Hi,

is there a way to watch videos from a remote network share over kioslaves, or something that provides a similar user experience?

For example:

1) Video files are on a NAS, can be accessed using samba without password-protection. this works fine with almost any program, be it vlc, dragon or mplayer. By creating the right shortcut, i can browse the share in konqueror or dolphin and have them played

2) Video files are on a NAS, can be accessed using samba, but a password is needed. I can play the files from the commandline, using
mplayer smb://user:password@host/path/file
vlc and dragon also work. Opening them this way from konqueror is more difficult, it's maybe possible with some scripting.

3) Video files are on another linux machine with sshd running. I have no idea how to play them, dragon sftp://host/file does not work, and mplayer and vlc do not include sftp functionality.

Is there a Video player that truly uses kio? will there be one? I tried with kaffeine and dragon, but the fact that both fail in case 2 and 3, but work in case 2 with password given makes me doubt they use this.
If there isn't, how to best work around it?

Hi i haven't had much experience with messing around with kio slaves
however if you open the remote location with 'kioclient exec [url]' kio will handle the retrieval of the the file and open it with the url file type's default application.

Code: Select all

kioclient exec smb://sakura/Content/Video/kKrtbUinWOU.mp4


did a little hunt for something that you may find to be a bit more customizable and usable, basically i just monitored and watched how kio executes remote files from dolphin and managed to dig this up.

the following is all in one line

Code: Select all

/usr/lib/kde4/libexec/kioexec 'mplayer -really-quiet %F' smb://sakura/Content/Video/kKrtbUinWOU.mp4

you should be able to just parse any remote location and have it open in mplayer. X3 i think i may find this handy too.

That's a nice workaround, but quite uncomfortable for larger files, as it first downloads the file.

For videos bigger than 1 GB it's starting to get unusable.

Judging from the debug output, dragon actually tries to use kio, if the (xine?) handler for smb:// urls fails, it just does not succeed. Some bugs are filed for this, but I doubt it will get fixed soon.

Dragon Player uses Phonon, which makes it a bit harder for it to have KIO support, as the underlying backend needs KIO support. As a fallback, Phonon-VLC passes the data stream from KIO off to libVLC, not sure if Phonon-Xine does this though.

Yes, that part seems to work. But with both xine and vlc as phonon backend, dragon does not play any Video for me.

judging from the (rather long, so i won't paste it in full) debug output, dragon passes the url first to the backend, then this fails (permission denied), then an kio-slave is opened:

dragonplayer(4503)/kio (Slave) KIO::Slave::createSlave: createSlave "smb" for KUrl("smb://chronos/sys/k3bphotovcd.mpg")
dragonplayer(4503)/kio (KIOConnection) KIO::ConnectionServer::listenForRemote: Listening on "local:/tmp/ksocket-goelzera/dragonplayerfo4503.slave-socket"
dragonplayer(4503)/phonon (KDE plugin) Phonon::KioMediaStreamPrivate::_k_bytestreamSeekDone: 0
dragonplayer(4503)/phonon (KDE plugin) Phonon::KioMediaStreamPrivate::_k_bytestreamFileJobOpen: 1731380

and there it stops, and no video is played. Does dragon with kio work, with some backend, for any of you?

It doesn't work with KIO for me... so something has probably broken. I suggest filing a bug at bugs.kde.org.

I did file a bug, https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=257903 , for those who are interested.