smeezekitty wrote:

Also, when blocking things with hosts, I find 0.0.0.0 seems to have less performance hit than 127.0.0.1 for some reason

There should be no discernible difference - it's essentially routing to a local null that returns nothing, and it checks hosts before it goes to DNS, so unless your hosts list is hilariously long it should be able to resolve to nothing pretty quickly (that is, it should be "instant" from the user's perspective). Of course I've never tried modernizing a K6 or 486 or whatever other old machine for web browsing, so I have no idea how that would perform.

I put the host file linked in thw Windows directory of Windows 98 but how can I be sure about it is filtering or not cause the batch file was not for this os version.

With this K6 233 it's difficult to say it's running also cause I can't enable DMA on my hard drive with the I430VX chipset I have.

In some cases, 127.0.0.1 may feel slower than 0.0.0.0 due to longer timeout.

obobskivich wrote:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

This is what I've heard as well. I haven't looked into hosts file-based blocking on my PC, but I have a utility for it on my phone called AdAway. Found it on F-Droid, but you need a rooted phone to use it.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

No substantial performance hit overall, and on many junk-heavy pages a performance improvement is noticeable, because it isn't loading nearly as much junk (it's much less resources intensive for it to resolve a bunch of 127.0.0.1's than a bunch of images/graphics/banner ads/whatever). Running that coupled with Ghostery (which blocks basically all social media junk, among other things) and not allowing Flash to run by default makes a lot of media-nightmare sites run much smoother, even on nicer hardware, as well as making them easier to navigate. Blocking multimedia junk locally will generally always improve performance, but if it's handled through a proxy or other external service there can be a performance hit depending on the performance of the proxy. Some sites also behave really weirdly when you don't let them drop supercookies, a million Flash applets, a never-ending stream of Javascript trash, etc onto you. 🤣

If you don't believe me, try it out for yourself - all of this stuff is very easy to implement and very easy to unload if you aren't happy for whatever reason. 😀

Do note: I've avoided the actual "AdBlock" software because it can cause compatibility problems, and has instituted a pay-to-play program where anonymous advertisers can buy their way out of blocking (and at that point, what's the point?).

Thanks. 😀 I'm on Linux though, so I found this on the same page: http://www.putorius.net/2012/01/block-unwante … sements-on.html I'm gonna give it a try.

Speaking of HOSTS files, you guys should get a proper router (like pfSense for example) and you can add 127.0.0.1 loopback DNS for ad domains to your routers DNS resolver daemon, so any client on your network that tries to DNS resolve them won't be able to load them. There's this Chess app on my android tablet that loves to load ads in a top and bottom frame during the game, but I've got the ad domains blocked at the router level so they can't ever resolve and load. Everyone here uses Skype as well, but I blocked all of their ad domains too so now whenever you're here on my network, whether it be on your phone, tablet, or desktop, the Skype ads don't load. Once you realize the power of a proper router, it's awesome.

Also, as for as Adblock Plus goes, you can do similar on Internet Explorer 11 (bear with me). They call it "Tracking Protection", but it allows you to import Adblock Pluses EasyList and blocks ads just the same. It's a little known trick of an otherwise useless "feature". You can also enable Enhanced Protected Mode (more resilient to exploits) and ActiveX filtering to make IE pretty secure these days. The ActiveX Filtering capability is similar to NoScript, except without the flexibility and is primarily a "Flash on, Flash off" type of system, which is still useful because a lot of exploits come from Flash anyways. ActiveX Filtering only works on individual pages and when started is enabled on every site by default, if you want to run Flash content for a site you would then disable ActiveX Filtering via the URL bar on that site and content would then run (presumably from all cross domains loaded from the site as well). It's not as good / flexible as NoScript, but it's decent and much better than having to manually enable/disable ActiveX on every site through the menus.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

obobskivich wrote:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm […]
Show full quote

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

This is what I've heard as well. I haven't looked into hosts file-based blocking on my PC, but I have a utility for it on my phone called AdAway. Found it on F-Droid, but you need a rooted phone to use it.

