Best OpenBSD hack ... ever: converting Flash video to MP4 with www.keepvid.com (and it's a good hack even if you run Linux, Windows or OS X)
In OpenBSD, Flash support isn't exactly something to crow about. Flash Player 7 is all that works due to subsequent Linux Flash players needing ALSA sound support, a feature none of the BSD projects possess. And that player only works in the Opera Web browser — and only on i386.
But it turns out that you can watch Flash video in OpenBSD on any platform that runs Mplayer. And this clever hack is something that even Linux, Windows and Mac users can benefit from.
Here's how to do it: While perusing the OpenBSD mailing lists, I saw this post about KeepVid.
Basically what you do is enter the URL of the video in the proper box at http://keepvid.com, and then you get an MP4 video to download. Then you can play that video with Mplayer.
YouTube videos do play in OpenBSD's Opera with Flash, since they don't require Flash 9 or 10, but again, if you have a non-i386 machine (or don't want to run Opera) and want to watch them, this is a great way to do it.
Three things:
1) Not all Flash content has an easily grabbable URL, so I'm not sure http://keepvid.com will work in those instances.
2) Turning a Flash video into an MP4 means you now have a copy on your local machine that you can keep and watch at your leisure and archive as you see fit.
3) http://keepvid.com can be mighty useful even if you don't run a BSD, even if you don't run Linux. If you have no trouble viewing Flash video on your Linux, Windows or Mac OS box, http://keepvid.com still offers you a way to save a Flash movie in MP4 format on your local drive to watch at will with your favorite video player.
For me, anything that knocks Flash off its proprietary pedestal is A-OK.
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Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
Steven Rosenberg aims to learn what he does not know. He writes about it here.
I've had PC-BSD installed for the past two days, and while I'm certain I'm going back to either Ubuntu or Debian Squeeze, it comes with Flash 9 working under Firefox and Opera in the installation. I'm not sure if this is doing it natively or under Wine, but the support is good and works better than Flash was under Squeeze for me. Unfortunately the boot loader does not install so I have to use my System Rescue disk to even get into the system. Also the system doesn't seem to have the best memory management, as it seems after opening firefox, installing something with pkg_add and listening to some music (not at the same time but sequentially) I'm hitting up against swap. On boot the system uses roughly 450mb out of my 1.2GB, but it doesn't seem to ever free memory when an app closes. Plus PC-BSD virtually locks you in to KDE 4.2. Actually its one of the best implementations I've used of KDE4 (Fedora 10 constantly flickers and is quite useless, Kubuntu still seems chunky) but I'd prefer either Gnome or xfce. But the point of this comment is that PC-BSD does come installed with Flash 9 working under Firefox 3 (and pretty well at that)
Ric, I wasn't sure which Flash Player ran in PC-BSD, so I'm glad to hear that it's version 9. I'm pretty sure it's the Linux version with Wine.
I've done a half-dozen installs of PC-BSD over the past year and a half, and I have to say that I'm very impressed with it. The one problem I've run into was not having enough space in the partition I dedicated to PC-BSD, and the install couldn't go all the way through. The installer should check disk space before it begins ...
Like you, I'm not a KDE user, and installing a system heavily reliant on KDE isn't something I'm terribly happy about. I seem to remember that Fluxbox is also installed by default in PC-BSD, and you can choose it when logging it. But like you, I'd prefer GNOME or Xfce (and not always in that order).
At least Slackware, even though it's KDE-centric, does include Xfce in the default install (though Koffice is there but not OpenOffice or even Abiword/Gnumeric). And it's not hard to figure out why the major Slackware-derived distros (ZenWalk, Vector, Wolvix) feature Xfce and a similarly light, non-KDE application environment.
I really should do a long-term test of FreeBSD. It installs with a very small base, and there are tons of packages and even more ports. And even though I've been quite happy running OpenBSD, I have a feeling that things in FreeBSD are more than a little bit easier to get working right. (I say this with no evidence ...)