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Comment by Spittie | Hacker News Reader

ViewTube: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

It replaces the YouTube player with the standard html5 video player. This alone made my experience on YouTube way better. My connection is slow, so many times I'll just open a YouTube video in a background tab, and leave it loading for a while. With this, I can just preload the whole video. And seeking doesn't make the video reload.

A side bonus, also, is that every video will use the html5 player, so making flash useless on YouTube (one of the few sites that make me keep flash installed). It will also remove the ads, so it might not be your thing for moral/ethical reasons.

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This thing is amazing, thanks for the script link!

My slow 1.5mbps Internet has had awful youtube experience since the player change. I have been downloading most of the videos directly to avoid using it.

how do you download the video? is it a browser plugin? I use chrome, and the old youtube downloader extension no longer works after their UI revamp (and the extension is no longer updated as far as i know).

The best, non-scumware script is: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

I use(d) http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25105.

I have used Keepvid.com before, it is simple and works good. Sometimes it requires the use of an Applet (which seems very suspicious to me) so I deny it access.

Video-DownloadHelper[0] is also a good choice if you need to download videos often, and from different sources (e.g. blip.tv). However, it only works with Firefox. Jdownloader can also download Youtube Videos (and many others).

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/video-downloadhe...

I use "1-Click Youtube Video Downloader"[0] in Iceweasel on Debian unstable and it works great (it puts a "Download" button below the video between the Subscribe button and the number of views.

I've only used it a few times but it seems to work well. You can choose which video (resolution/quality) to download and then I usually watch 'em later using VLC.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1-click-youtu...

Thank you! I had been using Chrome just for Youtube. Now, if only I could get Greasemonkey scripts to be saved by Firefox Sync.

Holy crap, thank you very much!

I've just installed this in Chrome and tried it on two videos and it is working great: the videos buffer quickly and seeking is fast and doesn't force a rebuffer. I've had problems with Firefox on YouTube, also trying the opt-in beta for the HTML5 player, but it didn't work. Cheers!

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