February 17th, 2008YouTube Alternate Player Firefox Extension
Update: Version 1.4 released.
1.4 Changes:
- Fixed the fullscreen glitch
1.3 Changes:
- Is now compatible with Firefox 3
- Made the status-bar menu simpler
1.2 Changes:
- Removed bundled VLC Portable and Wimpy
- Added stop button preference for Flowplayer
- Removed .flv extension for flow player as it sometimes stuffed up the stream (you can still download the video as an .flv)
- Added a restore function that restores the original player for the current page
Download here: http://forboden.com/js/youtubealternateplayer.xpi
Or here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6522
Description:
This extension replaces the default youtube player with either flowplayer (pic below)
or JW FLV Media Player (pic below)
You have the option of selecting which player to choose from within the extension preferences window:
You can also download and save the video using the status bar menu.
February 17th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Hello. I’d love to try your extension. I can’t though. I use firefox 3, and many people are converting. please make it compatible with firefox 3.
February 19th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Chad, it should be compatible now.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Hello, when I install your extension, none of the players will do fullscreen anymore, regardless of the native options. They’ll just start behaving weirdly. Anything that can be done about that?
(ff3+flash9 here)
February 21st, 2008 at 5:57 am
Well done.
Is it possible to add a button to change the aspect ratio?
February 24th, 2008 at 1:31 am
I’m using 1.3 of your add-on.
A few minutes ago I went to youtube - but the video player had collapsed and was invisible. I tried the youtube default player - but the video player was still hidden. When I disabled your add-on - the youtube video player was visible again.
February 24th, 2008 at 5:19 am
@ekbworldwide - can you post a link to the video that didn’t work?
February 24th, 2008 at 10:13 am
Yansky: is full screen supposed to work with latest nightlies?
February 24th, 2008 at 10:43 am
@DeathWolf - I’m still looking into that problem.
February 25th, 2008 at 8:44 am
An update on what I said…
The video players sometimes “collapse”. I clicked a few of my youtube videos
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=ekbworldwide
The first video I tried…
Chinese hip-hop grandma
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HS7lOUSzRNk
…didn’t work in any of the three players. A tried another couple videos and they worked in -all- the players. The only thing I noticed was that sometimes the player was collapsed for a moment and then came back.
I went back to “Chinese hip-hop grandma” and it worked in all the players.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:34 pm
Indeed the full screen button for JW FLV Media Player does nothing. And why is the button shown in the first place if “allowfullscreen” is unchecked? Anyway it could please be updated to use v3.15?
Same goes with flowplayer when “allowfullscreen” is unchecked.
March 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
@DeathWolf - The fullscreen glitch should be fixed now.
@ekbworldwide - I wasn’t able to replicate the problems you encountered.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Thanks yansky. Great work as ever:)
By the way full screen does not work here if I dont choose the native fullscreen option.
A nice option to add to flowplayer would be ‘useSmoothing’
As for JW FLV it would be nice to have a default volume option.
(It should also be possible with a cvs version of flowplayer too, as they have added it)
March 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Sorry to post a second time in a row, but I noticed that the fmt=6/fmt=18 videos dont work if youtube alternate player is enabled…
Anything you can do to fix that?
March 6th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
@DeathWolf - the ‘useSmoothing’ option is enabled by default.
http://flowplayer.org/player/configuration.html
March 6th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
weird because here the scaling is purely linear and ugly with flowplayer…(but nice looking with jw flv)
March 7th, 2008 at 9:24 am
A long term feature request: ability to be able to add any player(giving a swf) and a list of arguments to give to the player. That’d allow one to use any of the numerous flash players around.(I’ve been testing some really nice ones, like the one from break.com(whatever is it’s name)
March 7th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I get the same thing. It seems somewhat pixelated. It may have something to do with the “initialScale” value. I’ll mess around and see what I can come up with.
@DeathWolf - that’s a neat idea. The majority of video site players won’t work on other site’s though. But it would be possible to add a function where you can add/remove parameters from that specific video site’s player. Is that what you had in mind?
March 8th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Well I thought about both at the same time to be frank:
Being able to define(at first only for youtube) custom replacements for the player and it’s settings.(but later also for other websites)
March 16th, 2008 at 3:54 am
For the jwplayer here’s a few suggestions:
Add the following variables
setVars(’showstop=’,”true”);
setVars(’showdownload=’,”true”);
And if showdownload is set, these two should be set the following way(at least for youtube):
setVars(’linktarget=’,'_blank’);
setVars(’link=’,encodeURIComponent(’http://cache.googlevideo.com/get_video?video_id=’ + vidID + ‘&origin=youtube.com’));
March 20th, 2008 at 9:11 am
How do I set this up on Windows XP? Please! Adobe keeps crashing my browser and this looks like the answer i’ve been searching for. The plugin installs fine, but I don’t know how to setup flowplayer so that it can be recognized by Mozilla.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:13 am
How do I set this up on Windows XP? Please! Adobe keeps crashing my browser and this looks like the answer i’ve been searching for. The plugin installs fine, but I don’t know how to setup flowplayer so that it can be recognized by Mozilla.
March 20th, 2008 at 9:30 am
@HELP - there’s no setup involved. It should work automatically.
Make sure you have the latest version of flash installed.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:57 am
Okay, I see what you mean now. I downloaded the flowplayer pack when I didn’t need to since you’re streaming the app from google. Anyway, I finally got it working with the Flock browser based off the Gecko engine (just like firefox!) YEA, but I never did manage to get it working properly in Firefox itself, no matter what version I tried (Windows XP SP2). And flash isn’t crashing anymore. Hope this helps anyone else in the same boat.
P.S. The “download video” option saves tons of time and the file is auto named! WOW! Thanks, you’re awesome!
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:14 am
I,
See my website http://www.jookydo.com to find free Youtube online player video, without downloading the video.
Just choose the player you want, fill the Youtube url like http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=vy78aCF2Tt…. and get the html code of the player…. Enjoy…
March 27th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
I spoke to soon! Flash crashed flocked and I was super pissed, I used an older version of NPSWF32.dll version 9.0 r47 and copied it into the plugins folder where Flock resides. Everything works. No more crashing or any of that nonsense! I’m so happy YAY!
April 17th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
FF 2.0.0.14 stops Player 1.3 from working. The player doesn’t appear. There’s just an empty space. I upgraded to 1.4 - same problem.
April 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Whoops. I forget - I have three players to choose from. Those problems are true for jw flv player. The flow player works.
April 19th, 2008 at 1:51 am
Could you set it up to work on channel pages too? I hate it when something starts up all by itself…
May 12th, 2008 at 10:28 am
On a side note this seems to have been broken in recent nightlies, the toreplace function is now undefined or so.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Wont install on firefox 3.0 beta 5 on Ubuntu 8.04.
June 10th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Will not install on RC1 either, says it is not compatible.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:17 am
is it possible to view movies in youtube’s high quality mode with the other players? The link is there under the movie, but doesn’t seem to work …
June 18th, 2008 at 11:45 am
@jnski, I’m gonna update the extension for FF3. I’ll add an option for viewing the high quality version if availabel.
June 18th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
nice, …
can’t wait
Anny idea on when the update will do us smile?
Annother question: i’m on Mac, FF 2, and the add-on works fine, but is not installable in FF3 …
Thanks allready
/jnski
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Pleeease update Alternate Player for FF3! I really love this extension and cant use it anymore
July 8th, 2008 at 10:17 am
please update for Firefox 3! was just about to try it out!