Yet another way to play videos in an external player from Firefox

I spent some time today trying to figure out how to get Firefox to play embedded videos using anything other than Flash, which is an awful, stuttering, resource-devouring mess. The internet is littered with old browser extensions and user scripts which allegedly make this possible (e.g. by forcing sites like YouTube to use the vlc media plugin instead), but I was unable to get any of them to work correctly.

Here's a quick hack for playing videos from YouTube and any other site that youtube-dl can handle in an external mplayer window. It's based on several existing HOWTOs, and has the benefit of utilising a browser extension which isn't dead yet, Open With, which was designed for opening websites in another browser from inside Firefox.

I wrote a little script which uses youtube-dl to download the video and write it to stdout, and pipes this output to mplayer, which plays it. Open With is the glue which sends URLs to the script. You can configure the extension to add this option to various context menus in the browser -- for example, I can see it if I right-click on an URL or on an open page. You may find this less convenient than overriding the behaviour of the embedded video on the page, but I prefer to play my videos full-screen anyway.

This is the script:

Make it executable. Now open Open With's preferences, add this executable, and give it a nicer name if you like. Enjoy your stutter-free videos. :)

(Obviously you need to have youtube-dl and mplayer installed in order for this to work. You can adapt this to other media players -- just check what you need to do to get them to read from stdin.)