Cool Youtube Hack: Skip Flash, Load VLC

Watching Youtube’s Flash videos in full screen can be a very disconcerting experience for Linux users (I don’t know how it is on other platforms.) True you can join the HTML5 Beta program, but not all videos are yet available in HTML5. Also, at this point, you still can’t watch HTML5 videos in full screen. So how cool would it be if you can load a Youtube video in your favorite movie player with a click of one button? Well here is a little hack that would make your life Flash free. Its gonna happen sooner or later, why don’t we just make it sooner!

I am sure many of you are aware that Youtube videos are saved into your /tmp folder. Go ahead “ls /tmp/” and you will find a number of “Flash123ABC” files in there. This hacks takes advantage of this. First we need to install a nifty little tool called “incron,” which is a tool that schedules jobs based on filesystem activity:

sudo apt-get install incron

Then add this line at the end of your /etc/incron.config

/tmp IN_CREATE /home//.scripts/flash_movie_start $#

Create a new text file in ~/.scripts call it “flash_movie_start” and plug this in:

#!/bin/sh
case “$1″ in
Flash??????)
vlc “$1″
;;
esac

Make it executable:

chmod +x ~/.scripts/flash_movie_start

Finally, create a launcher ~/.scripts/vlc-yt:

#! /bin/bash
vlc /tmp/Flash*

You now can create a launcher in your taskbar pointing to ~/.scripts/vlc-yt. Now once you click on that launcher, VLC will load with the latest Youtube video downloaded! How cool is that?

Extra: You can install a plugin that will automatically load the highest quality video: Chrome Firefox

PS: Make sure that the video actually buffers fully in Youtube before closing the tab. You also can play videos that are still buffering

@ Reddit