Change all the colordepths in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to 24 bit. Both 32 and 16 bit had the problem, but 24 bit works.
I noticed a lot of errors about defaultdepth 32 which prompted me to change it.
Also, I'm using the nvidia binary driver and I added the following options at the same time, not sure if they helped or not:
Option "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
Option "DisableGLXRootClipping" "True"
Now my cpu is finally back to normal and compiz is much more responsive than it ever was before!
source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1873768
I assume you entered the URL correctly (no https but http, and only the v=... part, like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wxawmjnRWY)?
Open the Extras menu and click on Messages. Now click play again and see what message's there.
My guess is it's
lua error: Couldn't extract youtube video URL, please check for updates to this script
VLC parses YouTube's HTML source code to look for the video, but sometimes, YouTube changes its way it outputs the HTML, so VLC is unable to find the video URL.
Possible workarounds
- Go to https://www.youtube.com/html5 and enable html5 there to play the video in your browser without flash
- Install
minitube and try to play the video there
- Wait for an update of VLC (or update the lua script yourself - not so easy, see Updating the VLC YouTube parser)
- Install the package
youtube-dl and download the video to your harddisk. It's a command line utility though
Updating the VLC YouTube parser
Update just the Lua script for YouTube parsing to the latest version from VLC:
Open the Terminal application and enter these commands:
Make sure curl is installed, we need this to download the new file
sudo apt-get install curl
Get rid of the old, non-working scripts
sudo rm /usr/lib/vlc/lua/playlist/youtube.*
Download the current ones (use the whole command line, yes, it's quite long):
sudo curl "http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc.git;a=blob_plain;f=share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua;hb=HEAD" -o /usr/lib/vlc/lua/playlist/youtube.lua
See if it works.
Best Answer
If you just want to abandon flash you might be interested in
which you can use to download videos from youtube (and some other sites) and watch them using any player you choose.
There was an add-on for Firefox some while ago wich automaticly replaced the flash-video by a native player and add some controlls but it was abandoned. It might still work but that is not for sure
The original thread by the author: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1487327
Or you could use this script: https://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011