[SOLVED] Watch a video while being downloaded

harris4got · 08-25-2012, 01:09 PM

Greetings,

I use Fedora 17 and up till Fedora 16, I was able to watch a video while it was still being downloaded and it would update the file in real time, so that you don't have to wait till the video was finished downloading to start playing it.

But now, if I play a video which is being downloaded, it will play only till where it was downloaded when I started playing the video. Something has changed, but I don't know where to change it or what to search for so that it goes back to previous behavior. Any thoughts are appreciated.

Cheers

teckk · 08-25-2012, 01:46 PM

There are a number of ways to download a media file and play it at the same time.

Code:

mplayer http://www.path/to/file.avi -dumpstream -dumpfile out.avi & mplayer out.avi

You'll have out.avi and play it as it downloads.

Or stream it to a named pipe. (example)

Code:

mkfifo foo.fifo
mplayer http://path/to/file.avi -dumpstream -dumpfile foo.fifo
cat foo.fifo | mplayer -

Depends on what you are watching. If you want to watch youtube without waiting for download or flash

Code:

mplayer -cookies -cookies-file /tmp/cookie.txt $(youtube-dl -g --cookies /tmp/cookie.txt "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=video no. goes here")

You don't say what player you are using.

fogpipe · 08-25-2012, 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by harris4got

Greetings,

I use Fedora 17 and up till Fedora 16, I was able to watch a video while it was still being downloaded and it would update the file in real time, so that you don't have to wait till the video was finished downloading to start playing it.

VLC does that for me, what player are you using? Gmplayer does exactly what you describe above.

harris4got · 08-26-2012, 03:02 AM

Thank You teckk and fogpipe for your replies. I use mplayer, smplayer or totem to watch the videos. I tried vlc and it worked as you said. Something must have changed in mplayer I guess.

teckk's post was very informative, I learned some new stuff. Also, there is a nice lightweight command-line program called cclive for downloading videos from youtube, dailymotion and many other sites.

Also here is a trick to check this property (in Gnome-3). Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+R to start screen recording. Go to videos folder, a file named 'Screencast from %date%.webm' must appear in the folder. Play it. You will see recursive mirror effect and it will never finish playing unless you stop recording.

Cheers