Aerial: [Feature request] External sources url videos (daily download)

[BerryJerry]

• [x] Mac model: MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018)
• [x] macOS version: 10.15 (19A602)
• [x] Monitor setup: 3 Screens

Feature request

It would be great to have a "stream external source" feature.
For example video streams
I'm thinking of red bull daily highlights or YouTube videos etc etc etc.
I know I can download videos to a specific location and it will play them aka I could do it with a daily cron but I'd prefer to have an option to paste in a list of urls or some form of json etc

I'm not profound in swift else I would do a PR, but maybe you can point me to the right direction and I'll at least try to implement it and contribute to this awesome project <3

[BerryJerry]

also a feature to use aerial as a normal desktop background would be nice :)

Live streams in general would also be very interesting

[glouel]

Hi @BerryJerry

Streaming in general is a huge can of worm, Apple's servers barely support it and I heavily suggest people don't use it and cache their videos because of this.

But when it comes to Youtube, you can't play their videos like that, it's definitely not as simple as just putting a few urls, you have to use their own APIs as they protect their content. So that's not something I'm planning to add soon, sorry.

If you want to add your own videos you can download them (whichever way you want) and add them with the custom videos feature (click the button below the video list to access it). If you want to automate this, you can definitely come up with a cron that downloads your videos and generates the customvideos.json on the fly (that's the file used for custom videos). The format is straightforward, if you have any question let me know.

As for using the screensaver as a wallpaper, this used to be possible but Apple removed that a couple of macOS releases ago. This used to work if you have a macOS version older than High Sierra :

/System/Library/CoreServices/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background

As of High Sierra, this doesn't work anymore, and I'm not aware of a workaround, they disabled that possibility as far as I understand.

[BerryJerry]

Hey @glouel,
thanks for the quick response!

Well I don't rly care about the apple videos (could circumvent that with a mirror but not rly feasible for the expenses I guess).

To clarify I wasn't thinking specific platforms I was thinking more in general video streams, be it via an api or other options.
For example a Vimeo plugin could come in handy, they have a very good API and high quality videos.
One could create an account and use the account token to download videos or even channels subscribed to.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15658543/vimeo-video-downloading-through-api

As for YouTube there is this handy cli-tool https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

For the desktop screensaver I'm aware of an option in vlc, just confirmed it works in catalina, not sure how they do it tho would have to dig in the code.
https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=wallpaper&unscoped_q=wallpaper
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/11/13/how-to-replace-dynamic-desktop-with-video-wallpaper-in-macos-mojave

this line looks promising: https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/001ba0c9be5f3267182cde95c44dbfe22587031f/src/video_output/video_output.c#L1968

I'd def help but I'm a total noob in swift / ios dev. Java and php I can always help :)

It would be rly great if you check the sources mentioned I'm pretty sure there are ways to achieve the feature/s.
Btw where can one donate ?

[tvwillie]

I use “Wallsaver” to make “Aerial” produce itself as a desktop background.

On Dec 6, 2019, at 4:19 AM, BerryJerry [e-mail] wrote:

also a feature to use aerial as a normal desktop background would be nice :)

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[BerryJerry]

I use “Wallsaver” to make “Aerial” produce itself as a desktop background.
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@tvwillie
which osx version are you using ? Doesn't seem to work in catalina + last commit was 4 years ago and it's still in beta
Link ?

can someone confirm ?
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ nohup ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background & exit

apparently my time investigating this is up for today

FYI
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/326759/high-sierra-how-to-set-screensaver-as-desktop-background

[glouel]

Hey again

To clarify I wasn't thinking specific platforms I was thinking more in general video streams, be it via an api or other options.
For example a Vimeo plugin could come in handy, they have a very good API and high quality videos.
One could create an account and use the account token to download videos or even channels subscribed to.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15658543/vimeo-video-downloading-through-api

If you read on, this only works with Pro accounts, so that limits the people who could use that. And you have to implement their API. I could see adding something like this in the Custom Videos pane so you can more easily download from there, but in a static way (read below) which is not what you'd want.

As for YouTube there is this handy cli-tool https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

Ok just so we're clear, a screensaver is not an app. It's a plugin to the system that runs when the system wants it to (and gets killed by system with no notice when you press a key to wake it up). As such, anything that you'd want to do with external tools, daily tasks, etc, that's very much not suited to sit there.

A cron job would probably be a much better alternative to get the content you want considering you need an external tool anyway. With Catalina, we are sandboxed so launching 3rd party tools, writing files (outside the container) is no longer allowed which limits severely what we can do.

The customvideos.json file is probably a bit of a pain to generate from a cron in that case, but if that's the only thing, I could implement something like a special folder from which Aerial would try and play videos (assuming they play in an AVPlayer) without the need to generate a JSON.

For the desktop screensaver I'm aware of an option in vlc, just confirmed it works in catalina, not sure how they do it tho would have to dig in the code.
https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=wallpaper&unscoped_q=wallpaper
this line looks promising: https://github.com/videolan/vlc/blob/001ba0c9be5f3267182cde95c44dbfe22587031f/src/video_output/video_output.c#L1968

So there are a few threads where we discussed this already (like this one : https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/issues/610). Short version, a screensaver is a plugin, not an app. Only an app could use this trick. And as far as I remember you couldn't do it in Swift, you had to fallback to Objective-C. My prototype was displaying the video above the desktop icons if I recall correctly, so I never released it.

Btw where can one donate ?

I do have a link on the main page next to my twitter handle, don't feel obligated though!

Also :

can someone confirm ?
cd /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ nohup ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background & exit

That -background flag no longer works in recent version of macOS as I mentioned above, sadly. When you launch it, it just launch in "regular" screensaver mode. The path is wrong too (see the correct path in my post above, they moved it to CoreServices). You can paste my line above to see for yourself.

[tvwillie]

El Capitan 10.11.06. Probably it is not a 64bit program…………….

On Dec 6, 2019, at 7:08 AM, BerryJerry [e-mail] wrote:

I use “Wallsaver” to make “Aerial” produce itself as a desktop background.
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which osx version are you using ? Doesn't seem to work in cataline + last commit was 4 years ago and it's still in beta

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[Juesto]

I agree with being able to provide custom videos' streaming via user provided URLs instead of requiring it to be local.
of course, no support for youtube and such, just a simple url streamer.