulu, YouTube, other sites--on my desktop and notebook (but not with my Mini 9) and could not figure out what was wrong. I had the latest Flash player and everything else was in line just right. I was disconnecting and reconnecting my cable, changing my IP address, etc., but nothing really workied. Finally, I realized that my Java updater had stopped functioning. It seems pretty obvious to me that my security software blocked it--I have the same security software on both of those computers. I updated Java on both of them, and have had few problems since.

I have had no problems at all with video on my Mini 9.

[wiz1]

Originally Posted by dianed

This may help some of you:

I was having trouble with video--Hulu, YouTube, other sites--on my desktop and notebook (but not with my Mini 9) and could not figure out what was wrong. I had the latest Flash player and everything else was in line just right. I was disconnecting and reconnecting my cable, changing my IP address, etc., but nothing really workied. Finally, I realized that my Java updater had stopped functioning. It seems pretty obvious to me that my security software blocked it--I have the same security software on both of those computers. I updated Java on both of them, and have had few problems since.

I have had no problems at all with video on my Mini 9.

what about hd youtube vids??????