Today I learned that firefox doesn't like to play certain types of mp4 files. I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!

Watching these books being archived is amazing, I would love to do this!

[–] papalonian 10 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I also learned that you can copy a video link and paste it into VLC media player and it will play!

You can also use this trick to download YouTube videos without the need of a 3rd party website!

Copy the URL of the YouTube video you wanna download
VLC / Media / Open network stream... And paste your URL
Once the video has opened, Tools / Media Information
Copy the URL in the "Location" field and paste it into your web browser, you should have the option to save the video

It's a couple of steps but once you memorize what you need to do it's a million times faster (and I'd wager equally times as private) than finding one of those websites to give you a link.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

or just use youtube-dl
edit: here's an electron gui wrapper: youtube-dl-gui

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

Yes! Though yt-dlp has been the preferred fork for a good while now. yt-dlg is a nice GUI that supports downloading with the fork.

[–] indomara 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Neat! I figured out accidentally that you don't have to do step 2, you can just open VLC and ctrl+v!

I am downloading a test video now, thanks that's very cool!

[–] papalonian 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Nice, step 3 can also be accomplished with CTRL-I, at least on the windows version of VLC

[–] indomara 1 points 5 months ago

Amazing! I showed my husband last night, he was equally amazed. :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

MP4 is just a container, the specific audio/video streams can be one of several different codecs, and if you don't have the codec used it won't work. If you can identify the encoding you could probably just download a codec and be good to go.

Edit: for this video the video codec is

Codec: MPEG-H Part2/HEVC (H.265) (hvc1)

and audio codec is

Codec: MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a)

[–] indomara 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The more I read about this, the more confused I am! Near as I can tell, Mozilla refuses to support H.265 because it is "encumbered by patents". Is that right?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Media/Formats/Video_codecs#hevc_h.265

There are a few other places that mention the same... and I don't know of a reputable place to download codecs.

However people in this thread say they are viewing this video in Firefox just fine! o_O

Edit: I downloaded the HEVC codec from the Microsoft store and it has had no effect. (Feel no obligation to reply, at this point I am just lost!)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah, firefox doesnt support H.265 it looks like from some googling. Not exactly sure how other people are getting it to work, but it does look like there's some extensions for firefox to toss the media streams to VLC instead, that could work for you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Today I learned that firefox doesn't like to play certain types of mp4 files.

Probably missing a few dll's or something, works fine for me.

[–] indomara 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I tried googling and came up with nothing other than articles suggesting I delete my cookies and update firefox. If you know what dll's I should check please let me know! :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Depends on your OS and the alignment of Venus with the moon. For Linux, there's Archwiki, sacrifice a ~~lamb~~ few bytes for good measure.

It's usually something with media acceleration not set up yet. I believe i had to install the amdgpu-32bit driver first, before it worked? (oc only if you have amdgpu)