Hoping to hear from you, Mangetout. I see there do seem to be some workarounds for youtube that look like xkjy-git feoimsi dklsio and then eoiddoi the ratsenfrable to me … typical linux :eek::mad: stuff.
And there are soooo many Raspberry Pi How To videos on youtube. :smack:
The answer is: yes and no.
Flash works, in the sense that it’s possible to install a package that handles flash content, and the browser tries to play it (as opposed to just saying “something is missing here”)
In practice though, the performance is pretty poor. Flash animation such as Magical Trevor plays, but renders at about 2 frames per second.
Flash streaming video just eats up all of the CPU cycles and plays in tiny fits and starts.
In both cases, it’s because the hardware video decoding capabilities of the Raspberry Pi aren’t being used. The machine is technically capable of decoding and playing full HD video at 30fps or more, but flash (at least as implemented in packages available at the moment, for Raspbian) obviously isn’t exploiting that hardware capability, and the CPU isn’t grunty enough to do it entirely in software.
Youtube shouldn’t require Flash at all though - I mean, it works on iPads, which don’t support Flash at all. Maybe there’s a way to make it deliver the embedded h264 video as it does to iOS
Thanks, Mangetout.
I found a recent youtube video that confirms what you’re saying – it will run, but not well: Flash on a Raspberry PI
I’m also finding some stuff about OpenELEC and XBMC that might work but the explanations of those are still beyond my knowledge of linux.
Who’da thunk the second thing I try to do with this contraption is a thing that’s stumping the gurus.)
I’ve been pretty underwhelmed with mine. Yes, the price point is good. The OS support is pretty immature, however. That’s somewhat to be expected, but since I mostly want to use it as a sooper-Arduino 
I want lots of i/o control, etc. and that has been slow coming, although there’s some promising projects on the horizon.
Also, the sound drivers are sucky (for onboard audio anyhow, I don’t want to dedicate a HDMI display just for sound), it’s picky about SD cards and keyboards (REALLY picky about keyboards in my experience), and the GUI is crazy slow due to no HW acceleration (and it sounds like that won’t be remedied soon). For what I want, I don’t really care much about the GUI, and people are starting to fix some of the software issues, so it’s still quite cool for the price. But in terms of actually getting projects I want to do, done, it’s a bit half-baked. I’m really looking forward to the new Arduino based on a similar chip IIRC that will possibly also have a full linux onboard; I get the impression that if they can manufacture them in large enough quantity, the community will make that board a real winner.
So yeah, it’s a bit rough around the edges, but at the price point there isn’t much comparison, and it’s fun to toy with…
Have you tried adding &html5=True to the end of the URL?
There aren’t any browsers that will on on the RP that support HTML5 yet. People are working on it.
Downloading the video and watching it as .MP4 might be a possible work-around.
Me too, sort of. I’m not really sure what I expected - it’s really cool that it has a bunch of GPIO pins, but actually, a device that runs a full-blown OS is more suited to interfacing with peripherals, rather than ‘hardware’ - by which I mean that the Raspberry Pi is probably more naturally suited to applications such as print and file serving, data logging and kiosk-type computing.
That’s not to say that it can’t do stuff like controlling stepper motors - and no doubt, people will do some pretty interesting things in that direction, but it seems to me this is a computing device, not so much an electronics lab.