The VideoLAN Forums

Hey, I have been using VLC for a while and it was working great until youtube updated/changed its video formats, thus causing no youtube vids to work. I know that the problem is supposed to be solved by changing "swfArgs" to "SWF_ARGS" in the youtube.lua file. But, the problem is that whenever I edit and try to save the file, the computer says that I don't have the privilege (or something like that) in order to change these things. I heard that this could be solved by accessing the root and using that, but I also heard that that was somewhat dangerous to use. Should I just take a chance and use root, or is there another way to go about this?

Hi!

I was looking for a way to solved this issue and it's works !!! Thanks DikaiosuneZ.

If you know what you are doing, you can access the root account to modify the file.
You can also try "sudo", if you user account is allowed (/etc/sudoers). sudo allows a simple user to
launch commands as root.

DikaiosuneZ,

Yes doing stuff as root is potentially dangerous if you don't know what you do.

But modifying a vlc lua file is relatively simple and won't break anything if you do a mistake (well youtube video won't work but they are already not working).
Make a copy of the file before starting. this way you'll be able to revert to it if needed.
At worst you'll have to reinstall vlc to get the original lua file back.

Haha, I'm glad that I could help Overflow.

Xtophe, the thing is that the computer won't even let me save my changes to the file. I have made a copy, and I went into it and changed the stuff. Yet, whenever I try to save the changes, it saves that I don't have permission/authority to do so. Is there anyway that I can "gain" authority without having to go into root mode? For example, is there some sudo command I could use to edit a document? I'm somewhat new to Ubuntu, so thanks for helping!

sudo gedit

Thank you funman! My youtube videos work great now. I was looking at other video players, and none seemed to work as well as VLC. Thanks again!