Simple scripts to stream videos to VLC and CorePlayer

[Imixmuan]

flashvideoreplacer has been down for a couple weeks so I've been using viewtube exclusively as a replacement. Flashvideoreplacer's developer is working on a fix, but has a nasty HTML 5 bug to fix before he can release. I decided to switch over to Viewtube and it was tested on Tiger, Safari, Camino, Omniweb and Tenfourfox (10 RC).

In tenfourfox, viewtube works almost perfectly, but lowend mp4 is the best performing on my system (ibook G4 1.2 ghz). The fake fullscreen option works, but is a tad "jerky". lowend flv does not work at all. Also note that in 10 RC Cameron Kaiser's quicktime enabler in tenfourfox seems very improved, very few opening errors, usually opens the video on youtube the first time.

In safari (4.0.1) lowend flv is best performer, but fake fullscreen does not work, only shows the plugin at the same resolution and screen size as when it is embedded. In Omniweb newest viewtube doesn't work at all, nor does it work in Camino with geekmonkey, thought it did before. I suspect some of these issues are Tiger and quicktime plugin related.

Vimeo works but only HD mp4, which my ibook can't handle streaming unless I am using coreplayer.

While nothing can hold a candle to mactubes (or youview) browsing youtube within a browser is sometimes preferable, and leads to many more "hits" and links that are hard to come across in mactubes.

Many thanks to Sebaro and B-G for keeping the PowerPC youtube browsing within a browser alive in 2012, quite a feat if you stop and think about it!

[B-G]

I did some quick testing in Leopard for the latest ViewTube.

In safari (4.0.1) lowend flv is best performer, but fake fullscreen does not work, only shows the plugin at the same resolution and screen size as when it is embedded. In Omniweb newest viewtube doesn't work at all, nor does it work in Camino with geekmonkey, thought it did before. I suspect some of these issues are Tiger and quicktime plugin related.

All is working well for me in Safari. Same thing for Camino 2.1 with the exception of Youtube, where script doesn't load at all (it seems to be a Camino problem, since I have no problems using ViewTube as a bookmarklet in any other browser). It works in Omniweb, but with the same problems you are seeing in Safari 4 (except if I use html5).

Vimeo works but only HD mp4, which my ibook can't handle streaming unless I am using coreplayer.

The same happens in Leopard and in Lion.

Many thanks to Sebaro and B-G for keeping the PowerPC youtube browsing within a browser alive in 2012, quite a feat if you stop and think about it!

I did nothing, Sebaro did all the hard work.

[B-G]

Two more tricks.

1) In the first page of this thread I posted a [not working] script to launch CorePlayer from ClickToPlugin/Quicktime. Well, it turns out this is much easier than what I thought. Even if I've been using ClickToPlugin for ages, I only recently noticed that the elements in the source selector are right-clickable. If, for example, I want to launch a 720p video in CorePlayer, I only have to right click on the 720p item in the source selector, copy the link, and then paste it in CP (using the script in the first post).
I'm gonna edit the post in the first page.

2) This may be useful for TenFourFox users who don't want to mess around with applescript and Spark. Open With is a Firefox (and SeaMonkey) extension that allows you to open the current web page (or a link) in another browser:
http://www.darktrojan.net/software/addons/openwith/
The cool thing is the applications it works with don't have to necessarily be browsers. For example, access Open With properties and add Mactubes to the list of applications appearing in the menu. Now visit a youtube page or right-click on a youtube link, and you will be able to launch the video in Mactubes. Apart from MT I tried it with VLC and Quicktime. For QT you will have to use links to the actual video files (in this thread we have seen several methods to get them). For VLC remember that if you try to open a youtube video from the page URL, the player will open it at the highest available resolution by default. Be careful if your computer doesn't like HD videos.
This method doesn't work with CorePlayer.

[B-G]

Small update.
I just found it is possible to watch fullscreen videos in ViewTube (or with HTML5 players). Download HotBox:
http://briankendall.net/hotBox/index.htm
Even if not perfect (once the video is zoomed in mouse buttons will not work) it should do the job (and it should work in Tiger too).

[B-G]

New scripts, inspired by and based on this old post by PPC Luddite:
http://ppcluddite.blogspot.it/2011/0...h-mplayer.html
We are going to use applescript to launch MPlayer from the shell.
To use these scripts extract the MPlayer binaries as suggested in the post above. I'm assuming you are placing them in your applications folder, if not the scripts are so simple it won't be difficult for you to change the path.

The first script opens a file from your hard disk.

