HTML5 Videos

Flash is annoying. Specially in Linux where it goes bat crazy at times and starts gobbling up your CPU. That’s one of the reasons why I really think HTML 5 Video tag is the way forward.

YouTube has had an HTML5 beta for quite some time. Unfortunately, I don’t like viewing videos on the YouTube player. I like the feel of my favorite media player - VLC. The great thing about the Flash videos was that they used to be cached in /tmp/Fl*. And then, Adobe changed their Flash cache directory.

Fortunately, I found this script somewhere -

{{< highlight bash >}} #!/bin/sh args=(”$@“)

args=echo $args | sed 's/[/]$//'

pids=eval pgrep -f flashplayer for pid in $pids; do lsoutput=$(lsof -p $pid | grep ‘/tmp/Flash[^ ]*‘)

IFS=$'\n'
for line in $lsoutput; do
    lsout1=`echo $line | awk '{print "/proc/" $2 "/fd/" $4}' | sed 's/[rwu]$//'`
    lsout2=`echo $line | awk '{print $9}' | awk -F '/' '{print $3}'`

    if [ -n "$args" ];then
        if [ -d $args ]; then
            echo "Copying $lsout2 to $args/"
            eval "cp $lsout1 $args/$lsout2.flv"
        else
            echo "The directory \"$args\" doesn't exist"
            break
        fi
    else
        echo "Copying $lsout2"
        eval "cp $lsout1 $lsout2.flv"
    fi
done

done {{< / highlight >}}

After switching to the HTML 5 Beta, I needed a new script.

{{< highlight bash >}} #!/bin/sh

A Script that runs all WebM files present in the FireFox cache with vlc

media player.

Author: Vishesh Handa me@vhanda.in

CACHEDIR=“$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache/”

files=find $CACHEDIR -mtime -1 -size +1M -regex '[^_]*' \ -exec file -F ' ' {} \; | grep WebM | awk '{ print $1}'

for f in $files; do echo $f vlc $f &> /dev/null done {{< / highlight >}}

Have fun!