flv plugin

[jab]

First off, thanks for making this. It's fantastic!

Just wondering if there's an up-to-date flv quick look plugin for previewing flash videos. I found http://www.quicklookplugins.com/2007/12/02/flv/ but the download link there no longer works. Do you know if this exists anywhere else? Would you be interested in adding flv support here?

Thanks, and thanks again for this repo.

[sindresorhus]

Hah, I don't know sorry, and I'm pretty sure the reason is that no one uses flv anymore. And no, not interested in having it here ;)

[jab]

no one uses flv anymore

Unfortunately YouTube still uses it for many of its videos, so if you use e.g. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl to download them, you'll end up with a bunch of flv files and no way to view them in quick look.

Thanks anyway for your consideration.

[sindresorhus]

Then use a better tool that can also convert ;)

[jab]

Don't you consolation-smiley-face me! ;P

[dencold]

@jab youtube-dl allows you to choose the format to download the video. Most videos have mp4 as an option (it's how the iPhone is able to play youtube videos without a flash codec). Check out the -f / -F options to avoid flash entirely. More details are on the docs for the project, here's the direct link:

https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl#video-format-options

Hope that helps! @sindresorhus sorry for the off-topic post.

[jab]

Thanks, @dencold. I was assuming when youtube-dl ended up fetching an flv, it was because there were no other formats available, but that may not be true. The format options docs you linked to don't explain what format is chosen when no options are specified, so I just opened rg3/youtube-dl#2215. We can move any further discussion there to avoid more off-topic posts here.

That said, given the choice between downloading a low-quality mp4 and a high-quality flv, there are many cases where people would prefer the high-quality flv, and transcoding to mp4 after downloading can degrade quality. So I'm still sorry @sindresorhus shot this down.

[jab]

https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/2215#issuecomment-33149599

Indeed, youtube-dl defaults to downloading the highest-quality version available, which could be in flv rather than mp4 format.

[phihag]

In practice, a current version of youtube-dl will almost always download mp4s (from YouTube) unless given a specific -f option, since YouTube nowadays encodes primarily in mp4.

You can use -f mp4/best (either on the command-line or in the configuration file ~/.config/youtube-dl.conf) to prefer mp4 regardless of quality and/or --recode-video mp4 to recode to mp4 if needed.

[jab]

Thanks @phihag! Good to know.