-- Open video in MPlayer
tell application "Finder"
set sel to the selection as text
set video_name to POSIX path of sel
end tell
set player to "/Applications/mplayer -framedrop "
set MPvideo to player & quoted form of video_name
do shell script MPvideo

Copy and paste in Script Editor, then save. Copy the resulting file in /Users/_YOURUSERNAME_/Library/Scripts, then enable the script menu using Utility AppleScript. Select a video file on your hard disk, then launch MPlayer using the script menu. You could also create a contextual menu item for the Finder using Automator, see:
http://faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guid...de/findermenu/
Please notice that:

1) The line set player to "/Applications/mplayer -framedrop " is particularly important. This is where the path to your MPlayer binary file is. This is also where you pass parameters to the player. See the PPC Luddite post linked above, or http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/man/en/mplayer.1.txt
For example if you want to play HD videos the script may look like this:

-- Open video in MPlayer
tell application "Finder"
set sel to the selection as text
set video_name to POSIX path of sel
end tell
set player to "/Applications/mplayer -framedrop -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all:skipframe=nonref "
set MPvideo to player & quoted form of video_name
do shell script MPvideo

Modify the parameters according to your needs, or maybe save two or more versions of the script to open files at different resolutions.

2) The parameter -really-quiet is not needed because the script launches MPlayer without opening a Terminal window.


The next script streams a file from the net to MPlayer. To use it you have to copy the actual video URL in the clipboard. In my not so comprehensive tests I used Tenfourfox + Videodownloadhelper. I'm also using Spark (see the first post in this thread) to invoke the script.

--Net to MPlayer
set video_name to the clipboard as text
set player to "/Applications/mplayer -framedrop -cache 10000 -cache-min 10 "
set MPvideo to player & quoted form of video_name
do shell script MPvideo

Now, I must say that I'm having a few problems using Mplayer to stream videos from the web. MP4 files can sometimes begin to stutter. flv files take a while to load, or don't play at all. This seems to be a player issue, since I see the same behaviour if I launch MPlayer manually from the Terminal. (Edit 17/9/2012: the lagging mp4 problem seems to be solved by using a larger cache)

Let me know how all this works for you.

[MacinDan]

Excellent work! I found lagging problems on streaming mp4s on Youtube, too. You can fix it by adding the -lavdopts skiploopfilter=all option, but this will slightly downgrade the picture quality.

[B-G]

Ok, I think that the lagging problem with streaming mp4 files is a caching issue. MPlayer seems to default to a 320 kB cache. I did some quick testing adding the parameters -cache 10000 -cache-min 10 , and this seems to solve the problem. We now have a 10 MB cache, filled to 10% before the video starts playing (the downside is that now it takes a second before Mplayer shows up at launch). I edited the Net to Mplayer script in my previous post.
I don't see any noticeable difference using a larger cache to open files already on my hard disk.

Dan, yesterday I tried to add a comment in your blog to bring these scripts to your attention and to compliment you for your good work, but Blogger didn't let me post. Glad you found this thread here on MacRumors.

[B-G]

The Youtube in VLC script has not worked since the latest Youtube changes a few weeks ago. I found a patch for the youtube.lua file in Videolan forums. Download the attached file, unzip it and put it in /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/playlist (right click VLC icon and choose show package content to access the Contents folder). You should now be able to open Youtube in VLC again.


EDIT 20/12/2012: Youtube update. See message 61

[B-G]

While QuickTime is not as efficient as VLC, MPlayer or CorePlayer, it can still open things the others can't (for example large animated GIFs). So, almost a year late, here is the QT from clipboard script:

QuickTime from clipboard

set myurl to the clipboard as text
tell application "QuickTime Player"
activate
getURL myurl
end tell

It works in the same way the CorePlayer and MPlayer script do. Copy the link to a file into the clipboard then launch the script.

[B-G]

New script to open YouTube videos in MacTubes. Visit a Youtube page then launch the script. If it doesn't work properly try to change the delays.

Launch MacTubes

delay 0.5
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "l" using command down
delay 0.5
keystroke "c" using command down
end tell
delay 0.5
set mypath to the clipboard
set player to "open -a MacTubes "
set MTvideo to player & the quoted form of mypath
do shell script MTvideo

[B-G]

Youtube update. If you are using an older release of VLC and you still want to use the youtube in VLC script, you'll have to copy and paste the youtube.luac script from version 2.0.5 into the appropriate folder of your player (see message 58 for instructions).

I attached a copy of the required file

[B-G]

This is the NetToMPlayer script saved as an application bundle. It will allow you to open video URLs in MPlayer using the Firefox add-on Open With.
See this post from PPC Luddite.
At the moment it should be able to open only http URLs. If you want to open other URL schemes (rtsp, for example) it shoud be possible to do so by editing the info.plist file inside the application package. If you want to change the parameters passed to MPlayer, just open and edit this application in Script Editor. Please notice that I'm assuming your MPlayer binaries are in the Applications folder.