Conky?

[RobinVossen]

Hi, I noticed that you can put all the Great Mediaplayers in Conky.
Amarok, xmms, mplayer and a couple of others.

But the mediaplayer I like cant?
I really would like to know how to put VLC (If its posible) in conky?
Since I love VLC I use it for 2 years now and I only use one other mediaplayer (since VLC cant play rmbg (or something like that, since the codec isnt open))
But I love vlc. I use it everyday. I use it on my PDA, on my Laptop and even on my PC that I turned into a TV.
Its my fulltime Mediaplayer.

But I really want to see how to put it in Conky.
How can I extract the information?
Thanks alot, Cheers.

If you can put it in a Logitech G15 its nearly the same as Conky

[xtophe]

do me mean this conky ? http://conky.sourceforge.net

What do you want to put in it ? what does xmms or amarok put in it ?

[RobinVossen]

that conky indeed.
Id like to put in currently playing, how far it is (in a bar) that kinda stuff.
This conky shows xmms: http://conky.sourceforge.net/conky-gon.png
This conky shows another mediaplayer: http://conky.sourceforge.net/conkycvs050805.jpg

[RobinVossen]

Bump...

Is this possible?

[rob.syme]

I'd also love to know.
I'm moving from Rhythmbox to VLC.
when rhythmbox is playing, you can just type

Code: Select all

rhythmbox-client --print-playing

into the console and it will return Artist - Track Title
This means that you just need to add

Code: Select all

${exec rhythmbox-client --print-playing}

to your .conkyrc
Is there anything like that for VLC?
-r

[rob.syme]

NOTE: This is an incomplete solution, I still need somebody who knows what they are doing to finish it off for me.
A possible, (but pretty messy) plan of attack:
Inspired from the mIRC output page in the VLC wiki.
The idea is to make a page in the HTTP interface which basically prints what you want your conky output to look like and then use something that can read html to read back the info to conky.

You're probably saying "that's such a long winded way! Surely there must be an easier way?" and you're probably right, I'm no expert by any means.

Step 1:
Create the html file that vlc will use as a template for the vlc interface.
I created conky.html in /usr/share/vlc/http
I want super simple, so my conky.html file is just:

Code: Select all

<vlc id="value" param1="'ARTIST' vlc_get_meta"/> - <vlc id="value" param1="'TITLE' vlc_get_meta"/>

This will render out as
Daft Punk - Live at Coachella 2006 (or whatever)
There are heaps and heaps of data that you can pull of VLC. If you want to get all fancy, look at inf3rn0's mIRC script stuff here for some hints.

Step 2:
You need to set up the VLC to use the http interface by default (vlc->Settings->Preferences->Interface->check the "HTTP remote control interface" box)
Now if you start up vlc and point your browser to localhost:8080/conky.html it should show you Artist-Track Title

Step 3:
Add

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${execi 300 curl http://localhost:8080/conky.html}

to your .conkyrc

This is an absolute hack, and fails in a lot of situations. If you know anything about scripting/bash etc, feel free to help us out
-r

[RobinVossen]

Yea, ok that should work.
But as you already said. Its a bit of a Poor Fix for the Problem....
A better fix for this will be if something will be implanted in vlc.
VLC can do a lot already, this is just the last thing I really need... I love the ncurses interface, it plays EVERYTHING and everything I just really miss Conky power.

Cheers,
Robin

[xtophe]

For me it doesn't look that much a hack.
It's fully configurable: you can choose what info you want to display and at what frequency you went to pull the info.

Where I see potential improvement is if ou only interested in "now playing"-typ info and not in ime elapsed/remaining
If you are only interested in what's currently playing, having VLC push the info to corky would be beneficial (but that remain to be coded)

[RobinVossen]

Ok, so it can already be done you say?

But how?

Cheers,
Robin

[crimson]

pushing an old thread sorry ;p

but as far as i know most conky plugins get there information with dbus .. so i read the http://wiki.videolan.org/DBus-spec and thought this might be pretty easy BUT there should be a method /TrackList GetMetadata

however my VLC 0.9.9a on ubuntu 9.04 (64bit) only has following methods

• method QString org.freedesktop.DBus.Introspectable.Introspect()
  method int org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.AddTrack(QString, bool)
  method void org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.DelTrack(int)
  method int org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetCurrentTrack()
  method int org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.GetLength()
  method void org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.SetLoop(bool)
  method void org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.SetRandom(bool)
  signal void org.freedesktop.MediaPlayer.TrackListChange(int)

so there is no GetMetadata .. err why ? where has it gone dunno if this is build specific .. if you want to check just activate the dbus interface and try qdbus org.mpris.vlc /TrackList

any information about that ?

[crimson]

well what i did instead : enabled the RC interface, enabled fakt tty and enabled UNIX Socket ( /tmp/vlc.sock )
created a bash script

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#!/bin/bash # Test if socket file exists if [ -e /tmp/vlc.sock ] # exists then # trackname echo "status" | nc.openbsd -U /tmp/vlc.sock -D -q 1 | grep "input" | cut -d' ' -f6 # does not exist else echo "VLC not running" fi

and added

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${voffset 4}${execi 300 ~/whateveryoucalledyourscript}

to my .conkyrc

this will show the current path+track thats played .. this is only tested with a video file and of course you can do much much more with the RC interface ..




/edit: oh well you need to install netcat-openbsd on debian/*buntu