How do I make Firefox run vlc with URL?
I have a server that delivers media via HTTP (or FTP). If I click on a link, it downloads to /tmp and then plays in vlc, but what I want is for it to run vlc and give it the URL so that it will play it as a stream. I am generating the HTML and I'm using thttpd for the server. If I do it manually (Copy Link Location, paste into vlc) it works fine, but I'd like click-and-play. I've Googled for hours and can't even see the topic addressed. This is possible, right?
(Lucid-64, XFCE, Firefox 4.0b11, thttpd, vlc 1.0.6)
All Replies (5)
I'm not sure that I understand what you try to do.
If you click a link that isn't handles by a plugin then you get an "Open with" download pop-up dialog.
That dialog doesn't allow to copy the URL to the location bar.
See "File handling in Firefox 3 and SeaMonkey 2"
The "open with" tells it what to do with the file after it downloads it. I don't want it to download, I want it to stream (which vlc will do if you give it a URL). I want it to run vlc with the command line:
vlc <URL>
Thanks for your help.
If the file is send with a proper MIME type than you should be able to set an automatic action and clicking the link is sufficient to pass the link to the VLC program without seeing a download dialog. That works for me with RealPlayer (ram, rm) files on Linux.
Well I haven't found a way to make it do that yet, that's why I'm here asking. Hopefully somebody knows how to do it.
Everything I can see about applications specifies an action to perform on the file after it is downloaded.
I was hoping that defining a new protocol would work. I went into about:config and set up everything I could find to make vlc:// work as a protocol handler, but it didn't work. Maybe somebody knows how to make that work.
I did figure out how to make Firefox run vlc with the URL, but it was by defining a protocol so I could say "vlc://..." This will indeed run vlc and hand it the protocol, but vlc doesn't know how to handle a URL like "vlc://...".
Another solution I fould was to have my page download a little .XSPF file which had the URL in it. vlc knows how to parse this file and it will play the video.