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I've recently begun watching youtube videos to catch some sporting events. I 
mainly use the latest versions of Ubuntu 
on newer machines these days--machines which are not by any means bleeding 
edge, but are alot more current than the 
hardware BL typically targets. When I began using youtube, I was on a DSL 
connection, which meant I had sufficient 
bandwidth to watch these videos while downloading them (the video stream 
starts playing while the stream is being 
downloaded). Now that I use dialin a fair amount though, I had come to the 
conclusion that watching youtube videos and 
flash videos in general simply wasn't going to be an option for me. But while 
doing some reading yesterday, I realized 
that these flash videos can be watched if you have a dialin connection, 
though the process for viewing them is a bit 
different than the procedure by which they are most typically viewed. 
Furthermore, this process could be of interest to 
BL users, since the viewer I've used to watch these videos is mplayer--which 
has been packaged for BL--and since some 
BL users are still on dialup. Here's some more info.

The "automated" process for watching flash videos such as they have at 
youtube involves installing a flashplayer plugin 
for your browser. When you click on the link to watch the flash movie, it 
plays within your browser window in a little 
flash box. Viewing the movie won't work over dialin since the stream loads 
much more slowly than the plugin player 
plays it. The secret for dialin users is to download the flash movie to your 
hard drive, then invoke mplayer to view 
it. The problem with this approach is that youtube, and perhaps other such 
flash movie sites, don't give you a url to 
the actual flash movie. I suppose you could find one by searching through the 
youtube page's source, but that's pretty 
tedious. The easiest way to download the flash video seems to be to use one 
of a number of sites that can convert the 
url of the page where the flash video is viewed into a downloadable link. The 
one I've used since I discovered how to 
do this is http://kej.tw/flvretriever/ but I believe there are a number of 
others. You paste a url into the box there, 
hit the retrieve button, and in a few seconds the flash video is available 
for download via a link. Usually you'll have 
to give the file that gets downloaded an .flv extension, though sometimes it 
will already have that extension.

Once the file has been downloaded to your hard drive and you've assigned it 
an .flv extension, just invoke mplayer to 
view it by entering something like mplayer /home/user/get_video.flv. mplayer 
is actually a much better flash movie 
viewer than the firefox flash plugin anyway, since it can be resized to your 
specifications (using the -xy option). Be 
aware that these videos are approximately 2 MB per minute, so longer ones 
will tie up your connection for a good, long 
time. I've made the assumption here that the mplayer compiled for BL handles 
.flv files--which may not be correct.

The kej.tw site works fine with an up-to-date version of elinks, so I'm 
guessing it would work with links and/or lynx 
as well, btw.

Hope this post proves of help/interest to someone.

James

PS For the crowd that's used BL to create a photo frame device. How about 
this as a video application along the same 
lines. A script is written that randomly downloads youtube videos. It runs in 
a separate vt or as a background process. 
Then, the BL target machine plays the downloaded videos using mplayer on the 
main vt, or as the foreground process. Is 
that a cool use for BL, or what?