Opening videos in external players from Viewtube

[B-G]

The popular ViewTube userscript can open videos in external players by selecting its VTP playback option, but there are no instructions on how to do so in OS X.
I played a bit with applescript and came up with an helper application that allows to launch QuickTime from ViewTube. If you are using Safari simply put the ViewTubeHandler app somewhere on your HD. For Firefox/TenFourFox there are a few extra steps:
- type about:config
- create a new boolean preference network.protocol-handler.expose.viewtube and set it to false
- open the “First launch” html page in the attached zip file, and click the link
- when asked, point Firefox to ViewTubeHandler
Viewtube should now be able to open videos in QuickTime Player.

I chose QuickTime because of its ubiquity and because it's one of the few applications able to open https video links on powerpc. If you have the quite more CPU efficient MPlayer 1.3 installed (linked in another thread in this forum), and if you prefer to use that, install the app in ViewTubeHandler - Mplayer.zip instead. If you open that in Script Editor you can set the path to your Mplayer binary (I assumed a Macports installation, that should give you /opt/local/bin/mplayer ), and the options to pass to the player (the ones I chose should be adequate for 360p videos playback).

Another thing about ViewTube. On the script page, which at the moment seems to be down, you can see a reference to a bookmarklet called geekmonkey. This was created a long time ago by Joshie Surber to allow use of userscripts in Camino. The original page for geekmonkey is dead, but I had it in one of my hard drives so I attached it to this post.

 

[Dronecatcher]

The popular ViewTube userscript can open videos in external players by selecting its VTP playback option, but there are no instructions on how to do so in OS X.

Are you talking about streaming here? Greasemonkey/Viewtube have been able to download then pass to a video player of your choice since I've been using it?

 

[B-G]

Are you talking about streaming here? Greasemonkey/Viewtube have been able to download then pass to a video player of your choice since I've been using it?

This must have eluded me. I can play a stream in the browser through html5 or the QuickTime plugin, but I was never able to automatically launch an external player from ViewTube with a single click (i.e. without manually copying and pasting the link). On Sebaro homepage there are not instructions on how to do so in OSX

 

[Dronecatcher]

This must have eluded me. I can play a stream in the browser through html5 or the QuickTime plugin, but I was never able to automatically launch an external player from ViewTube with a single click (i.e. without manually copying and pasting the link). On Sebaro homepage there are not instructions on how to do so in OSX

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/youtube-options-in-2016.1986056/#post-23195872

Of course there's lots of other methods now too.

 

[B-G]

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/youtube-options-in-2016.1986056/#post-23195872

Of course there's lots of other methods now too.

Ah ok! That's a very good thread, and your method is perfect for use with CorePlayer.
Mine is perhaps a little more streamlined (pure streaming, i.e.no downloaded files on your HD, and instant playback when clicking on the preview image), plus it works on every browser supporting userscripts. What can I say, I like to have alternatives

 

[Dronecatcher]

Ah ok! That's a very good thread, and your method is perfect for use with CorePlayer.
Mine is perhaps a little more streamlined (pure streaming, i.e.no downloaded files on your HD, and instant playback when clicking on the preview image), plus it works on every browser supporting userscripts. What can I say, I like to have alternatives

That's great - I'll give it a whirl over weekend.

Yes, youtube-dl is a life saver, even works on a 300Mhz iBook - but yes, the url parsing is so slow...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/new-youtube-player-downloader-even-for-g3.2031523/

 

[Dronecatcher]

The geekmonkey bookmark didn't work for me.

The viewtubehandler successfully streams - I just have difficulty with TFF on low end systems, just the process of using it to browse is CPU demanding, nevermind playback. Pity it can't be launched from a TonVid Foxbox and not require Greasemonkey to manage Viewtube (FoxBoxes don't run add-ons.)

 

[B-G]

In my experience geekmonmkey can sometimes be a bit unreliable. The faster the machine and the lighter the website, the better it seems to work. Unfortunately that puts our old macs in a difficult position on sites like youtube. Also the bookmarklets it creates depend on the sites hosting the original scripts being reachable, and that's not always true. It's still useful to keep it as a bookmark though, especially for browsers not supporting userscripts (I've not used it in ages, but I seem to remember that Stainless doesn't work with greasekit).
That said I just tried to load ViewTube on Youtube and Vimeo from Webkit and TFF, using a bookmarklet created on greasyfork by geekmonkey. It seems to work on my 1.33 GHz iBook G4, even if it's definetely not as smooth as a process as using greasemonkey/ninjakit.