1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
|
<pre>> watch [/c <argument-string>] <video/playlist-url><br/></pre>
<p>This program takes a YouTube video/playlist URL as an argument
and opens the video/playlist in MPC-HC. The videos are streamed,
not downloaded and then played. There are downloadable builds of
MPC-HC with built-in support for YouTube streaming, but these
unfortunately do not support Windows XP. My program works on any
operating system that can run youtube-dl.<br/>
</p>
<p>The benefits of playing YouTube videos in a real media player are
many. If you have a non-widescreen monitor, you can zoom in to
remove black bars (in MPC-HC, <i>View > Video Frame > Touch
Window From Outside</i>). You can fix potential audio-video sync
issues in the video. Most importantly, you don't have to waste as
much memory on displaying YouTube's video page. (To get an idea of
how much memory YouTube uses, <a
href="../plain/comparison.png?h=readme">see this comparison</a>
between YouTube and invidio.us, an alternative YouTube
front end.)</p>
<p>The program can be started from the command prompt or the <i>Run...</i>
window. I recommend putting it somewhere in your PATH. Then, you
can easily watch videos by copying the URL, opening a <i>Run...</i>
window with Win-R and issuing <tt>watch <url></tt>. A
command prompt will be visible as the program retrieves the
addresses for the audio and video streams, but will be closed once
MPC-HC is launched.</p>
<p>If you supply an <i>argument-string</i> using the <tt>/c</tt>
option, it will be copied verbatim directly to the youtube-dl
command line, letting you specify extra parameters for the process
(for example, <tt>/c "-f best"</tt>).</p>
<p>If you want to interrupt the retrieval process (e.g., if there
are a hundred videos in the playlist and you just want to stream
the first five), press Ctrl-Break. This will open MPC-HC with the
videos that have been retrieved so far. If you want to interrupt
the process without launching MPC-HC, press Ctrl-C.</p>
<p><b>Dependencies:</b> <a
href="http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/">youtube-dl</a>, <a
href="https://mpc-hc.org/">MPC-HC</a>, the first of which must
be placed somewhere in your PATH. Note that youtube-dl needs to be
updated regularly; if the script stops working, then issue <tt>youtube-dl
-U</tt> from a command prompt.</p>
<h3>Bookmarklet</h3>
<p>To make a bookmarklet that opens a YouTube video from your
browser in MPC-HC, you need to download the files <i>watch.exe</i>,
<i>watch.reg</i> and <i>watch.js</i> from the repository.<br/>
</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p>Install <i>watch.exe</i> as <tt>C:\watch.exe</tt>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Register the <i>watch:</i> protocol handler in the registry
by downloading and running <i>watch.reg</i>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Copy the contents of <i>watch.js</i> to a bookmark in your
web browser. It supports the following features:</p>
</li>
<ol>
<li>Single-click the bookmark to convert all links on the page
to <i>watch:</i> links.<br/>
</li>
<li>Single-click it again to revert the links. (This also
happens automatically when you click a link.)</li>
<li>Double-click the bookmark to open the current page as a <i>watch:</i>
link.</li>
</ol>
</ol>
|