xscreensaver

Use mpv to play movies as a screensaver. This script asumes you will host your own repository of videos to play, so you will need to replace the URL with your own, more on that later. This version also allows you to host just one single file and have that play on all monitors, but can easily be adjusted.

Requirements

• mpv - https://mpv.io
• xscreensaver - https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/

Optional if you do want to download your own videos from youtube you will also install youtube-dl, and my prefered way of doing that is using pip (python) but you can also use brew.

For the option to show up in Xscreensaver, you need to add this to your ~/.xscreensaver file.

"VideoScreenSaver"  videoscreensaver                                        \n\

And place the videoscreensaver file in like /usr/local/bin. Next up is saving the configuration file to your $HOME/.config/ directory. This file now contains any settings I've added to the original version. The comments should be self explanatory but here's a brief overview.

Setting this variable to 1 will make the script use the URL setting in $my_server to fetch videos for you screensaver.

export use_my_videos="0"
export my_server="http://my.server/vidz"

Settings this variable to 1 will make the script use the list of YouTube videos either from $youtube_list, or $youtube_file. Leaving one of those blank will ignore it.

export use_youtube_videos="1"
export youtube_list="http//my.server/vidz/youtube-playlist"
export youtube_file="/tmp/youtube-playlist"

Getting videos.

So here are just some tips and tricks do get the files onto your server. Either you can create a playlist on YouTube and use youtube-dl do get all the videos from the list, or just create a new file on the server and add all the urls for the videos you wish to use as your screensaver, and then run this little thing.

for video in `cat youtube-list`; do youtube-dl -f 22 $video; done

And then you will need to rename all the files to remove any spaces and odd characters. Disclaimer: you might have to do more sed stuff than what I do if your videos have lots of wierd characters in them that break shell-scripts. Also the downloaded videos are 99% of the time in mp4 format, adjust accordingly. I will for ease-of-use sake also have the rename.sh file in this repo.

Hosting it, how?

So the one-liner in the script that get the video list relies on direcotry indexes being turned on, so you will need to fix that. Since this is the only thing I host on the server I have for this, I simply run nginx and have this in the default nginx.conf http { } bracket. Also the root is /opt/ytdl, add a index-file there, and create a vidz/ directory and put all your sanitized and renamed youtube videos there.

root   /opt/ytdl;
location / {
    index  index.html index.htm;
}
location /vidz {
        autoindex on;
}

Tweaks?

So I save all my files in /vidz, you are free to change this, but you will need to edit the script yourself to fix it. I could have named it somethings else. Just change the "my_server" variable to be host/path.

YouTube playlist

So this functionality is very basic, it solely depends on YOU having a file containing all the URLs for the videos you wish to highlight in your screensaver. You can easliy obtain these using youtube-dl like so.

youtube-dl -o "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=%(id)s" --get-filename "https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLdSUTU0oamrzINhr7CW-Fw41b__K-3DjB" > /tmp/urls

Also it's not feasible to have this in the script itself, because as you will surely notice it takes a pretty long time to generate this list of YouTube URLs. If you wish to host this file some place else other than on your computer, you should upload it as is and define the "youtube_list" variable instead of the "youtube_list".

Original source.

So this is a clone and edited version of https://github.com/graysky2/xscreensaver-aerial fine work.