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

No substantial performance hit overall, and on many junk-heavy pages a performance improvement is noticeable, because it isn't loading nearly as much junk (it's much less resources intensive for it to resolve a bunch of 127.0.0.1's than a bunch of images/graphics/banner ads/whatever). Running that coupled with Ghostery (which blocks basically all social media junk, among other things) and not allowing Flash to run by default makes a lot of media-nightmare sites run much smoother, even on nicer hardware, as well as making them easier to navigate. Blocking multimedia junk locally will generally always improve performance, but if it's handled through a proxy or other external service there can be a performance hit depending on the performance of the proxy. Some sites also behave really weirdly when you don't let them drop supercookies, a million Flash applets, a never-ending stream of Javascript trash, etc onto you. 🤣

If you don't believe me, try it out for yourself - all of this stuff is very easy to implement and very easy to unload if you aren't happy for whatever reason. 😀

Do note: I've avoided the actual "AdBlock" software because it can cause compatibility problems, and has instituted a pay-to-play program where anonymous advertisers can buy their way out of blocking (and at that point, what's the point?).

Thanks. 😀 I'm on Linux though, so I found this on the same page: http://www.putorius.net/2012/01/block-unwante … sements-on.html I'm gonna give it a try.

I would be concerned about automatically download a hosts file from a server like that. It is a security exploit risk as the IP address could be routed to something malicious.

smeezekitty wrote:

I would be concerned about automatically download a hosts file from a server like that. It is a security exploit risk as the IP address could be routed to something malicious.

It's just a text file. You can look at it and verify that indeed all the listed domains are being redirected to 0.0.0.0, and not some random IP.

devius wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I would be concerned about automatically download a hosts file from a server like that. It is a security exploit risk as the IP address could be routed to something malicious.

It's just a text file. You can look at it and verify that indeed all the listed domains are being redirected to 0.0.0.0, and not some random IP.

That could be changed at any time. If you manually update it, it isn't a big deal as long as you check it. But I wouldn't wget it personally.

smeezekitty wrote:

devius wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

I would be concerned about automatically download a hosts file from a server like that. It is a security exploit risk as the IP address could be routed to something malicious.

It's just a text file. You can look at it and verify that indeed all the listed domains are being redirected to 0.0.0.0, and not some random IP.

That could be changed at any time. If you manually update it, it isn't a big deal as long as you check it. But I wouldn't wget it personally.

It shouldn't be that hard to make a script that uses grep or something like that to check the file... so you could automate the process by using wget to download it to a temporary location, check the contents and then copy it to the right folder.

Tried installing flash 10.0.45 as a previous post suggested... The youtube vídeos I tested would simply not play. My guess is that with Flash 10.1.x they added the more taxing codec youtube uses now, and having the older version forces youtube to provide the version with the prévious codec... which might not be available for newer vídeos.

Once I installed Flash 10.1 vídeos started running again, but even 360p was unbelievable choppy and CPU usage was 100%

alexanrs wrote:

Tried installing flash 10.0.45 as a previous post suggested... The youtube vídeos I tested would simply not play. My guess is that with Flash 10.1.x they added the more taxing codec youtube uses now, and having the older version forces youtube to provide the version with the prévious codec... which might not be available for newer vídeos.

Once I installed Flash 10.1 vídeos started running again, but even 360p was unbelievable choppy and CPU usage was 100%

Try flash 9. I am not sure if it still works on youtube (it did a year ago)

alexanrs wrote:

Tried installing flash 10.0.45 as a previous post suggested... The youtube vídeos I tested would simply not play. My guess is that with Flash 10.1.x they added the more taxing codec youtube uses now, and having the older version forces youtube to provide the version with the prévious codec... which might not be available for newer vídeos.

