VLC Streaming?

[PDA1]

Here's what I want to do;

Copy any video I watching while on the web- particularly the Youtube video at this link;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEwSpfs1Sw8&feature=related

Of course that's not really the video I want but I want to figure out how to watch video, streaming, using VLC player.

Using the VLC Media------>"streaming" and entering the http address doesn't do anything- no video is streamed.

Any ideas from those of you who actually have done this sort of thing?

[evilsoup]

This is actually my standard way of watching internet videos.

The easy way - this works for Youtube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion links - is to install the Firefox add-on open with (http://www.darktrojan.net/software/addons/openwith), and set up VLC (to get at the settings, once you have the add-on, point firefox to about:openwith). You'll have to right-click on links and select 'Open Link with VLC media player'.

If you open VLC on the commandline with a youtube (or Dailymotion/Vimeo) link it'll play the video

vlc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEwSp...eature=related (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEwSpfs1Sw8&feature=related)should work perfectly fine.

You can take advantage of this by creating a keyboard shortcut. You'll need to install xclip (apt://xclip); then, go to keyboard shortcuts and set something to

vlc $(xclip -selection clipboard -o)Then you can ctrl+c copy (or right-click 'copy link location') a youtube or whatever link, and then hit the keybinding to activate that scrap of script (I use ctrl+alt+x, but that's arbitrary). The advantage of this over the Open With version is that you can also view embedded videos: just right-click the video and select 'copy video URL'...

There are only a few websites that VLC can 'read' for videos; for others you need a direct link to the video. Fortunately, another Firefox add-on comes to the rescue: DownloadHelper (http://www.downloadhelper.net/) can let you copy the direct URLs of a page's media, which of course feeds into the keyboard shortcut method described above.

Also, in VLC's advanced preferences, under 'Input/Codecs', you can choose your preferred quality of video streams. By default it's 'highest possible' IIRC, not suitable for lower-end machines.