Very commonly, I'd like to be able to quickly download and watch a video on YouTube. Navigating YouTube's interface is painful: this is of course ignoring the issue of copying and pasting variables into a downloader site.

I noticed this in the MPlayer thread:

A bit of searching dug up the XML-RPC API for YouTube, and a youtube-dl program capable of downloading a YouTube video.

I've linked them together with some Python, providing a reasonably simple way to search for and download videos. The next step is to wrap a UI around this: final step, integrating MPlayer.

If anyone has worked on a similar concept previously, or has code snippets to share, that would be great.

A nice Python library that abstracts out controlling an MPlayer slave would be excellent as well.

Hi alexandyr,

I have to say that your idea sounds very promising. I've been also thinking about a similar project since it seems that it would be possible to do with the great mplayer port that is available.

Maybe we could join our efforts? I've been already testing with a very simple GUI, but I haven't yet implemented the youtube downloading part. Also, I wasn't aware of the XML-RPC or the REST APIs that youtube has, so I've based my implementation on the RSS feeds that youtube offers. However, I think it could be easily modified to use your implementation as well. Here is a screenshot of what I've made so far. It's a bit ugly, but its been made in less than a day or something.

PS. Funnily my app has the same name as yours.

I am very excited by this idea and hope both of you will work on it and get it working because it would make the 770 way more valuable to be able to access youtube and flash movies etc....

I have been waiting for someone to do this since the 770 launched... although youtube wasn't as big at that time as it's become.

Teemu once again comes to the rescue with another cool app.

I can't wait...

I went through 10 other names...but really, what can you do

Your UI looks nice! Haven't thought through all the subcases yet, but I figure at least 75% of the non-watching time will be searching.

I'm having issues with the youtube API: I get a lot of random error messages (claiming my dev-id is invalid) but these are intermittent...once I sort this out I'll post it up here. The API is pretty limited though: no real searching, just by tag.

The youtube downloader I'm using is FOSS and can be found at http://www.arrakis.es/~rggi3/youtube-dl/ --- it takes a watch URL and gets the FLV for it.

Sounds like I should hack together a script that will download a given watch URL and start streaming / playing it.

Probably you have already found this link, but posting it here just in case (it contains some useful information about developing gui frontends for mplayer on nokia 770):
http://mplayer.garage.maemo.org/slave-mode.html

Also if you need any help or additional information, feel free to contact me.

*jawdrop* Nope, missed that link!

Ok, I'll probably have something rather nifty ready tonight.

Serge, you rock.

I hope you guys continue development on this even though the N800 has hit stores. Us 770 owners could use this app

Given what I've heard of the N800 (flash movie player is only getting 1-2fps) it seems like there's still a use for this: I'm far enough along that I'm going to see this one through even if the N800 gets patched

One problem I'm having is that I can't get mplayer to play partially downloaded FLVs, which somewhat limits the usefulness of the app. Suggestions?

mplayer slave mode is also causing videos to refuse to play. I'm not sure if it's just my device acting up: if someone could follow Serge's directions and see if they have any issues, that would be great.

I've found mplayer/mencoder to be picky about file extensions with FLV files, is your partial download named <something>.flv?

The only difference between the partial and full download is that one's partial and the other is full: I've verified that the partial is a valid preamble of the full, and the filenames and non-size metadata are identical.

Note to self: fill the file with zeroes so the size matches when I get home.