When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:18 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359)
In reply to: When have webbrowsers become about video? by mathstuf
Parent article: Firefox 82.0 and ESR 78.4.0

So you run “mpv $url” where $url is what I’d normally put on the youtube-dl commandline, and it DTRT?

Is this specific to mpv? (I’m using normal mplayer as I found I slightly prefer it over mpv and really hate mplayer2 and never could even begin to figure out how to use vlc…)

OTOH for actual youtube downloads I normally add a format option, so I don’t mind the two-step way. I download to /tmp then can watch while the next, if any, downloads. (I don’t watch videos much anyway.)

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 2, 2020 23:48 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, mpv has a plugin that detects HTML (or something; not sure exactly what it triggers on) and hands it off to its internal youtube-dl-based pipeline. You can set your `mpv.conf` up to choose the formats you prefer as well. This lets me jump around and seek without downloading the whole video (useful at times).

I dropped mplayer years ago (late 2013, early 2014 based on when my first patches landed) and implemented the one feature I noticed was missing into FFmpeg and implemented a few other features I found to be useful myself. I found mpv's development process to be a lot easier than mplayer's (not least because the codebase is a lot cleaner).

When have webbrowsers become about video?

Posted Nov 3, 2020 0:03 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link]

Interesting (all of it), but I guess I’ll slightly stick to mplayer; despite all its problems, it’s a known number, and I didn’t yet need to develop in it ☻ but thanks for the insights.

I’ve not normally got wide enough internet access that I can live seek in videos… ☺

Incidentally (forgot this in my first reply), shortly after posting the first comment here, someone sent me a soundcloud link, and the browser didn’t have any audible audio from it, but it worked with youtube-dl and mpg123… crazy world.