Once I installed Flash 10.1 vídeos started running again, but even 360p was unbelievable choppy and CPU usage was 100%

That's strange. I've tested this combination: Firefox 12 + Flash 10.0.45 on Athlon 64 3000+ (Windows XP) last week, and it plays all the videos I tried. Results are noticeable better than with any newer version. However there are some problems to back from fullscreen mode.
Back in time I found this version the only one to be able to play youtube (in lores of course) on Pentium 3 1000Mhz (on crappy Gericom laptop with SIS chipset).

Yesterday I've tried SMtube +SMPlayer combination on another Athlon64 3000+, and this does his job very well. My recommendation !

If you run a newer OS and browser, you can watch youtube videos without flash.

zyga64 wrote:

That's strange. I've tested this combination: Firefox 12 + Flash 10.0.45 on Athlon 64 3000+ (Windows XP) last week, and it plays all the videos I tried. Results are noticeable better than with any newer version. However there are some problems to back from fullscreen mode.
Back in time I found this version the only one to be able to play youtube (in lores of course) on Pentium 3 1000Mhz (on crappy Gericom laptop with SIS chipset).

Yesterday I've tried SMtube +SMPlayer combination on another Athlon64 3000+, and this does his job very well. My recommendation !

SMPlayer works wonderfully, but it doesn't allow for comments and subscriptions. Bummer. But plays HD vídeos just fine wih high CPU usage.
Tried the older flash version again, this time downgrading to Firefox 3.5. Same results: the page loads but the player doesn't do anything.
Interestingly enough, Flash 9 Works. But the player is a bit glitchy (the buttons don't show up) and is stuck on what seems to be 240p or 360p.

I'm running my GT 6600 with 160 drivers. Perhaps I'd have better luck with the latest ones.

joacim wrote:

If you run a newer OS and browser, you can watch youtube videos without flash.

HTML5 vídeos are as slow as Flash on this PC (at least on Firefox)

I'm running Firefox 35 with HTML5 on a P4 531 with adblock and all and so far i didn't notice any serious slowdown. I can play YouTube 360p with no lag at all. Could be because i've upgraded to 3 gigs of ram

These are my system specs: http://valid.x86.fr/sx59fh

obobskivich wrote:

Worth also noting: on the "bridged" GeForce 6/7 cards, video accel is generally disabled/unsupported per nVidia specs. I'm not sure if the 8400GS PCI would have a similar limitation or not. PCIe of course the 8400-8600 or G9x+ will be solid (and note that GeForce 8 has both G8x and G9x parts - the G9x parts have the improved decode features like the 8600). Regarding 1080p, my Quadro FX 1700 (GF8600 based) has no troubles with YT 1080p. 😀

I've been playing with a PCI (not Express) 8400GS that came in the mail yesterday. It's a G98 based version. I can confirm that hardware H.264 acceleration definitely works on the PCI G98 based card. Software/drivers could still get in the way though.

I wasn't able to get this feature to work on WinXP, but I didn't put a lot of effort into it. What I tried with XP was an old install with the nVidia 260.99 driver and VLC player. In VLC I made sure the "hardware decoding" box was checked, but it was still killing the CPU and not playing properly. I suppose the next things I'd try for XP would be a later driver and different player software.

I was able to get acceleration working with SMPlayer (an MPlayer frontend) under Linux Mint 17.1. It just needed the proprietary NVidia driver enabled, and an option changed in the SMPlayer settings. The system running that install has a Prescott 2.8GHz/533 CPU.
While playing a 1280x720 video file, originally downloaded from youtube, in software mode the CPU was saturated and it only played about half speed. With "VDPAU" enabled, it plays smoothly and the sum of CPU usage for the "MPlayer" and "SMPlayer" processes is 6%. So no doubt that it worked. However, I haven't had any luck playing directly from Youtube yet.

These cards really are amazing for video playback on old PCs. Somebody here reported using a PCI 8400GS to play 1080p with a Pentium3 933MHz:
http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=61218
I need to repeat the annoying caveat though that some 8400GS cards have the older G86 GPU in it, not the G98 which is better for video acceleration. I have no idea why nVidia didn't give the G98 based cards their own name.