Is it possible to force Flash animations to play at Low quality by default?

December 29, 2007 5:13 AM

I set my Dad up with an old computer of mine. At the default Flash quality (High), this computer renders YouTube clips at about 1 frame/sec. When he manually switches the quality to Low, they are fine; but he has to do this manually every time. Is there a way to make all Flash animations default to Low quality?

When I Googled, I gathered that the consensus answer is no (e.g. here, here), because the writer of the Flash animation (rather than the viewer) gets to choose the default quality. But I remain hopeful that there is Another Way. Any ideas?

posted by hAndrew to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Response by poster: I apologise for the faulty links. Fixed links: here and here.
posted by hAndrew at 5:15 AM on December 29, 2007

Best answer: Since (iirc) you can set the parameter 'quality' to 'low' using Javascript on the object, this might be a job for Greasemonkey and/or an extension compiled from same.
posted by genghis at 5:55 AM on December 29, 2007

Just in case, as genghis pointed out, Greasemonkey is probably the way to go. However you would have to use the Firefox browser in order to use it. This might be obvious as the link given is at the Firefox extension/addon site, but as I said, just in case I wanted to make that clear.
posted by magnoliasouth at 7:14 AM on December 29, 2007

I don't have an answer for you, but maybe you could try the official Adobe Flash Player forum? It seems to be monitored by at least one Adobe software engineer, so it's likely you can get a definitive answer there.
posted by tracert at 8:06 AM on December 29, 2007

Best answer: If Greasemonkey could do it, then so could Proxomitron. You'd have to set up a rule to rewrite the HTML so that it forced low quality. The nice side of this is that Proxomitron is really useful in other ways, and it works equally well with any browser.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:40 AM on December 29, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for your great ideas.

In the end, I used greasemonkey to solve it by rewriting the innerHTML of the element that contains the Flash animation. (I tried to directly change the SWFObject with something like bla.quality = 'low';, but I ran out of time trying to find the right element bla. Surprisingly for me (based on what I saw in Firefox's DOM Inspector), document.getElementById('movie_player') didn't work.)

Here's the greasemonkey script that works for me:

// ==UserScript==
// @include http://youtube.com/*
// @include http://*.youtube.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

var x = document.getElementById('playerDiv');
x.innerHTML = x.innerHTML.replace("quality=\"high\"","quality=\"low\"");
posted by hAndrew at 8:59 PM on December 29, 2007

This problem has been bugging me for a long time, so I finally sat down and figured out how it can be done. I wrote a tutorial that covers it here.

It involves Greasemonkey and a user script that will force ALL flash movies to low quality.
posted by osodani at 6:26 PM on December 20, 2008