I guess the YouTube problems are just my desktop. I played a few videos on my laptop, and they played fine instead of playing for two seconds, restarting, playing for seven seconds, skipping forward 10 seconds, playing for a few minutes (possibly skipping forward more times), and then stopping and buffering non-stop until I refresh the page (or if it recovers and starts playing again, it will skip back 20 seconds). Also, the laptop defaults to 720p, while the automatic quality setting on my desktop (with the same Intel GPU, Windows version, browser, and browser extensions) won't go above 480p (I have to manually select higher resolutions).

To make things even more strange, my old Linux box defaults to 1080p60 with no hardware video decoding and a CPU that isn't able to play 1080p60 smoothly (and a screen resolution under 1080p).

lti wrote on 2024-03-23, 17:33:

gerry wrote on 2024-03-19, 13:02:

i'd never had that issue with Firefox and youtube. Opera seems to work fine too, as another option

It happens on almost every video for me, especially the problem with videos skipping forward randomly (and by a random amount - usually 10 seconds, but it can be anywhere from 2 to 15 seconds). Is it just me then?

I just switched to Firefox and haven't noticed any issues with Youtube (yet).

Yeah, I just realized today that it's only my main computer. I have no idea what would cause it, though. Maybe I need to refresh Firefox or something.

That laptop does still have the problem of quiet and horribly distorted audio (totally drowned out by Windows notification sounds, lots of crackle, and anything remotely loud turns into a burst of full-volume noise).

lti wrote on 2024-03-23, 17:33:

gerry wrote on 2024-03-19, 13:02:

i'd never had that issue with Firefox and youtube. Opera seems to work fine too, as another option

It happens on almost every video for me, especially the problem with videos skipping forward randomly (and by a random amount - usually 10 seconds, but it can be anywhere from 2 to 15 seconds). Is it just me then?

Something is wrong with your setup. I use all the major browsers across multiple PCs, Linux and Win10/11, and never experience this.

lti wrote on 2024-03-18, 18:58:

For me, YouTube is difficult to watch because of how broken everything is under Firefox. Videos randomly skip ahead, the buffer suddenly empties and then the video reloads 20 seconds back, or some videos won't even load at all. It's stuff that is supposed to happen to people who use ad blockers, but it happens in Firefox without an ad blocker. Chromium-based browsers work fine, even with an ad blocker. However, I'm too stubborn to switch to the most popular browser and accept a browser monopoly, even though I've run into other websites that don't work in Firefox (like Parts Express, which means that my bank account is safe).

I've had to essentially give up using YouTube as a website and use things like "yt-dlp" (yes a command line Python based program) to download a entire video to RAM and then view that in a actual standalone media player written in a actual compiled programming language. Google/YouTube just keeps sabotaging YouTube worse and worse; I feel insulted every single time I see that "survey" they used to give out because I know I'd just be completely overruled on it.

The whole "adblocking arms race" is such a moot point; things can and will get spoofed one way or another, it's 2024 and they still haven't done anything to prevent yt-dlp from being able to serve it's purpose; downloading videos in their entirety without interruptions.

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-22, 23:25:

Anyone watch Phil's latest video about SBEMU? It's bizarre. He reviews compatibility, but all the crashes he shows are clearly jemm/freedos crashes. Surely Phil knows that some games don't like jemm?

I was wondering about the same thing. Testing out something like SBEMU on Freedos is.. why man?

Testing out something like SBEMU on Freedos is... why not? It's about compatibility.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-03-25, 09:53:

Testing out something like SBEMU on Freedos is... why not? It's about compatibility.

The FreeDOS crashes had nothing to do with SBEMU. Those games don't work with JEMM. All he demonstrated was FreeDOS compatibility. Which was not the point of the video.

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-25, 10:29:

The FreeDOS crashes had nothing to do with SBEMU. Those games don't work with JEMM. All he demonstrated was FreeDOS compatibility. Which was not the point of the video.

Ok, then he tested Jemm(Ex) and FreeDOS compatibility with certain DOS games 😁 I don't watch Phil's videos.

Yeah, but JEMM itself also has compatibility issues as well even on MS DOS 6.22. SBEmu only works on JEMM as far as I know. I tried to get it to run on QEMM as it is advertised as supported, but I failed. QEMM has much better compatibility than JEMM IMO.

analog_programmer wrote on 2024-03-25, 09:53:

Testing out something like SBEMU on Freedos is... why not? It's about compatibility.

