webvi - command line web video downloader Copyright 2009-2012 Antti Ajanki This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. See the file COPYING for more information. Description ----------- Webvi is a tool for downloading and playing videos from popular video sharing websites such as YouTube. See README for the full list of supported sites. Installation ------------ To compile and install the command line client (without VDR plugin; see main README if you have VDR installed) run make libwebvi make install-webvi By default the program is installed under /usr/local. You can specify a different installation location by make libwebvi PREFIX=/usr make install-webvi install-conf PREFIX=/usr If you use an alternative installation location, you may need to put PREFIX/lib/pythonX.Y/site-packages/ or PREFIX/lib/pythonX.Y/dist-packages/ to your PYTHONPATH environment variable. Running ------- webvi --templatedir=/usr/local/share/webvi/templates The parameter --templatedir can be left out if the default PREFIX was used in make install-library. Command line parameters ----------------------- -h, --help show this help message and exit -t DIR, --templatepath=DIR read video site templates from DIR --vfat generate Windows compatible filenames -u URL, --url=URL Download video from URL and exit -v, --verbose debug output Usage ----- The content of video sharing websites is presented as series of menus. The menus consists of two kinds of links. Navigation links, which are be identified by [brackets], are used to navigate the site. Non-bracketed links are media streams that can be downloaded or played. Following commands are recognized: help Show help select x Select a link whose index is x download x Download a media stream. x is menu index or video page URL. stream x Play a media stream. x is menu index or video page URL. back Go backward in history forward Go forward in history display Redisplay the current menu menu Go back to the main menu quit Quit the program x is an index of menu item or an address of a video page (download and stream commands). A plain number without a command follows a link (like "select") or downloads a stream (like "download") if the item is not a navigation link. The command line option --url runs a single download mode that downloads a video from the the given URL and exits. URL must point to a video page on one of the supported sites (see README). Config file ----------- Config files /etc/webvi.conf and ~/.webvi configure the behavior of the program. An example configuration file debian/webvi.conf is included in the sources. The config files are in ini format. The following items are recognized in section [webvi]: streamplayer1, ..., streamplayer9 streamplayer1 to streamplayer9 are alternative media players to be used for streaming. The substring %s will be replaced by the stream URL. The players are tried one by one starting from streamplayer1 until one of them succeeds playing the stream. If no players are defined in config files then vlc, totem, mplayer, and xine are tried (in that order). templatepath Path to video site templates. vfat Generate Windows compatible filenames. Allowed values: true, false. verbose Write debug output to stdin. Allowed values: true, false. Quality of the downloaded and streamed videos can be selected in video site specific sections. Currently only YouTube module (section should be called [www.youtube.com]) supports multiple qualities. The following options are recognized: download-min-quality, download-max-quality Minimum and maximum allowed quality when saving the video to disc. The default is to download the best available version of the video. stream-min-quality, stream-max-quality Minimum and maximum allowed quality when playing the video. The default is to download the best available version of the video. For Youtube, the available quality scores are: 50: standard quality (320x240, i.e. what you get in the web browser) 60: 480x360 MP4 65: 480p WebM 70: 720p MP4 75: 720p WebM 80: 1080p MP4