This series is written by a representative of the latter group, which is comprised mostly of what might be called "productivity users" (perhaps "tinkerly productivity users?"). Though my lack of training precludes me from writing code or improving anyone else's, I can, nonetheless, try and figure out creative ways of utilizing open source programs. And again, because of my lack of expertise, though I may be capable of deploying open source programs in creative ways, my modest technical acumen hinders me from utilizing those programs in what may be the most optimal ways. The open-source character, then, of this series, consists in my presentation to the community of open source users and programmers of my own crude and halting attempts at accomplishing computing tasks, in the hope that those who are more knowledgeable than me can offer advice, alternatives, and corrections. The desired end result is the discovery, through a communal process, of optimal and/or alternate ways of accomplishing the sorts of tasks that I and other open source productivity users need to perform.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

view youtube videos while browsing with elinks

I recently wanted to view a youtube video using a computer that had no graphical browser installed. Long story short, the computer runs Gentoo and is used almost exclusively for recording and playback of television content: so for almost all use case scenarios, having a graphical browser is not needed, the excessive compile times they would entail (over 24 hours on this somewhat low-resource machine) being unjustifiable.

I decided there must be some way, using the non-graphical browser I did have on this machine--elinks,to view youtube videos. A bit of online research revealed how I could accomplish this task. Though there is undoubtedly more than one way to skin this cat, I used the one that seemed most straightforward to me, as described below.

Since I already had installed the mpv utility, all I had to do was some minor tweaks to elinks. First, I went into Setup > Option manager > Document > URI passing and added a new entry. I simply named it youtube-handle_mpv. Of course the final task for this step is to save that option.

I then edited that entry, using information found at the Arch wiki entry for elinks, and added the line mpv %c (this allows elinks to feed the designated URI to mpv). Having done that, I next needed to assign a key which, when pressed, would trigger the URI passing.

I went to Setup > Keybinding manager > Main mapping > Pass URI of current frame to external command and there designated the grave or backtick key as the one that would trigger the URI passing. Again I selected "save" and exited the Setup menu.

After having done that, I navigated elinks to youtube's site, searched for the video I wanted to view and, having highlighted the desired link using the arrow keys, pressed the grave/backtick key. After a brief pause (for downloading and caching some of the data, I presume), mpv opened and the video began to play.

NOTE: the pause between pressing the designated key and the actual playback of the video under mpv could vary based, I believe, on the length/quality of the video.
Posted by at 5:01 PM
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