Use user defined video player when watching a video from a node

[constraintAutomaton]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. When I have video in my node, I would like to use my own video player to watch them instead of the built-in the ipfs-desktop video player.

Describe the solution you'd like I want a button to open the video in my video player.

Describe alternatives you've considered I don't have an alternative

Additional context None

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[whizzzkid]

Thanks for this issue @constraintAutomaton this sounds like an interesting idea, I tried opening a video link in my local VLC, while http://localhost:<PORT>/ipfs/<CID> loaded almost instantly, resolving it over a public gateway took a really long time.

However, that being said, I feel the problem is a bit more complicated than that. Opening media links from electron, is not trivial, because electron has no idea around what media players you have available. Running a command like open https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<CID> will open the browser and maybe trigger a download instead of opening it in the media player.

Think of it as youtube, can the link be opened directly in a generic external media player? The same conventions apply in this case. The only way I can think of is probably either pasing link to the localfile (which does not exactly exist in the conventional sense) or serve a media stream url, which somehow triggers OS's link handling mechanism.

@SgtPooki what do you think about this?

[constraintAutomaton]

I saw an electron app; freetube, support opening external media player. So it seems like it can be done.

[SgtPooki]

@whizzzkid I think this would be a great addition. If the bytes aren't stored in a file on the filesystem, we'll have to link to the file via the local gateway URL. Also, this code change would ideally belong in ipfs-webui, so I doubt an electron-specific technology would work here.

[whizzzkid]

@SgtPooki but how would webui trigger loading videos in an external player? are you thinking in terms of creating a custom m3u playlist that will point the player to a stream? I think that's how peertube does it aswell.

[SgtPooki]

My comment wasnt super clear sorry, yea some action on the video view to get the url to use is probably the best we can do.

Honestly, an explainer in readme/docs that explains how to watch video provided by ipfs-desktop (or node backing webui) using an external player should resolve this. This should already be possible via Kubo's local gateway.

[whizzzkid]

And it sorta works, I can add the stream url to VLC and it works (albeit slow) mostly as expected. I think this idea still has some weight, but if we plan to work on that I'd like to think in much broader terms, like a file-handler-plugin mechanism, which loads configured files in their respective apps. images -> preview, videos -> vlc, pdf -> adobe, etc.