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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<title>Playing multimedia with Dillo</title>
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<span class="date">Written on 2025-03-16</span>
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<a href="/">Home</a> /
<a href="/topic">Topic Guide</a> /
<a href="/topic/playing-multimedia">Playing multimedia</a>
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<h1>Playing multimedia with Dillo</h1>
<p>Dillo doesn't have the capability to play audio or video directly from the
browser, however it can <em>easily</em> offload this task to other programs.
This page collects some examples of how to do watch videos and listen to audio
tracks or podcasts by using an external player program. In particular we will
cover mpv with yt-dlp which supports YouTube and Bandcamp among many other
sites.
<img src="dillo-tv.png" alt="A black and white drawing of an armadillo
watching a futuristic looking TV playing the famous video of Rick
Astley, Never Gonna Give You Up">
</p>
<h2>Requisites</h2>
<p>You will need at least Dillo
<a href="/release/3.2.0/">version 3.2.0</a> to open URLs in external
programs, be sure to install an <a href="/release">updated version</a> or
built it yourself from source.</p>
<p>To play multimedia files you will also need
<a href="https://mpv.io/">mpv</a> along with
<a href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp">yt-dlp</a> tool to extract video
and audio streams from
<a
href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/master/supportedsites.md">several
sites</a>.
There are other alternatives, but these are the ones I have tested and they
seem to work fine. Be sure to use an <b>updated version</b> of yt-dlp, as it
is likely that old versions don't work anymore.</p>
<h2>Opening URLs in mpv</h2>
<p>Apart from opening video and audio URLs, <a href="https://mpv.io/">Mpv</a> can
also open URLs that contain embedded video or audio elements by extracting the
relevant sources from the website with the help of
<a href="https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp">yt-dlp</a>
under the hood. For example, a YouTube video can be directly opened like so:
<blockquote>
<pre>$ mpv '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4</a>'</pre>
</blockquote>
As well as any Bandcamp album:
<blockquote>
<pre>$ mpv '<a href="https://tokyoskaparadiseorchestra.bandcamp.com/album/35">https://tokyoskaparadiseorchestra.bandcamp.com/album/35</a>'</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>When opening <em>audio</em> files, mpv won't show a new window and will read
the input keys from the stdin of the console. As we will be using Dillo to run
mpv, we change the <code>force-window</code> option to always open a window by
setting in the <code>~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf</code> config file this option:
<blockquote>
<pre>force-window=yes</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>You can also specify this option from the command line if you prefer to do it
only for Dillo. You may want to also specify other options regarding the
quality of videos, see the <a href="man:mpv(1)">mpv(1) manual page</a>.</p>
<p>In order to open an URL in mpv, we simply add this line to the
<code>~/.dillo/dillorc</code> config file:
<blockquote>
<pre>link_action="Open in mpv:mpv $url &"</pre>
</blockquote>
The <code>$url</code> variable is set by Dillo to the value of the URL of the
hyperlink. The <code>&</code> (ampersand) at the end ensures that when
Dillo is closed, the mpv process continues running.
<p>You will need to close Dillo and open it again for the changes to
take effect. Now when you are over a link, you can click with the right
mouse button and select the new <em>Open in mpv</em> option, and the link
should be opened by mpv. You can try with the above two links.
<p>To search, consider using an alternative YouTube frontend like
<a href="https://yewtu.be">Invidious</a> which doesn't need JavaScript.</p>
<h2>Playing URLs in a queue</h2>
<p>While opening a single video or audio URL is helpful, often multiple
videos or audio links are intended to be opened in sequence. This can be
achieved by using the <a href="man:mpv#JSON_IPC">mpv control socket</a> and a
small script that queues them in the current playlist (there are other tools,
but this method has almost no extra requirements). To use this technique
you will need to install the
<a href="http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/">socat</a> program as well, to
communicate with the UNIX socket.
<p>We will add two modes of playing elements, play next in the queue or add at
the end of the queue. The <code>$url</code> variable will provide the URL that
we should open, and the first argument will control where it gets added in the
queue. With mpv, this is controlled by the <code>loadfile</code> command,
which accepts the <code>insert-next</code> and <code>append-next</code> options.
<p>Create the <code>~/.dillo/mpv/</code> directory and place the following
script in the file <code>~/.dillo/mpv/queue.sh</code>, and make it executable
with <code>chmod +x ~/.dillo/mpv/queue.sh</code>:
<blockquote><pre>#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$url" ]; then
echo "error: url not set" >&2
exit 1
fi
mode=${1:-append-next}
sockfile=~/.dillo/mpv/mpv.sock
conffile=~/.dillo/mpv/mpv.conf
# Try queueing it by appending it, see loadfile in mpv(1) manual
echo "loadfile $url $mode" | socat - "UNIX-CONNECT:$sockfile" && exit 0
# Otherwise start a new mpv server in the background
mpv --include="$conffile" --input-ipc-server="$sockfile" "$url" &
</pre></blockquote>
<p>Additionally, create a custom mpv configuration file at
<code>~/.dillo/mpv/mpv.conf</code> with the following content:
<blockquote><pre># Always show the player window even if it is only audio
force-window=yes
# Keep the player open after playing all files
idle=yes
# Select small video formats (optional)
# ytdl-format="best[height<500]"</pre></blockquote>
<p>You can add more options that will only affect mpv when running in this
queued mode, for example to disable video and only play audio which would
reduce bandwidth usage, but these are enough for now.
<p>Then add these two new actions in <code>~/.dillo/dillorc</code> to play
files in the queue and restart Dillo:
<blockquote>
<pre>link_action="Queue next in mpv:~/.dillo/mpv/queue.sh insert-next"
link_action="Queue last in mpv:~/.dillo/mpv/queue.sh append-play"</pre>
</blockquote>
<p>The first time that you queue an URL, a new instance of mpv will start which
will setup the socket, and will remain opened even if the file ends. Succesive
URLs will be added to the playlist at the specified position.</p>
<p>Notice that the mpv program is running in the background, and if you close
Dillo it will continue playing. You can in fact open Dillo later and queue
more items and so on.</p>
<h2>Closing remarks</h2>
<p>The <code>queue.sh</code> script always opens all URLs in the same way, but
you could handle different URLs in different ways. The <code>$origin</code>
variable is also available with the value of the URL <em>from</em> which the
link was opened, which can also be used to determine how to load the URL.</p>
<p>You can also add more options, for example to handle audio and video
separately with different mpv options for each type, or particular options for
your hardware to better use the video hardware decoder (if present).</p>
<p>Finally, this technique works for any other program that can handle URLs
which can be configured to be used with Dillo in the same way.</p>
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