(SOLVED) Difficulties getting YT.rexx to work (with Odyssey)...

I'm trying out YT.rexx with Odyssey:
http://os4depot.net/?function=showfile&file=video/misc/yt.lha

Technically it looks very promising - low resource usage & fast (unlike SMTube), probably no stability problems (unlike SMTube...), and potentially integrates well with Odyssey (unlike SMTube). So it's kinda the spiritual successor to ClipDown+GetVideo, which worked brilliantly once set-up.

Unfortunately the developers seem to have gone for extreme customisability, at the expense of making it not very easy to install & set-up (the opposite of the philosophy I took with RunInUAE). I can just-about manage to get it working (see below for my problems), but I do wonder if many others will manage (I'm pretty sure Mikey C would not!).


First hurdle - the suggested options for use with Odyssey cause it to open a web page listing all the available video sizes & formats. Very nice I thought... until I was unable to get any of them to play. It seems to try to directly download the video file (if you are lucky), rather than redirect it to MPlayer as advertised. Not very helpful, so minus 1 point already.

So I added a second menu option to Odyssey to just "autoplay" it (and hope it's chosen video size & format was OK). From what I can see that SHOULD have worked, if it wasn't for the next problem...


Second hurdle - they recommend LiveForIt's MPlayer, but that'll only work if you have the right hardware & pay for the right drivers. I don't (yet), so instead I'm using a normal version of MPlayer:
http://os4depot.net/index.php?functio ... video/play/muimplayer.lha

Unfortunately, at least on the X1000 (with a Radeon HD card) it doesn't work... with no indication as to why. Turns out YT.rexx runs MPlayer with Run <>NIL: and -really-quiet, so it's debug log (T:YT-Debug.log) is absolutely useless, since it shows no error messages which might even hint at the problem. I had to manually extract the MPlayer command it uses (sans NIL: redirection & -really-quiet option), and run it from the Shell, before I got useful error message.

It couldn't initialise video or find an audio mode, which I happen to know means I need to add the MPlayer commandline options "-gui 1 -vo cgx_wpa -ao ahi_dev" (without quotes). And that means editing YT.rexx so the ArgsMP line looks like this:
ArgsMP="-gui 1 -vo cgx_wpa -ao ahi_dev -quiet -really-quiet"

Finally it works, but already minus several points for ease of use, and probably beyond most average users' abilities.


Third hurdle - the above works, but I want to be able to choose my video size & format. And as I mentioned earlier, the web page it creates for Odyssey simply doesn't work. I've even got MIME types already set-up in Odyssey to play MP4 videos with MPlayer... but it seems to ignore those, so I assume the (YouTube) server doesn't give any useful MIME types.

I'm no Odyssey expert, so here I am stuck, and I don't think YT.rexx's docs are any help. So perhaps someone else can give me a clue?


Another usability issue - if you want to configure YT.rexx, many of them require editing it directly. Which unfortunately means that as soon as you install a new version, you will loose all your config information.

So even if I help set-up YT.rexx for someone (say Mikey C!), he will be stuck with that version forever, because if he tries to update it, he will break YT.rexx (due to loss of configuration).

I have modified the YT script quite a bit to use requestchoice etc instead of using the shell, the problem is it's using a program not available yet and offers a download or on the fly mp3 conversion option so I can't publish it.

What I suggest you do is run it as if from a shell, set odyssy to run yt.rexx with just the url passed to it. It should then open a console window to let you choose the resolution then it'll ask you if you want to stream it or print the url.

@ChrisH

Quote:

There's no advertising that it does any redirection, nor do I know how to make it do that, or if that's even possible (absent any MIME types). It seems like you're left-clicking the links. Instead, you need to make a menu option for it, so Odyssey loads MPlayer directly with the given link you right-click on, this is in the guide under "Streaming Videos from Odyssey, IBrowse & AWeb".

Quote:

That is for playing from the shell, or with autoplay. As you found out, you can just get the link (using YT.rexx from the shell), and feed into MPlayer manually if you need to find out any possible error message.

Quote:

That's the TagOrder parameter (for autoplay), but if you mean to always be able to choose the size & format, see below.

Quote:

You're probably right about the server not giving useful MIME types. Check the page in the guide called "Streaming Videos from Odyssey, IBrowse & AWeb", which shows you how to set up an MPlayer option in Odyssey, which feeds the link directly into MPlayer (YT.rexx isn't used for this part. It's only used to generate the page of links).

Quote:

Pretty much only an issue with autoplay, since most of the other options are also command line parameters. The MPlayer parameters you'd set up in Odyssey itself.

@MickJT Quote:
OK, thanks. That was not at all clear to me. I would suggest adding a "quick installation" section to the manual, which clearly states the minimum number of steps needed to set-up the typical configuration with the most common web browser (Odyssey).

In case it helps anyone else, I ended-up using the following Action command in Odyssey:
APPDIR:MPlayer -gui 1 -vo cgx_wpa -ao ahi_dev %l

P.S. I have no idea why the manual needlessly complicates matters by saying you should set Action to:
<MPlayer path/filename> %l

Most likely typical users will put that in exactly as stated, and then wonder why it doesn't work. IMHO it seems far better to just say use APPDIR:MPlayer (etc), which will work in the majority of cases, and advanced users will know how to change that if they have special needs...

Quote:
As I tried to point-out in my post, there is no "*just* get the link and feed into MPlayer manually". This is a relatively complex & non-obvious step, which is far beyond most average users abilities & patience. I strongly suggest making it easier to debug why MPlayer doesn't work, by removing the two parts I identified (this should cause NO problem as the output is still redirected to a T: log file & thus hidden).

Quote:
That's not sufficient for me, because I may find some videos work acceptable at higher quality, but others do not (probably due to the bitrate used during encoding, rather than the actual video resolution).

In the next version I'll have it redirect stdout and stderr to two files. If I remember