Minitube 1.3 brings video back on your desktop

Many people noticed that Minitube, like youtube-dl and other YouTube tools, stopped working on Dec 9. Here’s a new release that brings back the “Minitube experience”.

This version sports a shiny new icon designed by David Nel. I hope you like it as I do. I’m really thankful to David for this contribution.

There a many changes under the hood too. The way video playback works had to be radically changed. The Mac version is more responsive now and never shows the dreaded spinning pinwheel. The changes also led to the (hopefully temporary) disabling of seeking functionality on Linux.

This is the first Mac release based on Qt/Cocoa. This brings minor visual enhancements and fixes. Minitube now requires Leopard or better.

On the i18n side we have a new Macedonian translation by Veta Branislav and updated German (by Jakob Kramer) and Finnish translations.

Now go get your Minitube!

UPDATE! Minitube is now avalaible for Mac PowerPC and Tiger users too.

  1. […] on his feet, Minitube developer Flavio Tordini has pushed out a fix release which restores the primary function of the application, playing videos, as well as introducing a […]

  2. Christian says:

    Qt/Cocoa based sounds good. Like the new icon too…

  3. Nick says:

    Is there going to be a PPC version? I got the ‘not supported on this architecture” dialog.

  4. Fish Wilson says:

    We need a PPC version too! Is there any chance we will get one? I run this excellent program mostly on my iBook G4 and is one of the reasons this brilliant piece of hardware still gets used a lot.

  5. Flavio says:

    @Fish I just rebuilt for PPC too, by popular (4 people :) ) demand.

  6. Keith says:

    Version 1.2 worked fine, I have updated to 1.3 in Ubuntu (AMD-64) 10.04 stock radeon drivers. At 720p setting the video plays for a few seconds then skips to the next one. At 360 setting it seems ok. CPU usage doesn’t seem to be an issue.

  7. James says:

    Same as Keith. I’m on Linux Mint 64-bit, and the video plays for a few seconds then skips to the next one.

  8. billb says:

    Awesome! Thanks for the quick update to 1.3. Back in action on the PS3 with YDL 6.2. :) Like the new icon, too.

  9. […] website. The update broke all applications for playing / downloading YouTube videos, but luckily Minitube has been updated (version 1.3) to include a fix. The new version also comes with a new icon and is available as […]

  10. Frank says:

    Help Flavio out. If I, a pensioner on Social Security, could send him a few bucks so can the rest of you.

  11. spot34 says:

    “On the i18n side we have a new Macedonian translation by Veta Branislav and updated German (by Jakob Kramer) and Finnish translations.”

    Macedonian? Not really sure what this language is..

    Maybe you wanted to say Greek because that is where Macedonia is and belongs to. Greece.
    If you want the small country above Greece try FYROM.

    Thanks.

  12. Vasaris says:

    Video don’t play .. on 10.10 1.3v.
    Error: 01:28:12 AM: input_file: File not found: > file:///tmp/minitube.mp4<

  13. Susu says:

    Same here as what happens to Vasaris. Running Linux Mint 10 64bit

  14. Jonas says:

    spot34: The Macedonian language is a language. Why did you start talking about something else? Just give it up already.

  15. Peter says:

    Same as Keith and James. When I start a video it appears to download at ~2 MB/s but strangely /tmp/minitube.mp4 grows slowly, too slow for video playback so the player reaches EOF before the download is finished. At least that’s what it looks like to me. What gives?

  16. Darkk says:

    I am using the MIB rpm version of 1.3 and also tried a locally compiled build here. I have the gstreamer backend and all of the phonon packages installed. The phonon xine backend is not. I have all of the gstreamer plugins, good, bad, and ugly installed, as well as the Fluendo commercial codecs for gstreamer.

    When I get a list of items returned from serch, audio plays but I get a fixed screen and no videp plays. I can play youtube videos here in a browser.

    I don’t know what might be missing to get the video to work. I appear to ahve all of the gstreamer stuff installed.

    Ideas appreciated.

  17. Dotty says:

    Same as keith and james. If 720p is selected the video stops playing after few seconds and skips to the next one. All was fine before 1.3.

  18. Magnus says:

    Thanks! Minitube just keeps getting better each release. No problems on fedora 14 x86_64.

  19. bernard says:

    Same problem with Keith, James and Dotty, videos plays for a few seconds and then skips to the next one.

    Thanks Flavio for the wonderful apps, but please help!

  20. bernard says:

    Sorry, forget to mention I am running Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10.

  21. Bryan says:

    Same For Me videos plays for a few seconds and then skips to the next one. on ubuntu 10.10, i’ve changed the resolution of video but nothing works

  22. Hanan Sela says:

    HI
    I have just installed mintube, on Ubuntu 64 bit 10.04 LTS. I get this message: “could not open media source”
    please help

  23. Milozzy says:

    I can’t wait to see the new relase in debian repos! :)
    I also hope that it will be included in squeeze before the relase, or we will get a Squeeze with the not working 1.1 minitube.
    Cheers and thanks for all your effords!

  24. Fish Wilson says:

    ppc ftw! Great work! Appreciated. If only every software maker was this professional…

  25. Brad A says:

    Minitube 1.2 would not work properly for me running Fedora 14 and a Gnome desktop but after installing minitube 1.3-1 from the rpmfusion-free-updates-testing repo it works great. This is a very useful application, thank you.

  26. Peter says:

    Too bad you are using PayPal.

    I want buy Minitube for €9. But I don not want to send my money through the same company that has compromised wikileaks.

    Sorry…

    • Flavio says:

      @Peter, I hated PayPal’s behaviour too (and Amazon’s, Mastercard’s, etc). But still I prefer to go with the “industry standard”. Many people have an account or at least they heard of it. Also I wouldn’t expect any major US company to act any different. I’ll look into alternatives when I have time.

  27. Maximilian says:

    Hello Flavio

    recently i compiled minitube for ubuntu 10.04 64 Bit
    with Gnome.

    Thanks for this peace of Software.

    If you like to offer this version for download
    give me the information how i can transfer it.

    max

  28. neversfelde says:

    mhh, see above. PPA contains packages for 10.04.

  29. Dmitriy says:

    I can’t make Minitube work on Ubuntu 10.10 64 bit
    Getting error: input_file: File not found: > file:///tmp/minitube.mp4<

  30. Ionutzradu says:

    Same problem as Bernard..
    If i play at 360p minitube works well but if i switch to 720p or even 1080p minitube skips repeatedly an the next video in playlist.
    Could you fix this???
    Probably it skyps when the buffer isn’t full.

    Excuse me for my bad english.

  31. bernard says:

    Hi Flavio,

    Just want to say thanks. Upgraded to minitube 1.4 today, there is no more skipping. It works beautifully.