A way to watch (some) videos about Emacs with wget and mpv

[Eduardo Ochs]

Hi list,

there are many videos about Emacs on Youtube, and this

  rm -Rfv /tmp/emacs-news/
  cd      /tmp/
  git clone https://github.com/sachac/emacs-news
  cd      /tmp/emacs-news/

  # (find-file "/tmp/emacs-news/index.org")

lists most of them... or let's suppose that it does. Also, let me
suppose that many of the authors of these videos read help-gnu-emacs,
and that posting here is a good way to reach them.

I'm the author on a package that is official enough to be in ELPA -
"eev" - but that makes sense to very few people. I've tried to record
some videos to make it more understandable, but it turned out that the
people who may be interested in eev also usually the people who hate
videos - like me =(... - so I've been experimenting with ways to make
my videos more friendly to people who hate videos...

To be more precise: for me watching 30 seconds of a video is fine, but
having to watch a video that is one hour long is not. And I hate
having to wait for almost one minute while Youtube loads the
recommendations, and plays an ad, before playing the video that I
requested. Downloading a video with youtube-dl or yt-dlp also takes a
long time, so what I usually end doing is that I use one of the many
packages that show the transcript of a video, and I speed-read the
transcript instead of watching the video.

Anyway, I think that I reached something that is worth sharing.

Some of the pages in my website are about videos that I've recorded
and subtitled. In each of them I've put something like this:

  You can watch this video on youtube [here], but youtube always
  converts my videos to a format that is blurry at some points. The
  best way to watch this video is to run the two [wget]s and the [mpv]
  in the beige block below to download the video and its subtitles and
  then play it with mpv; to make mpv play it in high speed, use the
  keys listed [here].

    # See:  http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos.html
    #       http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos.html#mpv-keys
    # Play: (find-eev2019video "0:00")
    # Info: (find-1stclassvideo-links "eev2019")

    wget -nc http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/emacsconf2019.mp4
    wget -N  http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos/emacsconf2019.vtt
    mpv --fs --osd-level=2 emacsconf2019.mp4

So: most people will skip the comments, will paste the "wget"s and the
"mpv" into a shell, and ta-da, the video plays. Some people will
recognize that the .vtt is a subtitle file and will click on it to
read the subtitles without the video. A few people - very few - will
follow the other links.

Long story short: 1) use two "wget"s and an "mpv"; 2) this is my
20th-ish attempt to find a way to point to wget-able videos, and the
first one that I really like - and that would be easy to adapt to
other people and to videos totally unrelated to eev; 3) I don't know
if this would work well for the EmacsConf,

  https://emacsconf.org/2022/

because the URLs for its videos are too long...

Here is an example in which the instructions and the beige rectangle
appears very close to the top of the page:

  http://angg.twu.net/2020-some-template-based.html

I hope that other people will find this idea inspiring.
Apologies for mentioning eev so many times, and cheers, =)

  Eduardo Ochs
  http://angg.twu.net/eepitch.html
  http://angg.twu.net/eev-videos.html