 Today, I want to address one of the most common problems I hear about using Linux on the desktop, and that is the fact that watching video inside your web browser, whether it be a Chrome-based web browser or a Firefox-based web browser, kind of sucks. Watching videos on our Linux browsers really sucks, and the reason it sucks is because of video acceleration. Our browsers simply don't have it. Chrome kind of has ways to enable video acceleration, but it's not great. It's kind of flaky, and then when you don't have good video acceleration or no video acceleration at all in your browsers, you open up Chrome, you open up Firefox, and you're trying to play videos from YouTube or Peertube or whatever video platform you're watching videos on, and you notice your CPU is spiking to like 100%. That's not a good time. Not to mention that the video quality is kind of bad as well. So what's the alternative? Well, in my opinion, and this is something a lot of us old-timers in Linux have gotten used to, is just getting the habit of when you want to watch, especially a lengthy video, you know, if you're going to spend 15 minutes, 30 minutes watching a YouTube video, or maybe two hours watching something that's more of a feature-length kind of film, you know what? Just open that thing in MPV. For those of you that are new to Linux, MPV is kind of the standard video player on Linux. It's very minimal, and basically all it is is a frame that appears on your screen that has a video playing it, and it doesn't have any kind of menu system or buttons or anything like that. It just plays a video on your screen, and it's really fantastic because it has excellent hardware acceleration. It's very fully featured, and everything looks good in it, and that's one of the reasons why instead of playing that stottery, choppy playback, you know, as far as your videos and your browser, just have those browser videos automatically open in MPV. And how you do that is there's plugins that you can install in both Chrome and Firefox, and Chrome and Firefox-based browsers. So anytime you go to YouTube, for example, you can right-click on a video and choose Play with MPV, and it opens that in MPV. So let me show you how to get these MPV browser extensions installed and how you can use them. So I'm going to switch over to my desktop, and I've got the Brave browser open. Brave, of course, is based on Chrome, but I will also show you how to install plugins on Firefox that will allow you to play videos with MPV. But I've got a plugin installed called Play with MPV on my Chrome-based browser. So if I right-click on this YouTube video in the right-click menu, you say I have Play with MPV. And let me click on that. It'll take a few seconds to download stuff from the internet, but you can see the video actually looks very good, no stuttering, nothing like that. It's much better. It's a much better experience watching something in MPV rather than Chrome or Firefox. So the plugin on your Chromium-based browsers is called Play with MPV. What you want to do is you want to go to the Chrome store, so go to chrome.google.com slash web store, and in the web store do a search for MPV. There's going to be a few MPV plugins, but the one you want is called Play with MPV. It's been around for a few years. It's very popular. Click on that. There's a button that'll ask you, do you want to install it? Click install. My button says remove because I've already got it installed. You want to go visit the GitHub, so if you want to check out the source code, you can. And it's licensed under the unlicense, which is basically a license that says this is really, it doesn't have a license. Do what you want with it. It looks like the code for it's written mostly in JavaScript and Python. Now installing this, you do have to do a few things here. This isn't as simple as you install the plugin and things just work. You actually have to install a couple of different things. First you actually need to make sure you install MPV, of course, because if you don't have the MPV video player, obviously this isn't going to work. You also need to make sure you have Python 2 or Python 3 installed and PIP, which is Python's package manager. On most Linux systems, pretty much every Linux system is going to have Python installed, so you shouldn't need to do anything there. Now, the next thing you need to do, of course, is install the Chrome extension itself, so the Play with MPV Chrome extension. And once you have that installed, the last thing you need is a program called Play with MPV that is actually a desktop application. It's essentially a daemon, a server that's going to run in the background that's always listening for any time you do something like right click on a video and choose Play with MPV, it'll help serve that video up with MPV. Now, how do you install this on most Linux distributions? You will install this through PIP, which, again, is that Python package manager. So most Python programs are able to be installed using PIP. And you just run this command here. But if you guys that are on Arch Linux or ArchBase distributions, like I am, we actually don't need to install this with PIP, because the beauty of Arch Linux is the AUR. So if you go to the AUR and do a search for Play with MPV-git, actually Play-with-MPV-git, kind of a long convoluted name there. But install this particular program, and you can install it with Ye or Paru or Aura or whatever AUR helper you use on your system. And then once you have that installed, what you want to do is you want this Play with MPV-git daemon running in the background. What you should do is make sure that it just auto starts every time you log in to your desktop environment or window manager. So here is how I would handle this. I would first open a terminal, and then I would CD into .config slash auto start. So for those of