Here's how it works

Take a moment to think about something you're glad you discovered or learned about in the *nix world, anything, anything at all that you would consider vital, helpful, exciting, a joy to learn or just plain awesome. It can range from an application, to hardware, to books or videos, to little tricks you've picked up along the way like different flags or shortcuts or alternatives.

Once you've thought of something, or maybe multiple things, you share it here!

I'd like to keep this thread constructive, so we're going to have some posting guidlines:

Here's how we're going to post

1. What it is summed up in a short synopsis.
2. Why you think it's worth posting here. You don't have to write an essay on it, but try to be descriptive.
3. Links to documentation/official project site or any other helpful resources if possible.

And that's it as far as posting your suggestion goes. In regard to responses, let's keep it clean people. I know we're all friends here, but no slating anyone's suggestions. We're all different, hell we're all *nix users, we like having choice ;) Though, that isn't to say you can't suggest alternatives.

If you're suggesting an alternative, you must state exactly why you think it is a better choice. Try and list some advantages.

I'd also like to say; you may post about something you're only just starting to learn about, are in the process of learning, or have only just discovered etc.

This is the "Check this out" thread, so keep an open mind and let's see what everyone's got to share!

So, I suppose I'll get the ball rolling with something short and sweet.

Web video streaming without flash in Xombrero

This is a tiny little script I wrote that enables the user to watch YouTube videos (and videos from other sites supported by youtube-dl) from the Xombrero browser without the need of flash.

It takes the current page's URL, parses the necessary string, then streams in the highest quality to MPlayer via youtube-dl.

Why you should check it out

For anyone who doesn't have/want to use flash on their system, this is a nice, seemless solution. Assinging the script to an alias in Xombrero makes it as easy as navigating to the page, then typing `:yt` and there you have it, your media streaming in the highest quality, in an outstanding media player, from a great browser, and all without flash ;)

Resources

First off; this doesn't have to be used with Xombrero, you can use it from the shell or perhaps throgh some other means. All it needs is to have the URL passed to it as $1.

So here's the script. Just put that in a file (I place it in ~/.xombrero/ and name it "yt"), make it executable.
Then in your Xombrero config, give it an alias, like so:


Now you can just browse to the site with the desired video and enter the command 'yt'.

Of course for this you need youtube-dl and MPlayer ;)

I've found it might not work on Daily Motion and Vimeo, but works great with YouTube and some others.

Enjoy!

Thanks for the great in depth post Phyrne. I will check this out later today!

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Since my job has always been computer repair and networking, I've never really delved into shell scripting etc. I was so amazed to see what I could do with just a few small scripts! Even though I'm still learning it has already changed the way I use my computer. If you don't know how to fully utilize the shell, and shell scripting I would suggest you take the time to learn. Here are a few books I've going going through to get me started. Most of them are from O'Reilly, they do an amazing job in all their books.


I have plenty more Ebooks from topics ranging from Vim to PGP, just let me know if you are interested in more. I've found reading from one book helps me focus a lot more than reading from multiple man pages and tutorials.

No problem! And thanks for contributing :) Couldn't agree more. Learning the shell and the core utilities can change the way you use your system monumentallly (sed & awk <3). Great post kopri!

Yeah honestly you should have seen my face when I realized how simple it was to write a script to update portage and eix, then upgrade everything. TFW everything gets easier :3

Awesome posts guys, great thread idea Phyrne.

Thanks Mafia! Feel free to contribute of course ;)

Hey phyrne, nice share brah.
Have you tried /usr/ports/www/get_flash_videos yet?
I just did a fresh install of FreeBSD and as I was surfing through the ports tree I noticed something named get_flash_videos but I have not yet tried it.

Quote:user@zygotb:/usr/ports/www/get_flash_videos $ cat pkg-descr
[ excerpt from developer's web site ]

Download videos from various Flash-based video hosting sites, without
having to use the Flash player. Handy for saving videos for watching
offline, and means you don't have to keep upgrading Flash for sites
that insist on a newer version of the player.

YouTube, eHow, Brightcove (used by many sites like Channel 4, Daily
Telegraph ...), BBC (news, etc), Metacafe, 5min, Google, fliqz,
nicovideo, vimeo, Blip, Break, Collegehumor, Muzu, Sevenload,
Megavideo, Wat.tv. Also includes a 'generic' method which works on
many other sites.

WWW: http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/

I guess I ought to give it a try before I mention it... But I haven't slept in 28 hours... My thought processes aren't quite up to my standard idiot level yet. :D

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edit:

Meh... I just tried "get_flash_videos" and it didn't work... Disregard my entire post.
I'm installing youtube_dl.

This isn't something you guys are likely going to do or even use but i thought it would be pretty cool to show you guys.

So basically this guy built this thing called a gMame which is basically a arcade cabinet built to run MAME. For those of you who don't know what MAME is you can check it out here: http://mamedev.org/

Here is a pic of What this gMame is:

And this thing all runs off linux.

If you want to check out how he did it you can go here and check it out.

http://g-mame.blogspot.ca/

I know someone that tried this and said it was pretty easy to do.

This just goes to show the awesomeness that is *nix.

Me and my friends built something just like this! They built the cabinet, and I installed an old Pentium 4 box I had lying around with Slackware on it. 34 inch CRT and that thing was ready to go! Had pretty much every old school Nintendo, DOS, arcade, and SEGA game on it you could thing of. I still play it when I go over there to play Dungeons and Dragons hehe :3