Drag-and-drop target to open video weblinks in VLC or youtube-dl

bgstack15 — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 12:36:51 GMT

Drop-videos is a small project for personal use, that displays an icon that acts as a drag-and-drop target that invokes either a downloader or a viewer, depending on how you invoked the program. The main utility is drop-videos.sh which displays a small icon that lets you drop video links on it. Depending on the environment variables at invocation, the program will download/view the links.

Using

Several example scripts are provided, which is every script in this directory excluding drop-videos.sh. My main use cases include the following provided examples. Use case | file
---|---
Download all videos from this playlist | save-playlist.sh
Download the specific link | save-audio.sh
View the specific link | view-video.sh
The application accepts the standard environment variables DEBUG and DRYRUN.

Upstreams

Dragon

This project uses a customized dragon binary. The diff is provided here, as well as the customized source code.

Alternatives

I read article Open YouTube (And More) Videos From Your Web Browser With mpv [Firefox, Chrome] - Linux Uprising Blog which describes how to set up a browser extension that lets you add a userscript that shows a small button in a youtube browser page that opens that video in a local video player. This worked on my systems (aside from the fact that I don't have mpv installed so the protocol handler fails), but I wanted a solution that would work without having to visit each and every link first. This article that inspired me refers to Tampermonkey which appears to be a fork of greasemonkey which has a fork for Palemoon. This Greasemonkey can use the userscript that will introduce a custom protocol which you can configure the OS to send to a specific program.

Dependencies

Compiling

To compile the C binary, you need gtk3 libraries.

Running

Bourne shell youtube-dl vlc or other media player

Fix vlc ui scaling problems

bgstack15 — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 12:51:14 GMT

Vlc disable hidpi scaling

tl;dr

Set the environment variables:

export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0
export QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1

The story

I am testing Fluxbox on Devuan on a physical system (instead of just a VM) with two monitors. I discovered that on one monitor, the ui for vlc is scaled way wrong. For my left monitor, the buttons are way larger than they should be. And on the other monitor, the buttons were normal-sized, but the menus and other text widgets were way too small. When I set the environment variables as described above, vlc appears in the correct scaling. At one point, I had some OS or DE installed that showed that my system viewed the left monitor (HDMI-connected) as a 7" screen with 1920x1080 resolution, which is why the scaling on the left side was messed up. Not only did I add those variable exports to my ~/.fluxbox/startup file, I also wrote a wrapper for vlc as /usr/local/bin/vlc

1 2	`#!/bin/sh QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0 QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS=1 /usr/bin/vlc`

I was not aware that VLC was a QT program. But, after setting some environment variables,

Knowledge Base (Posts about vlc)