How Do We Play Videos by L5?

Hardware Librem 5
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OK, I can take a video. It saves to /Videos.
I for one can’t/don’t want to wait for the next generation of fixes and patches i.e. Crimson - that could be a long time from now.

I took 1 video, found 13 2 of which are "(copy).mp4

Presently, All I can think of is to save the 13 files to a thumb drive/stick and move it to a Windows folder and play it via windows. Is that what ewe’re left with doing?

~s
edit typo

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If the video does not start playing when you tap it a couple of times to open it, you may not have a video player installed. Several options there.
sudo apt install vlc is a classic that opens every file type and more but is not the best on small screen.
There are several alternatives that are more suitable for watching videos (except the Gnome default player Totem [“Videos”] which does not fit itself to L5 screen) and I’d direct you towards Flathub website to select your own. Try Light Video. I’m sure others can suggest their favorite video/media players (flatpaks or not) too…

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There’s also the Videos app… I have it, but I actually don’t remember if it was part of the default build or if I installed it myself. It works for the videos made using the camera app without any issues. In the PureOS Software app, it’s listed under Installed > System apps, so it must have been a default install.

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Does that fit to screen properly? I had some issues - needs to be set from Mobile settings, compositor (or something, can’t remember what I did).

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You’re right. I do have it “composited” in Phosh Mobile Settings.

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I’ll describe my setup for playing videos on L5. It’s a combination of custom crutches and it is a shame that it is the only usable setup I can think about.

So, here it is:

  1. An MPV player I built from sources on L5 so that it would have latest FFMpeg library and yt-dlp support.
  2. An mpv-mpris plugin I also built from sources. It allows to pause videos, resume playback, seek 10s backward and 30s forward from Phosh drawer and even lock screen.
  3. An mpv config (~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf) which
    • limits cache size (because when mpv cache is swapped, the player starts to make hiccups),
    • limits video size yt-dlp retrieves and makes it skip containers and codecs which do not work well,
    • enables hardware decoding when possible (I have no idea whether it even working),
    • make mpv save position in file being played on exit.
    ytdl-format="22/bestvideo[width<=1440][height<=1440][container!*=?dash][vcodec!*=?vp9][vcodec!*=?vp09]+bestaudio/best[width<=1440][height<=1440][container!*=?dash][vcodec!*=?vp9][vcodec!*=?vp09]/bestvideo[width<=1440][height<=1440]+bestaudio/best[width<=1440][height<=1440]/bestaudio"
save-position-on-quit
hwdec=auto
demuxer-max-bytes=4M
demuxer-max-back-bytes=8M
  4. empv.el package for Emacs to conveniently start mpv with files on filesystem, urls and saved M3U playlists, and also to control it in general. Together with xterm-mouse-mode and xclip package it becomes a decent UI if run in terminal. The standard “Files” GUI application is still hard to use on touch screen.
  5. NewPipe application in Waydroid to find videos to watch.
  6. KDE Connect to share links from NewPipe to PureOS. I shielded it from outside world with iptables firewall rules just in case.
  7. A custom bash script and .desktop file installed instead of a browser so that it can intercept URLs being opened including those which arrive from KDE Connect. The script asks through zenity dialog box what to do with each URL.

I also tried Celluloid mpv GUI both from apt repository and from FlatHub. There were problems with touch GUI on small screen with Celluloud version in apt. (I don’t remember which problems exactly.) I did not figure out how to make Celluloid from FlatHub work with my custom-built mpv.

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Clapper: