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Topic: General Unix/Linux Thread (Read 120507 times)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #200 –
On the same topic, Smtube, a plugin for Smplayer, provides a convenient GUI for browsing and downloading YT videos.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #201 –
VLC also supports playing YouTube videos directly through "open network stream".

Btw, don't forget to likeascribe the channels and vids you enjoy. People get money that way, apparently. :)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #202 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

VLC also supports playing YouTube videos directly through "open network stream".

Unfortunately works only with speedy reliable internet which I still don't have.

Quote from: Frenzie on

Btw, don't forget to likeascribe the channels and vids you enjoy. People get money that way, apparently. :)

Applies to those who are logged in to YT, which I am not. Those who are not logged in can generously disable their adblocks :) except that this makes half of YT unwatchable in the browser. VLC and Smtube don't pull in ads though.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #204 –
Have you tried these for streaming? Option 1:
Code: [Select]

youtube-dl -f 18 $URL -o -| mplayer -


Option 2:
Code: [Select]

mplayer $(youtube-dl -g $URL)


The first option works for me. The second doesn't no matter what switches I try with youtube-dl.

There's also a more complicated tutorial with YT cookies. I have not tried to follow it.
[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCuq0_nY3Xk[/video]

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #206 –
I also prefer to save. Just showing that there are other streaming options besides VLC. Streaming in VLC or mplayer is good when you don't have flash-capability in browsers and before saving you want to take a look at what you gonna get.

Pipelight vs Flash

Reply #207 –
Does anyone have Pipelight installed? Can it completely replace Flash? At my job we have Linuxes and it looks like (not sure at the moment) we have both things installed.

Pipelight at the job computer is able to do Silverlight plugin which is necessary for me due to a website I need to visit. I am thinking of installing Pipelight to home computer too, if it can completely replace Flash.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #208 –
I've never tried it, sorry. Don't websites tend to use either Silverlight or Flash though?

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #209 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

I've never tried it, sorry. Don't websites tend to use either Silverlight or Flash though?
Not this one http://www.katsomo.fi/?progId=427939

Edit: I mean, see if you get it to work, please.

As to either Silverlight or Flash, one of my impressions has been that Pipelight is supposed to do both. I could be wrong. Needs to be verified somehow.

(Sorry, I'm overtired, looks like I didn't get at first what you meant. Maybe I am still not getting it.)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #210 –
Looks like Wine Silverlight is a dependency of Pipelight so, sadly, Pipelight is not a replacement for anything.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #212 –
Quote from: ersi on

I also prefer to save. Just showing that there are other streaming options besides VLC. Streaming in VLC or mplayer is good when you don't have flash-capability in browsers and before saving you want to take a look at what you gonna get.


give minitube a go, great program for streaming / downloading youtube vids
“I kill monsters and zombies with infeasibly large plasma-based weaponry”

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #213 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

There's a new Xfce release: http://www.xfce.org/download/changelogs/4.12

The bad part of Debian: I imagine it shouldn't show up in Jessie.

It's already present in Manjaro unstable branch and will move to stable in about a month, depending on the feedback it gets in testing.

Quote from: ultraviolet on

give minitube a go, great program for streaming / downloading youtube vids

I have tried SMtube, SMplayer's YT extension. It's somewhat clumsier than youtube-dl, really, and this is inadmissible. Graphical things are only worth it when they are smoother to operate.
 

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #214 –
Quote from: ersi on

Quote from: ultraviolet on

give minitube a go, great program for streaming / downloading youtube vids

I have tried SMtube, SMplayer's YT extension. It's somewhat clumsier than youtube-dl, really, and this is inadmissible. Graphical things are only worth it when they are smoother to operate.


type into the search bar what you want, press play, press download. done. i guess thats pretty smooth
“I kill monsters and zombies with infeasibly large plasma-based weaponry”

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #215 –
Quote from: ultraviolet on

Quote from: ersi on

Quote from: ultraviolet on

give minitube a go, great program for streaming / downloading youtube vids

I have tried SMtube, SMplayer's YT extension. It's somewhat clumsier than youtube-dl, really, and this is inadmissible. Graphical things are only worth it when they are smoother to operate.


type into the search bar what you want, press play, press download. done. i guess thats pretty smooth

Yes, but I need one more thing: To choose the quality. This can be set, but it's rigid and cannot be changed easily on the fly. In command line I can easily select from the available formats separately for every video I want to download.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #216 –
Quote from: ersi on

Quote from: ultraviolet on

Quote from: ersi on

Quote from: ultraviolet on

give minitube a go, great program for streaming / downloading youtube vids

I have tried SMtube, SMplayer's YT extension. It's somewhat clumsier than youtube-dl, really, and this is inadmissible. Graphical things are only worth it when they are smoother to operate.


type into the search bar what you want, press play, press download. done. i guess thats pretty smooth

Yes, but I need one more thing: To choose the quality. This can be set, but it's rigid and cannot be changed easily on the fly. In command line I can easily select from the available formats separately for every video I want to download.


thats just a button down the bottom right of the screen :-)
“I kill monsters and zombies with infeasibly large plasma-based weaponry”

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #217 –
You mean the button in the flash element? Minitube plays YT in flash?

In SMtube there's no flash element. The video is played in Mplayer. The quality of the download can be selected in general settings and when you want to change it, you have to go to the general settings. It would be much better if it were in some right-click menu or in a button that would display the available formats.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #219 –
Never forget about the power of your shell. For instance, if you don't want to keep some audio around losslessly:
Code: [Select]
for f in *.flac; do opusenc --vbr --bitrate 128 "$f" "$f.opus"; done

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #220 –
Linux kernel 4 is out. I installed it on the netbook and booted to it. Nothing seems to have gone wrong. I guess I am going to keep it :)

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #221 –
Linux kernel updates should be (and are) uneventful. :)

Windowing versus Tiling

Reply #222 –
Manjaro has conclusively stopped me from distro-hopping. However, its choice of fan and community editions with wildly varying configurations is so attractive that I keep trying out different desktops and window managers.

It's said that there are two kinds of window managers, stacking and tiling. Stacking is the ordinary thing that everybody uses with or without knowing, while tiling is the more geeky. However, I don't think the names are accurate. I think stacking window manager is the true window manager, whereas the other is a tiles manager. There are no true windows on a tiling desktop. There are tiles.

So, tiles instead of windows. Other features of tiling desktops include lack of proper cycling (i.e. lack of the equivalent of Alt+Tab), lack of iconifying (minimising, particularly the equivalent of Minimize All a.k.a. Show Desktop is missing), lack of right-click on desktop, and lack of a native taskbar (there's still a statusbar or tabbar or both). These missing features (emphatically NOT considered as missing features by the authors of tiling desktops!) may have their workaround scripts shared on some forums or they may still be directly implemented anyway; for example Pek comes close to a windowing desktop, as it has right-click and cycling (at least Manjaro Edition does this, not sure about the original author defaults).

My first attempt with a tiling desktop was when I was fooling around with my freshly bought Ubuntu laptop a couple of years ago. I installed the "awesome" window manager a.k.a. awm. I tried to like it, but I just didn't see the point with tiles back then. It was kinda awesome for terminals, but it basically ruined the window decorations for all the other apps. Tiling desktop is kind of pointless when you don't use terminals much. And I cared a lot about window decorations back then. 

By default, tiling desktops open the first app up maximised and then they tend to open each next tile to the side or under the already open app, thus quickly eating up the screenspace. But Manjaro community edition with i3wm has changed this. In this configuration, each new tile opens up maximised.

So, in Manjaro i3wm Community Edition, every new app is maximised and the open apps are neatly identified on a tabbar. This makes perfect sense on the netbook whose usability is my constant work in progress. (After much experimenting, my chosen and preferred desktop on the netbook is Openbox and I have occasionally thought if I should configure each new app to open up maximised on it. They mostly open up maximised anyway when they continue where they left off, so I sometimes think it would make sense to configure the window manager to help it along a bit.)

To open up every new app maximised was also attempted in Manjaro Netbook Edition by means of a modified Xfce desktop, but there the result was a bit clumsy, because in addition to normal windows, even dialogues tended to fill up the whole screen. The i3 Community Edition avoids this clumsy experience. True tiles managers seem to have careful definitions for dialogue popups, so that despite the general tile geometry, dialogues and prompts can still appear floating as usual.

It really makes sense to have apps open up maximised in a small screen, such as on a netbook, and i3 does it very well. However, with maximised windows you also generally want to have two things:


  • 1. Minimise all (Iconify)/Show Desktop


  • 2. Cycle through all open apps (Alt+Tab).


The first action is sort of available in i3 by opening a new workspace. It's "sort of" because opening a new workspace not quite the same thing as Minimise All/Show Desktop. Moreover, new workspaces are opened by identifying them by number. You have to know the next available number to open a new workspace. There's no generic action for "Open a new empty workspace" the way there is in Openbox, Xfce, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, etc. This is what I consider a missing feature.

The second one is frankly not available at all. It's only possible to cycle through open tiles in one workspace, then change the workspace and cycle through tiles there. This is where i3's native "container logic" is really inconvenient, even though the author of it disagrees of course.

Various scripts and patches try to make up for the broken cycling. Looks like the best one is probably Quickswitch that works by extending the functionality of DMenu, identifying open apps on all workspaces and switching to them by means of search, so Quickswitcher is a cool appswitcher and exposé kind of thing in one.

On i3, DMenu is the default access to installed apps and system commands, given that the Start Button kind of apps menu is missing. Quickswitcher, which is basically an extension to DMenu, is not available out of the box in Manjaro i3 Community Edition. I think it should be.

I think that the two missing features are a serious shortcoming in tiling desktops and any Linux distro or spin featuring a tiling desktop should make up for it out of the box as best as possible, complete with help file instructions or a list of shortcuts in conky. Until then, tiling remains properly useful only when opening up multiple terminals, but we have Tmux for that.

Tiling may seem useful when two apps are needed open side by side, and tiling desktops handle this very naturally, but the same feature is well available in windowing desktops too these days. It's available by drag-to-edge in recent versions of Cinnamon and Xfce, and many window managers are configurable to tile windows by keybind.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #223 –
Quote from: ersi on
Tiling may seem useful when two apps are needed open side by side, and tiling desktops handle this very naturally, but the same feature is well available in windowing desktops too these days. It's available by drag-to-edge in recent versions of Cinnamon and Xfce, and many window managers are configurable to tile windows by keybind.

It's also been available in Windows since presumably Windows 95. (Hold Ctrl while clicking windows on the taskbar.) KDE has also had it since forever, but Xfce and Gnome traditionally do not afaik.

Re: General Unix/Linux Thread

Reply #224 –
Quote from: Frenzie on

Quote from: ersi on
Tiling may seem useful when two apps are needed open side by side, and tiling desktops handle this very naturally, but the same feature is well available in windowing desktops too these days. It's available by drag-to-edge in recent versions of Cinnamon and Xfce, and many window managers are configurable to tile windows by keybind.

It's also been available in Windows since presumably Windows 95. (Hold Ctrl while clicking windows on the taskbar.) KDE has also had it since forever, but Xfce and Gnome traditionally do not afaik.

I am really not familiar this history. It makes sense that KDE is the most advanced one of Linux desktops. I always thought it was. Unfortunately it's resource-hungry and occasionally glitchy too, making it inconvenient to find out its features of convenience.

I only discovered tile-to-edge by mouse when it was discussed as a new big thing for Cinnamon. After Cinnamon, it arrived to Xfce too. I'm not even sure how native it is to Xfce. On my computer, it appeared by updating Manjaro. Until it arrived like this, I tiled windows the slow, painful, and wrong way: resize with mouse adjusting little by little.

But Openbox had keybinds for this ever since I first had Openbox.