What's this all about:
Whenever you are not happy with web video performance within your browser, you just click a (newly created) bookmark button in your browser toolbar and a few (2 - 3 on a RPi 3) seconds later an omxplayerGUI video window will open and play the video in high quality without any lagging and using very low resources.
What you need:
You have to install the kweb suite (either for Jessie or Stretch) which includes omxplayerGUI and all the other bits and pieces we'll need for this.
You also need a full installation of youtube-dl, but this will be installed during the installation of the kweb suite.
If you have already installed the kweb suite, update to the latest version (using the button on kweb's menu page).
Configuring your browser:
You have to add a bookmark which should appear as a button in the browser toolbar. In Firefox and Chromium this is in the “Bookmarks Toolbar” section. In Midori you have to enable “Show in toolbar” in the “Add Bookmark” form.
A new Bookmark requires a title and an URL. As title use something like “Play Video” or “omxplayerGUI” or whatever you like. In the URL field enter the following (one line):
Code: Select all
javascript:(function(){var%20target_url=window.location.href;var%20ytsvr="http://localhost:9192/play?url=";var%20final=ytsvr.concat(encodeURIComponent(target_url));var%20myWindow=window.open(final,'_top')})();How to use it:
Whenever you decide to use the new button, you have to start omxplayerGUI (the frontend) first from the application menu and let it run in the background as long as you want to use it. Now you can navigate to any kind of video page and click the new toolbar button to play the video with omxplayerGUI (it will use the already running instance and not start a new player). In the browser tab you will see something like this:
- webv2.png (12.38 KiB) Viewed 31295 times
To return to the original video page after watching the video with omxplayerGUI, click the “Go Back” button.
Additional Notes:
This works for all websites supported by youtube-dl ( http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html ) and for web pages containing simple HTML5 video. As the websites are always changing, you have to update youtube-dl regularly (There's a button on kweb's application page).
This doesn't work for web pages which contain embedded (youtube, vimeo etc.) web video. You have to go to the original video web page first (which is offered as an option by the embedded player).
youtube-dl also supports youtube search results, playlists and channels, but this will take some time (up to a minute). The frontend window of omxplayerGUI will appear frozen during this time. You will simply need some patience. The resulting video window of omxplayerGUI will contain all the videos from the search list and will start playing the first one. If you stop the video you will see the playlist containing all titles. Each one can be played immediately.
How it works (for the more technically minded):
If you start omxplayerGUI from the application menu, it will not only open the player's frontend, but also run the youtube-dl-server in the background (in an embedded mode in version 1.7.9.5 or newer). This is a small specialized web server, which can do a number of things:
1) Control and run youtube-dl and its hundreds of modules in the background (much faster access than using the command line version). Youtube-dl is used to extract the video URL(s) from a web page for direct playing.
2) Send messages to omxplayerGUI (to play something, for example).
3) Display simple web pages like the one you are redirected to when you use the "Play Video" function explained above.
There's even more to it: You can use it to browse you local media files, play any file by just clicking on it, create playlists (ordered or shuffled) on the fly etc. Check the omxplayerGUI manual for more details.
