Petter Reinholdtsen

Back in February, I got curious to see if VLC now supported Bittorrent streaming. It did not, despite the fact that the idea and code to handle such streaming had been floating around for years. I did however find a standalone plugin for VLC to do it, and half a year later I decided to wrap up the plugin and get it into Debian. I uploaded it to NEW a few days ago, and am very happy to report that it entered Debian a few hours ago, and should be available in Debian/Unstable tomorrow, and Debian/Testing in a few days.

With the vlc-plugin-bittorrent package installed you should be able to stream videos using a simple call to

vlc https://archive.org/download/TheGoat/TheGoat_archive.torrent

It can handle magnet links too. Now if only native vlc had bittorrent support. Then a lot more would be helping each other to share public domain and creative commons movies. The plugin need some stability work with seeking and picking the right file in a torrent with many files, but is already usable. Please note that the plugin is not removing downloaded files when vlc is stopped, so it can fill up your disk if you are not careful. Have fun. :)

I would love to get help maintaining this package. Get in touch if you are interested.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard. After searching the web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed to find a recipe that worked. If you got a kodi instance with its API available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to have check out a nice cover band.

curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
  "params": {"item": { "file":
  "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
  http://projector.local/jsonrpc

I've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its first argument. It can now handle direct video links, youtube links and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi. It is almost like a Chromecast. :)

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.