Can EmulationStation play video from a Youtube link?

sselph

Hi,

I am adding support for ArcadeItalia's videos in my scraper. They also have youtube id's and links. I think VLC can play youtube but didn't know if that was supported in code or if it would be preferable or not.

meleu

@sselph not sure if your intention in this post is also collect opinions... but if I had this feature in ES I would surely prefer to keep it disabled.

sselph

@meleu I was trying to determine if it was worth adding a feature to add links to videos instead of downloading them. If ES can't even play them it is obviously not worth it. If it can play them but the experience would be subpar it might not be worth it either.

Hex

@sselph I think it is doable on pi2/3 but not on 1/Zw. If you want I can help with this.

herb_fargus

@sselph I'm not sure about Emulationstation but it's possible it may be an option in the future with the Pegasus front-end @fluffypillow is developing as well Still doesn't have a beta yet though so I'm not sure if/when that will happen

fluffypillow

Technically it's possible in Pegasus, but that'd need developing a YouTube-specific plugin, since you can't just access the video stream as-is.

sselph

Thanks. I also looked on youtube's developer site and the only supported option is to play in an iframe so not something that is supported even if it was possible for a library to play it. So I won't spent much time with that.

@herb_fargus thanks for letting me know about @fluffypillow 's project. It looks cool. I need to discuss to see if my scraper library could be used but that is a discussion for another place.

fluffypillow

@sselph there're guides for Android/iOS too, if those plugins are open source and more than just a webview wrapper, it might be useful. If not, we're stuck with the iframe option, which would require an embedded browser engine, and that's quite unstable in my experience. Alternatively, we can also just ask the OS to open the video in the default browser.

Hex

ES uses vlc and vlc supports youtube streaming so it might be possible. @sselph can you give me some time before abandoning the idea.

fluffypillow

Nice, if it works in VLC, we can make likely make it work in ES/Pegasus as well.

pjft

This is a nice idea in concept. While it doesn't at the moment support it, it wouldn't be a stretch to implement.

That being said, VLC on the Pi is already quite sub-optimal, having it stream a video from YouTube, unless we can specify the quality of the stream to be one of the lower ones (and even so) might be a bit more resource intensive than ideal for the little Pi.

Might be worth testing out rendering a random videogame snap that would come from ArcadeItalia via VLC in the command line, and see how it'd perform, and then decide whether it's worth investing in it at the moment. That'd be my recommendation.

OMXPlayer also allows for that, but it requires a bit more tweaking.

Anyway, for non-Pi systems, and for users who'd be permanently online and have good bandwidth, that would be a welcome addition I imagine.

That being said, a bit of a cautionary tale: given that neither VLC nor OMXPlayer are using any sort of official API, things might break at a moment's notice if things change on the YouTube side of things. Been there, had that happen a few times with such things.

Thanks!