[nzlug] theora format streaming

[Jasper Bryant-Greene]

On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 12:36 +1200, simon wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 08:57 +1200, Nick Rout wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 2:59 AM, simon <simonbridge at ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> > > (Is it possible to stream a youtube movie via an rss feed entirely with
> > > free software?)
> > 
> > mythnews (a mythtv plugin) does this, sort of.
> > 
> > If you have a youtube rss feed you can click on a feed item and it
> > downloads the video and then uses mplayer to play it.
> > 
> > So it doesn't stream, in that it completely downloads before it plays.
> > 
> So it doesn't count. One can always just download the file the normal way.

assuming it's being served off an HTTP server, you can stream the file,
because it downloads start-to-finish, and HTTP supports range fetching

mplayer has FLV support, so it's as simple as getting the FLV URI from
youtube, which is fairly trivial (www.downloadyoutubevideos.com will get
the URI for you) and then just mplayer the URI:

mplayer 'http://www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=blah&t=blah'

perhaps with -cache 4096 or different depending on your connection. this
has always been my preferred way of streaming youtube videos on Linux,
as it means I don't need the proprietary flash player (I prefer swfdec
but it's not very good at video)

> IIRC: you need the ffmpeg stuff. Mplayer will not play flv files with
> only the "linux essential" free codecs package. IIRC: ffmpeg is not free
> software.

ffmpeg is LGPL, with portions GPL

-jasper