Talk:VLC media player

Skins

I have download probably all WSZ (almost 2000) and WAL (almost 900) skins from ru.winamp.com. I haven't direct URLs to them but I have uploaded all of them on one of my "empty" website. It is not as I understand can be used and installed same way as fonts, by copying in the "media player folder". The only way that I see is to download into "/usr/share/skins" or "/usr/share/skins/WSZ" or "/usr/share/skins/Winamp/wsz" folder. But to download all at the same time is also not good idea or is it (with one PKGBUILD file)? May be create a script that first will list only all available skins, download desired into some of the "/usr/share/skins/*" and then add option to create only symlinks to them in the chosen folder. There are still many media players that supports Winamp skins, including VLC. Andy Crowd - 蔡依林 13:51, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Here is a script for downloading skins into "/usr/share/skins/WSZ" and creating symlinks to them in current running folder. installwsz.sh. Andy Crowd - 蔡依林 09:47, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

About creating an Aur package to include them all: I don't know under which license the skins are published at winamp, but it may be not possible/allowed to download/republish them via another site in one package.

Additionally, having ~3000 skins installed when you only use one at a time seems excessive and not really Arch style. I think most Arch users prefer to customize their desktop/apps, i.e. make a choice before and then install the skin (or a few) that match their desktop best.

Those who do probably prefer sites like deviantart to share creations. You also get wsz skins there for example: [1] Following that approach: To choose a skin, it seems preferable to browse them online, decide and download the individual ones.

So, if you want to share that knowledge, you might help other users more by making a subsection under VLC_media_player#Skins to give the necessary hints to browse skins from different sites, download and install them for vlc. Maybe, if it can be helped with an Aur package, you want to write one which wraps the curl download to automate the download/install, e.g. taking a command line argument wsz-skin-install url to download the wsz/wal skin file to install. Not sure how much such helps, that depends on how easy it can be used to download/install individual skins from different sources. Maybe it is faster to do manually once you have decided for one and using an Aur package makes more sense if you change them a lot.

--Indigo (talk) 11:27, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for advice. To publish so many skins as I have will take a very long time to upload one by one. The winamp website will be closed soon and many skins will go into history, that's why I downloaded them and want to share. Many websites want keep users come because of making money on advertisement, but I will ask some of them about this idea, to provide "easy" access to Skins database/list/urls but will do it late. Even on torrent websites is relatively hard to find big collections with winamp skins.

I have looked for licenses in *.wsz files and only few contains them but almost every of them contains readme.txt/rtf. Then the *.wsz list must contain additional information, such as availability of readme and license files. The tool feh can be used to preview desired within script,wsz-skin-install peview skin1,skin2... , the filename used for preview is "main.bmp"(you see it on websites as preview) and is part of *.wsz that makes it easy to "scroll" through skins. People are often looking for skins in categories or searching by names, script can only search by name. The readme files can be available online as an image as a small protection against spam bots.

Andy Crowd - 蔡依林 18:23, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Chromecast support

I just added a section on streaming to chromecast devices. On my system, I just had to install libmicrodns and I was all set. However, I have a sneaking suspicion that editing the hosts line in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file may be a necessary prerequisite. I already had that done as I use kdeconnect. Can someone drop a line here if they can't get chromecast streaming working right out of the box by just installing this additional package? I'll happily add that bit in (unless of course, if you beat me to it!). Thanks! Karthik Periagaram (talk) 03:54, 11 March 2018 (UTC)

I can't get chromecast to work, would you mind sharing what you added to /etc/nsswitch.conf, then I can report back my findings. Thanks! ShadowGirl (talk) 21:23, 25 December 2019 (UTC)

From what I can tell so far, adding mdns_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] to /etc/nsswitch.conf should be enough get Chromecast to work. Adding this to the wiki page. ShadowGirl (talk) 22:46, 26 December 2019 (UTC)