watchfromcli.sh

A shell wrapper for mpv/MPlayer to run videos easy via CLI.

The main goal of this project was to access any video file in the depths of a certain folder by giving only a short keyword. And make as little movements as possible.

And this is it – the simplest command, that takes only one argument, a keyword.

First thing it does is looking for files and folders inside a basepath (the only thing that must be provided, aside from the keyword). That’s how it looks after setting up an alias (described in the wiki).

It works not only with single video files, but also with folders having disk structure. For folders with episodes watchfromcli.sh can start a cycle, in which it will play one file after another through a short pause, in the time of which it can be stopped. The watching cycle can also be stopped by quitting the player, or even killing it – watchfromcli.sh recognizes when it quits normally or is closed in the middle of an episode. That helps to resume the cycle on the right episode.

watchfromcli.sh maintains a journal, where it stores session data. It provides information needed to resume the interrupted watching cycle.

Having a keyword and being able to distinguish episode number sequences in file names enables this script to load exactly those subtitles and tracks, which are needed. This is a big step forward from the video players’ beloved paradigm ‘load by exact name or the whole bunch’.

If you’re already interested – learn more in the wiki!

N-no?.. Then how about…

• storing screenshots to separate folders;
• compressing them with pngcrush to reduce the size of PNGs;
• or converting them to JPEGs with a given quality value;
• and running such jobs in parallel to utilize all available CPU cores;
• printing the last shown episode number in big ASCII-art (thanks to figlet);
• three levels of heuristics to guess the right sequence of episodes;
• ignoring disk structure and play BDMV or DVD like folders with episodes;

and, proabably, twice as much other options that tweak little things.

Running the script in ‘novice’ mode.

I hope you’ll like it.

Visit the wiki.

Y U NO GO TO THE WIKI?