Internet oriented front-end for mplayer

Refractor · 11-23-2008, 07:15 AM

Greetings, all!
The last few months I've been trying to find a front-end for mplayer with better support for internet. My english is poor, so I'll explain what I mean.
There's a web server full of movies and I can open them from Opera with plugins for mplayer or totem or xine, but they can't load subtitles (AFAIK). So I removed the browser plugins and changed Opera's settings to automaticaly send URLs to smplayer and it works, it loads up the movie. The other thing I can do with SMPlayer is load an URL (MPlayer-GUI isn't capable of this). But when it comes to subtitles... Nothing gives me the option to open subtitles from http:// . I was looking for this all over the web, spent hours google-ing, browsing forums but there was nothing. So I thought that mplayer just doesn't support this kind of subtitle handling, but I gave it a try. In a terminal I typed:

Code:

mplayer http://thewebserver/moviesfolder/movie.avi -sub http://thewebserver/moviesfolder/movie.srt -subcp windows-1251

and voila! Mplayer started, the movie displayed and the subtitles were in the correct charset and loaded. I don't mind using command line, but after 2-3 movies it gets really really annoying to type all the time, especially when the movies are on 2 or 3 cds... So I was wondering if any of you know some GUI that does this automaticaly.
I have absolutely no knowledge about C++ but if I knew I'd love to make one myself... If someone can guide me from where should I start or where to find such a thing, please share this with us! Thanks !

--
Sorry for my poor english!

bigrigdriver · 11-23-2008, 02:54 PM

I don't know of a GUI to do what you want, but I do have a suggestion.

Instead of typing a long command each time you want to watch a movie, why not put the long command into a short script instead. Then just run ./script.sh (or whatever you choose to name it) to run the long command for you.

You can run the command more easily and with less aggrivation while you continue your search for an application to run it automatically.

Refractor · 11-24-2008, 08:20 AM

Thank you for your answer.
I've got the idea of a script but I've got trouble with it. I want to write a script that I can call from Opera. It doesn't sound hard and I know how it's supposed to be, but the command-line options give me a hard time. My idea is the following:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
mplayer $1 -sub $1(without the file extension).srt, $1(without the file extension).sub -subcp windows-1251

And when I click on a link in Opera it will send the filename as $1 to the script and the movie will play. I just can't figure out how to strip out the extension from the movie's name... If some1 has any ideas how to remove the .avi or .mpg or .mkv... you got the point from $1, please share it!

pwc101 · 11-24-2008, 08:26 AM

In bash:

Code:

prompt$ filename=something.mov
prompt$ echo ${filename%.*}
something
prompt$ filename=somethingelse.txt
prompt$ echo ${filename%.*}
somethingelse

farslayer · 11-24-2008, 08:39 AM

My preference is VLC for media, but I don't know if it will do what you want or not.

http://www.videolan.org/

it appears to be able to handle subtitles, but not closed caption..

Refractor · 11-24-2008, 08:47 AM

I've tried VLC but it doesn't display the subtitles at all, can't even load them. At least SMPlayer loads them with drag and drop. I've read somewhere that newer versions of VLC will autoload http:// subtitles if they match a part of the stream's name but for now it's the command-line and Mplayer...