The video was about SBEMU and how compatible it is but all errors he ran into were issues with FreeDOS. The entire video is kind of misinformation.

appiah4 wrote on 2024-03-26, 10:22:

The video was about SBEMU and how compatible it is but all errors he ran into were issues with FreeDOS. The entire video is kind of misinformation.

Ok, understood. kingcake already noted this for me. I don't watch Phil's videos, 'cause they seem uninteresting as content to me, but now I have one more reason to not watch them.

Anyone else seen the latest bird-watching steams from LGR (LGR Blerbs)?

It looks like he's diversifying his content. 😁

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-03-28, 15:49:

Anyone else seen the latest bird-watching steams from LGR (LGR Blerbs)?

It looks like he's diversifying his content. 😁

Frankly speaking, I see a little difference between this birds spotting stream and his recent The Sims reviews. 😄

If anyone still cares, refreshing Firefox seemed to help with my YouTube playback problems for about two days. Then the problem of videos randomly skipping forward came back, and it's even worse than ever. I didn't find anything online besides people complaining of the same thing on their phones, and the big featured result in Google was "lol your computer is too slow you idiot."

I don't remember if I said it on this forum, but I'm only signed into YouTube for the "Don't recommend channel" button. Before I created an account, I had to go through my browser history to find channels that I actually wanted to watch because the recommendations were nothing but "Disney goes woke" and "boycott Bud Light" bullshit. I'm an old redneck, and I still don't agree with that shit. It's also completely unrelated to anything in my watch history.

I assume you’ve already tried minitube (which probably doesn’t help much)

I’ve seen mention of smtube but no idea if it’s safe.

https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/watch … ecent-ones-too/

Be careful as There are also YouTube alternatives recommended by folks like yewtu.be indivious and piped.video but all appear to be scam farms (and I’m too terrified to check them further).
Would love to be proven wrong and there actually is a legit low resource solution to YouTube .

rmay635703 wrote on 2024-04-01, 14:15:

I’ve seen mention of smtube but no idea if it’s safe.

It's part of smplayer, which is an open-source media player. I would regard that as safe.

lti wrote on 2024-03-30, 21:53:

If anyone still cares, refreshing Firefox seemed to help with my YouTube playback problems for about two days. Then the problem of videos randomly skipping forward came back, and it's even worse than ever. I didn't find anything online besides people complaining of the same thing on their phones, and the big featured result in Google was "lol your computer is too slow you idiot."

No offense, but something is wrong with your PC or your network somewhere. This is not the normal experience. YT should work fine on anything Core2Duo or higher. Are you using WiFi? What kind of router? Have you done a site survey?

It has come to my attention, and specifics will be avoided as per the preferences of Vogons mods, to keep drama off here, search "retro scammer" etc to dig more up, that there is an undercurrent of unease, drama and ppl bowing out of the scene due to how one or several sociopaths have been playing "names" in various retro communities, Mac, Tandy, PC, Arcade etc off against each other, while gaining trust of some of them (temporarily) and leveraging it to inveigle sale or trade items which are incompletely paid for. Hence several have been becoming jaded and distrustful. This maybe has put a cloud over various segments of the scene this year so far and dimmed it's sparkle.

I am not sure that detailed discussion of this will be possible here, so just treat it as a PSA/warning, especially if someone pops up out of nowhere trying to be your new best friend and claiming to know virtually everyone.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-01, 22:33:

It has come to my attention, and specifics will be avoided as per the preferences of Vogons mods, to keep drama off here, search "retro scammer" etc to dig more up, that there is an undercurrent of unease, drama and ppl bowing out of the scene due to how one or several sociopaths have been playing "names" in various retro communities, Mac, Tandy, PC, Arcade etc off against each other, while gaining trust of some of them (temporarily) and leveraging it to inveigle sale or trade items which are incompletely paid for. Hence several have been becoming jaded and distrustful. This maybe has put a cloud over various segments of the scene this year so far and dimmed it's sparkle.

I am not sure that detailed discussion of this will be possible here, so just treat it as a PSA/warning, especially if someone pops up out of nowhere trying to be your new best friend and claiming to know virtually everyone.

Wow, that's crazy. Thanks for the heads up.