Thanks for the tip on mplayer. It didn't work, either. I found later that I had a message from YouTube telling me that I had 48 hours to watch the movie. But after restarting my computer, when I go back to YouTube, it doesn't seem to remember that I paid $5. Oh well. If I can get the downloaded file to work, that would solve my problem. It's funny that I can play the downloaded 1080p HD video of Baraka, but the .mov videos made by my Canon camera won't play - they play slowly in mplayer and they just hang in VLC, but the audio plays normally in both. Mplayer tells me that my system is too slow. This is all I've got: processor : 0 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 15 model : 79 model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3800+ stepping : 2 cpu MHz : 2411.275 cache size : 512 KB fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 1 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow up rep_good extd_apicid pni cx16 lahf_lm svm extapic cr8_legacy bogomips : 4822.55 TLB size : 1024 4K pages clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 40 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: ts fid vid ttp tm stc It's not a big deal for me to replace that, so I guess I'll be doing that. I'm surprised that I have only a single core and I'm wondering why the heck I bought that mobo just a couple of years ago! I have 4 GB of RAM. I'm sure it's a pretty good dual-DVI video card. I do stuff like this all the time (these things simultaneously): (1) play a DVD ISO on one monitor (2) do VNCviewer on a second monitor (3) serve a DVD ISO over the network to VLC on another machine So I thought it could handle things but I guess it breaks down with a .MOV file that seems to use about 375 MB of disc space per minute of video. It's amazing that the camera has no problem playing the video, but the computer can't handle it. Am I doing something wrong? Mike On Thu, 7 Feb 2013, Yaron wrote: > Just for fun, can you try mplayer? I know people swear by VLC but I've > NEVER had luck with that thing. Mplayer always worked perfectly for me > though. > > On Thu, 7 Feb 2013, Mike Miller wrote: > >> I've been using Flash Video Downloader add-on to Firefox (on Ubuntu) to >> download YouTube videos and play them with VLC. They play much better >> on VLC than they do with Firefox. It isn't just because of buffering >> because even with good buffering in YouTube on Firefox I get a lot of >> jerking of the video with higher definition. >> >> The nicest thing I downloaded so far was a full version of Baraka >> (1992) in 1080p HD. It seems to be gone now, probably because of >> copyright issues, but it looks like some 720p versions are available. >> >> Now that Samsara (2012) is out on DVD (it's like Baraka, made by same >> people), I'm wondering if I can get a nice HD version on the web. I >> found that YouTube has it in 720p (1280x720) but it cost $4.99. >> That's not a lot of money, so I took a chance and paid for it. Well, >> it just doesn't play well on my system at 720p in YouTube/Firefox so I >> used Flash Video Downloader to download it to my hard drive. That >> seemed to work until I opened it in VLC -- it shows the right length >> (1:42:16) and the file is about 1.5 GB, and VLC runs, as if it were >> playing the movie, but there is no video and no audio. >> >> Do any of you know anything about this? I don't know if it's a DRM >> issue, but that's what I suspect. I just want to watch the movie that >> I paid for. I don't want to rip them off and I'm not going to >> distribute copies.