Greetings, all. My Gateway LT40 notebook computer runs a dual boot with LL and AntiX's MX-15. (LL is my preferred distribution, but I like to play around with alternatives.) Playing Youtube videos has been a challenge on this little machine.
To avoid browser issues, I installed SMTube in both distros, with VLC being the player it calls. Well, with this setup LL did OK playing the videos at about 80-90% CPU usage. But MX-15 ran with 100% CPU usage and usually the image froze while the sound played.
After some bumbling around I went to the SMTube settings menu and found that it could use several different players. I installed and tried SMPlayer with better results than VLC, but with the video lagging the audio by about 1 second in MX-15.
Then I tried mplayer, which is a command line program. Bingo! With mplayer the backend to SMTube, Youtube videos played just fine in both distros. LL still uses less CPU than MX-15, but they are both way down from using VLC or SMPlayer. I did have to reduce the desired resolution to 360 to get the full video frame, but I blame my 1240 x 600 display for that. Also, there are fewer controls while watching the video, but this doesn't bother me.
In retrospect this all makes sense, because as a command line program I'd expect mplayer to use fewer resources. But it took me a while to figure this out. I thought I'd pass my experiences along to the LL forum in case this would help someone else. Linux Lite could actually play the videos without changes, but by using the SMTube and mplayer combination the CPU usage is down to something like 10-15%, a big jump downward, and I like that. If I'm playing a music video just to listen, I can minimize the video window and do other things at the same time.
Cheers,
Andy N1KSN
