Knowledge Base

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