youtube-dl, qt 4/5, direct gl 2/3...ugh....i mean, fun times

[deathtokoalas]

ultimately, i'm looking for answers to the questions at the bottom of the thread, but i need to vent, first.

so, i'm dealing with the death of flash over youtube and it's ramifications for my tv box - which is a pIII with a 128 mb ati all-in-one gpu. it was actually a really nice machine back in 1998. i do not want to buy a pi or something, for the reason that i think it's insane to dedicate a quadcore towards something that a 486 can do and also because i don't want to landfill a working machine. there's nothing wrong with this pIII, dammit. it sent youtube to the tv for the last ten years, and there's no reason to think it can't do it for another ten.

the actual problem is the bloat in getting to youtube, not my 20 year old cpu. i've stripped xp down fairly well with nlite, but it's still xp. then, you have to update firefox to run html5 - which forces you to pair a 90s cpu with a 10s browser, and, yeah, that doesn't work well. i think it would work well enough, though, if youtube would tone down the javascript, which is what really sputters the thing out. i tried k-meleon but it's forked far too late and doesn't get around the basic javascript mess at youtube. if i could get somebody to take a fork of like firefox 3.0 and mod it to run html5 using xul or something...

there is something called minitube, but they went and built it on dot net, which is actually too much for this thing. minitube wants a 1.5 ghz processor. some minitube.

so, i'm on the brink of resorting to a dsl build from the mid 00s, but i'm still going to run into the same basic problem of needing html5 built on an ancient fork in order to get the cpu to handle streaming - which, as mentioned, is insane. it's a pIII. the premise that a pIII can't handle streaming video is preposterous! they need to cut their bloat!

so, as a last gasp before i resort to a minimal linux install and some kind of forked browser hack, which the world would thank me for but is going to be time consuming, i'm trying to set up smplayer to accept a playlist. i can mod the playlist in the browser, that's fine, smplayer just has to stream it out the tv. i thought this would be easy enough....

1) the newest versions of smplayer are built on qt5, which my processor can't handle - i need qt4. when exactly did smplayer switch from qt4 to qt5? i'm hoping i can find the latest possible choice, because:
2) the qt4 versions of the install that i've found cannot access the youtube-dl server. when was this fixed? is there a working qt4 download that can get to youtube-dl? see, i can install 16.9, and it streams audio, but it can't decode video because...
3) my gpu is too old for the built in decoders. for example, i'd need open gl 2.0 for the card (this information comes from an mplayer log file), but the program come with 3.0. i suspect that the better answer is to find a way get a qt4 smplayer to read open gl 2.0/2.1. anybody have a good idea how to approach that?

in the long run, i hope my lightweight html5 browser appears. i might have to do it myself if i can't get this to work. it doesn't need any extraneous functionality; it just has to stream video. but, it needs some help from youtube, who ought to be being pushed to offer a way into the site that doesn't require so many cycles lost on java - or perhaps just need to be pushed to clean up the site, over all. for right now, it seems that smplayer can extend the life of this system, but i just need these qt4 tweaks to get the video to actually work.

[rvm]

[deathtokoalas]

after a few tweaks, that does seem to work - thank you. but, it doesn't take playlists in the url input. is that expected or am i doing something wrong?

[rvm]

Do you get any error?

[stevo]

In case any Linux users are looking for the same thing, the Debian 8 builds in this repo are built against Qt 4, the Debian 9 ones are built against its Qt 5 to use the HDPI support. https://build.opensuse.org/package/show ... t/smplayer