Youtube means flash. Flash means firefox + flash plugin.
Firefox itself is moderately stable, so if you are experiencing crashes and hangs, try upgrading flash plugin (that's unless you are using incredibly old version of firefox). So the whole ability to view youtube depends on one system component - flashplayer plugin for firefox. There really shouldn't be any "black magic" or "hidden obstacles" here. Plugin is precompiled, so everything is pretty straightforward. IMO, flash isn't something that behaves completely differently on various distributions and requires throughout testing on different distros and hours of thinking.

You were asking about youtube, not mplayer plugin. I don't think that youtube requires anything besides flash support.
If mplayer (plugin) behaves differently between distributions, that's probably because Mplayer it can be configured very differently (see ./configure --help) and (IMO) you really should be compiling it yourself (svn version). Also the distribution might be using old version of mplayer.

I have two machines, one with slackware 12.1 (Firefox 2.0.0.14), , another with Ubuntu Hardy (uses distribution default Firefox). Both play youtube videos just fine.
No testing, because playing flash is one of the few things that "just work".

I prefer downloading clips and watching them later.
Anyway, I don't remember firefox crashing/hanging while watching youtube during at least last month.

Yes formally I was asking about this:
But that is because forum has rules. Short and consistent and
one thing at a time they always tell me when I ask too many things
in one post. So the title is Best linux distro and browser for youtube.com?
but my underlying needs motivating the thread is to:

To find the best distro that out of the box give as broad coverage as possible
of music and video and streaming TV news and so on.

I am not short and consistent so I failed to write a title that covered my needs.

So every well meaning suggestion that I download it myself is way off the thread.
If the distro need that the user install things then it is not the best unless
it is a fool proof way to do it that is obvious even for very clumsy installers
like me.

And boy I screw up any obvious foolproof way to install things. 9 out of ten attempts
would fail miserably in my hands. So there is a real reason behind the thread.

I simply want to know the experience of the users of distros. Which one worked
out of the box with most streaming videos like BBC, CBC, NBC, ABC, Newspapers
Tabloids TV or video services and you tube too. But I mentioned that one first
cause that one is most important to me. I love music.

I hear that Mint and Mepis both have most codecs and Flash installed automatically. I have also found Debian to work well (though you have to install it all from repos so you may want to stay away from that one!)

Firefox browser and any distro.

No offence, but if that was your motivation, then you should have called thread differently. "Distribution for online video/audio streams", perhaps.

If you'll list which resources you exactly want to access, you'll get better answers, IMO.

AFAIK, no distribution will allow you to watch ALL streaming videos (Of course, I may be wrong). Certain sites use WMV streams and "windows media player"-based controls to play these streams, which I was never able to get working. Other sites support Windows only. See this and this thread for examples. Besides, certain linux video players (mplayer included) can't play certain wmv videos (I think this is because of patent problems with file format or something).

Your best bet is to make some research and see what options are available to play various streams you are interested in. Then see in which distributions these options are available.

I have just learned something... After trying a number of distributions, I decided to settle (for now) and install fedora 9 (dual booting) on my 3 computers at home.

I installed the "flash plugin" according to Adobe's website for the Firefox 3.0 browser, but I had problems getting the sound to work with flash, with kids websites and Youtube.

Finally, I went to the fedora forums (at the fedora project) and searched for "flash sound" and found a tip to go into terminal, and "yum install libflashsupport". The answer is also probably here in the fedora forums as well.

That seems to have fixed the problem. If you have questions about other multimedia support, especially, if you have specific interests, I would recommend that you just go into those subforums and ask around.

It is so cool to have all of my computers with the capability to dual boot into Linux, share the wireless network connection, and printers (at least when the hosts are in Windows mode)... I need to fix it for Linux host printer sharing next.... have my kids run Firefox under fedora and visit their favorite websites without having to boot into Windows.

http://www.cbc.ca/national/
canadian national news. or BBC with world news? here in the read
thing up high.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/c...1&bbwm=1&asb=1

Does such works in fedora? mplayer plugin seems to be used by a lot of
news stations. Do they work in fedora?

To the OP,

Have you finally found a distro that is stable and works out of the box? I'm glad you started this thread cuz I'm going down the same road.

Oh, sorry, I am an incredibly lazy guy. I lost patience when I didn't find a distro that behaved as good as winxp on youtube.

Nimblex was rather good.
http://www.nimblex.net/

I am surprised that so few care. Youtube is imprtant for me as a source of new or old music me have not known about without youtube.

Thanks for the quick reply. I started out in linux about a year ago using slax. Since it was new to me, I found it quite tedious to find and install flash, java, or other plugins. I had to manually install dependencies and it just became a hassle especially when I've been a windows user for the longest. However, when I finally got it to where I wanted it, it worked quite well.

But recently I have discovered that there are other good distros out there that are made for individuals like us. I have been using linuxmint and must say that I am very very happy. It has worked out of the box and has had every necessary multimedia plugin I could throw at it.

I'm gonna ditch my slax for now.

Downloaded & burned a copy of NimbleX. Unfortunately, I'm going to using the disc as a coaster. It seemed primitive compared to what's out there.

Top 10 Linux distros
http://www.bestlinuxdistros.com/2012...ributions.html

You resurrected a four years old thread just to drive traffic to your own site. As I have seen on your other post this seems to be your only reason to post on LQ. Please stop that.