Mpv: Allow the user to pick video quality for YouTube links

[Fuuzetsu]

Currently it seems that mpv <youtubelink> will play the best quality video. In cases where I'm on a netbook with a small screen and 1024x768, there really is no need for it to choke on 1080p videos. It'd be great to be able to choose the quality.
Currently I end up having to use youtube-dl wrapper script which is a shame considering mpv has YouTube support.

I'm unsure whether this should just be merged under #287.

[qmega]

The --quvi-format option/property lets you choose the quality to some extent.

On Jan 15, 2014, at 0:37, Mateusz Kowalczyk [email protected] wrote:

Currently it seems that mpv will play the best quality video. In cases where I'm on a netbook with a small screen and 1024x768, there really is no need for it to choke on 1080p videos. It'd be great to be able to choose the quality.
Currently I end up having to use youtube-dl wrapper script which is a shame considering mpv has YouTube support.

I'm unsure whether this should just be merged under #287.

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[ghost]

Yes, you can set quvi-format even as property at runtime (then it'll reload the video, though, which is slow).

The main problem here is that libquvi is pretty inconsistent in what formats it accepts for which sites. It's different for the two supported versions of libquvi too (0.4 and 0.9).

[Fuuzetsu]

Ah, I must've missed that flag when checking the man page. I'll close this then, thanks.

[CounterPillow]

I wish to comment here to say that the manpage does not go indepth enough to actually help me choose the right format for --quvi-format with quvi 0.9, essentially rendering the feature useless, because I can't find the right documentation on it anywhere else either. I'm not even going into the mess that is making "best" the default, and "default" not the default.

For quvi 0.9.x (which I'm running) it links me to some doxygen documentation hosted on sourceforge which tells me nothing about what the actual accepted formats are or how to retrieve them, it only pretty much states "lol special cases watch out, also it has this general form but the actual values are also lol special cases watch out" which does not help me. Besides, as an mpv user, I shouldn't have to read the documentation for the API of one of the libraries it uses when said functionality could be wrapped in mpv. If there is a way to list available formats in quvi 0.9, then I haven't found it yet, because it's not quvi dump, and not quvi scan (which, for this youtube link, just returns the youtube link again.) and certainly not quvi info. The quvi manpage is not informative either.

[Fuuzetsu]

Use quvi -F, at least it works for quvi 0.4.2, it seems that they skipped some versions until 0.9.x.

✓ misaki shana % quvi -F "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkhaneo25Mc"
:: Check for URL redirection ...done.
:: Fetch config ...done.
fmt05_240p|fmt17_144p|fmt18_360p|fmt22_720p|fmt36_240p|fmt43_360p : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkhaneo25Mc

[CounterPillow]

not working in quvi 0.9.

quvi -F "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pkhaneo25Mc"
error: `-F' is not a quvi command. See 'quvi help'.

Apparently, the new way is quvi get -S <url>, which appears to work.
Does anyone have any opinions on whether this should be wrapped or just added to the manpage?

[ghost]

I agree that this isn't nice. Not only are there differences between quvi 0.4 and 0.9, even within the same version the formats are inconsistent.

For example, there are 2 examples on this page, for two sites: http://quvi.sourceforge.net/r/api/0.9/glossary_termino.html#m_stream_id

It's not clear how users (or applications) are supposed to switch between different quality levels, so mpv doesn't attempt to do it (yet).

[ghost]

All of this is obsolete. We stopped using quvi. We now use youtube-dl, and you can pass the quality setting to --ytdl-format. What parameter this takes is up to youtube-dl's --format parameter.