you that are not familiar with what this is, in your home directory, you have a hidden directory called .config, where all your config files hang out. In that directory, you should have a folder called auto start, if you don't create it. And inside that, if I did an LS, you will see that I have several files in there, the end and dot desktop. They have this dot desktop extension. Now these desktop files, when they get placed in .config slash auto start, what this does is it tells your Linux system every time that I log in to my window manager or desktop environment, I need these programs to actually start. So what I did is I created one myself called Play with MPV. I actually didn't give it the .desktop extension, but that's fine. It knows it's a .desktop file simply by the contents of this file. If I open this in VIM, you can see the very first line is brackets desktop entry. That's why it knows it's a desktop file. And I'm going to leave this open for a few seconds on screen. So you guys, if you need to copy this, can. Let me make it full screen. But essentially, you create desktop entry. Categories equals no space between the equals, and you can give it whatever categories you want. And this is categories for a menu system. So if this appears in your GNOME menu, or your KDE Plasma menu, or whatever, it knows exactly what category to throw this thing into. The comment could be any comment you want. Execute is the most important thing, is what is being executed on startup? Well, we're starting this particular program, Play with MPV. So when you install Play with MPV-Git from the AUR, the actual program that gets executed is Play-with-MPV. You also want to give it an icon, again, for your menu systems, icon equals MPV, in my case. The name, name, I said Play with MPV server. And the type equals application. So once you've created this Play with MPV desktop file, and you put it in .config slash auto start, now you've got that server running in the background, listening all the time for any time. Again, I right-click on something, and it's going to have Play with MPV in the menu system. Now when I click on it, again, it should just take a few seconds to start downloading it, and playing it in MPV. And of course, the most common usage for this is YouTube, but anything that has any kind of embedded video of PeerTube, I checked PeerTube earlier. So if I wanted to watch these 22 minutes of My Little Pony, for example, I right-click on this PeerTube video, Play with MPV, again, it's going to take a few seconds to start downloading, but after a few seconds, we get really nice, high-quality My Little Pony. Now unfortunately, the Play with MPV plugin that this Than fellow wrote over on GitHub, this is specifically for Chrome. It does not work with Firefox. There's no Firefox version of Play with MPV, but Firefox has its own MPV plugins. Let me go ahead. Do I have standard Firefox installed? Yes, I do. Let me launch Firefox, I launched on the wrong monitor. So this is a standard Firefox here, and what you want to do, similar to what you did in Brave or any Chrome-based browser, I'm going to do a search for Add-ons, Firefox, and Add-ons for Firefox. Go to that particular web store, and once again, do a search for MPV. Now there's several MPV plugins available for Firefox, similar to how there were a bunch for Chrome. Now, the one that's most popular, got the most users, FF2MPV, I haven't had good luck with that one recently. For some reason, this one seems to be broken. The one I recommend is the very first one here that says Send to MPV Player by Joe Urtaba. So click on that, and it's gonna say Add to Firefox, click on that button. The very first time you install this, what you want to do is you want to click on the Send to MPV Player button, and it's going to open up a new tab, and this new tab is gonna explain some installation instructions. Basically, it's gonna have a download link. You need to download a package as a zip file. It's called linux.zip. It downloads it to your downloads directory, and then what you want to do is go into your downloads directory, extract that linux.zip file, and then inside that file is gonna have an install script called install.sh. Run that install.sh script, then close out Firefox because it won't work until you restart, but when you restart Firefox, now you can go to a video platform like YouTube, and if you want to, now just click on my Arch Linux installation guide, and choose Send to MPV. It'll take a few seconds, again, to start the download, but there you go. Arch Linux, Arch Linux. And of course, these particular plugins that I showed you inside Firefox and Chromium, and then the Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, these are just the plugins that I've installed personally and that I have used, and I can kinda vouch for that I like, but there's several, again, when we did the search for MPV in both the Chrome Store and the Firefox Store, there's several MPV plugins. I also mentioned there's several VLC plugins if you prefer to watch your videos with VLC. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Game James, Mr. Paul, Scott, Wes, Akami Allen, Chuck, Commander, AngryDi, Yo-Kid, David, Dylan, Gregory, Heiko, Lee, Maxim, Michael, Mike, Nitrix, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, Edwardor, Polytech, Raver, Red Prop, and Stephen, Willie. Oh my goodness, I'm out of breath. These guys, they're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This episode you just watched would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because even though I just switched to the wrong screen and OBS, I'm really not normally this bad. Like, normally I'm much more professional, but if you guys like some of my professional and unprofessional work, please subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right guys, peace.