Using ffdshow to play youtube videos?

[Maciek]

You Tube HD videos don't play well on my computer. AFAIK these are not .flv videos, but MP4. Correct me if I'm wrong. Can I do anything for these videos to be played using ffdshow decoder?
I'm talking about playing these videos in my browser, not downloading them and playing in a separate player.

[clsid]

The Flash plugin does not use external decoders. It is therefore not possible to use ffdshow or any other DirectShow filter.

[mariush]

If you'll write your own Firefox plugin to replace Flash then yes.

[Keiyakusha]

You can just copy link to youtube video, paste it to... lets say mpc-hc, using openfile dialog (ctrl-o) and player will download the video while you watching. However you need some youtube downloader addon for firefox to get proper link. There was addon that can make this automatically but it probably not supported anymore.

But while we at it, it will be really awesome if someone can make such plugin for replacing flash. It shoudn't be hard, it is possible to replace flash with html5 player, which is already there and use ffmpeg (or even better - directshow) for decoding. Maybe its even possible to take some code from chrome (since afaik it uses ffmpeg for its player). So the whole thing will be: finding flash code in webpage and replacing it with appropriate html5 code. Of course such thing will work only for selected websites, but i don't think there is some other way. Flash video can be part of something more complex and can't be replaced everywhere.
I wonder why there is no projects like that so far?

[nm]

But while we at it, it will be really awesome if someone can make such plugin for replacing flash. It shoudn't be hard, it is possible to replace flash with html5 player, which is already there and use ffmpeg (or even better - directshow) for decoding. Maybe its even possible to take some code from chrome (since afaik it uses ffmpeg for its player). So the whole thing will be: finding flash code in webpage and replacing it with appropriate html5 code. Of course such thing will work only for selected websites, but i don't think there is some other way. Flash video can be part of something more complex and can't be replaced everywhere.
I wonder why there is no projects like that so far?

Well, you can replace Flash Player completely by a (somewhat-)compatible open-source implementation that supports progressive download and RTMP. There are already two such projects that have progressed pretty far: Gnash (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/) and Swfdec (http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/). Gnash decodes video directly with libavcodec, but adding support for DirectShow playback shouldn't be impossible. Swfdec seems to be tied to Linux/*BSD and its development has slowed down.

[Maciek]

It shoudn't be hard, it is possible to replace flash with html5 player, which is already there and use ffmpeg (or even better - directshow) for decoding.

That sounds interesting. There is a beta HTML5 player in youtube. How about this one?

[Keiyakusha]

That sounds interesting. There is a beta HTML5 player in youtube. How about this one?

No thats not what I mean. "html5 player" is a piece of software, included in browsers. For showing flash player, webpage should contain specific embed code. What i mean is to replace this code with html5 code while page is loading.
For chrome this is probably possible, for firefox it needs additional enhancing of the html5 player (because it only supports theora atm.)

[littleD]

What about that addon for FF then? MediaPlayerconnectivity (https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/446)
I used it one day but hadnt satisfying results (or maybe i couldnt configure it properly). Maybe it will work better for others.