TuneCatcher - A Youtube Audio Player

I've often heard people on the MacRumors PowerPC forum say that they like to use Youtube for audio playback only - listening to albums or gigs etc so don't really require all the CPU intensive donkey work of playing video.

With that in mind I've cobbled together TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer - scripts that play audio only and save on all important CPU cycles.

Included in the install is Choob - a TenFourFoxBox Youtube browser preloaded with a vintage Nokia N90 user agent (hence the groovy app icon) which eschews all the usual Youtube script clutter and allows you to browse for videos quickly and efficiently.

Download and unzip the installer dmg - once mounted there is a choice of two installers. Youtube-dl is a requirement for this package, so if you have it installed as normal or with PPCMC, choose the appropriate installer.

Incidentally, PPCMC is a must have application for any PowerPC Mac - apart from it's core functionality it's also a Swiss Army Knife of essential tools including Python, youtube-dl, ffmpeg, curl and soon, ffplay all in one package without the usual fuss of needing X11 and Macports.

The installer will create a TubeAudio folder in ~/Music and place Choob, mplayer, TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer in /Applications.

Use Choob to browse for your desired clip, right click and Copy Link Location, then click on TuneCatcher in the dock (assuming you made a shortcut earlier.)
The link is passed to youtube-dl, the m4a audio file is downloaded and opened by MPlayer where the normal keyboard shortcuts apply for playback control.
When the clip is finished (or stopped) it is moved to ~/Music/TubeAudio/Archive.

Note, the m4a encoding used on Youtube is problematic to PowerPC Macs - without conversion they'll need to be played in either MPlayer or VLC.

If the Youtube clip you want to play is of a length unreasonable to download, choose TuneStreamer instead but be aware this will not keep a copy of the clip.
Also because of piping the stream via stdin the normal MPlayer controls aren't available.

Download is available here.

Download the G3 compatible version here. Unfortunately, mplayer for G3 doesn't accommodate streaming or playing m4a audio, so using TuneCatcher, a standard 360P video is downloaded which mplayer plays without processing the video.

MPlayer keyboard shortcuts for reference:

Pause/Play.....Space
Left/Right.......Back/Forward 10 seconds
Up/Down........Back/Forward 1 minute
9/0................Volume -/+
[ ].................Decrease/Increase playback speed by 10%
ESC...............Stop and quit

Blogging Like It's 1999

Pardon the lazy Prince pun/reference but all will become clear...

While writing theses posts will always primarily be done in front of a Mac screen, it's nice to have the ability to write when out and about too - enter my pocket sized, vintage Oregon Scientific Osaris from 1999 - a budget copy of the mighty Psion Series 5 PDA.

Being an 18Mhz EPOC32 device, this thing only gently nibbles away on two AA batteries and saves files to a Compact Flash card - so even in the worst case scenario of the main and backup batteries failing, my data is safe.

 

Whilst working on a post it's no sweat to swap the Compact Flash card out of the Osaris and use an adaptor to share it with a Mac, however, I'm reluctant to place repetitive strain on the card hatch and connector on the Osaris - I'd rather use it's friction and fatigue free infrared port.

This is by necessity more than anything, as unfortunately, buying the Osaris secondhand, it didn't come supplied with the original serial connector lead so the only connectivity available is the infrared port and luckily, I do have an old USB infrared dongle - however, it only works with Windows 98/ME/XP.

At the moment I don't have a PC - old or otherwise - permanently setup but what I do have is Virtual PC 7 on my Powerbook.

So, after installing Windows 98SE to a 1Gb virtual drive, and doing a few optimisations to keep the CPU demands down, the workflow is as follows.

With the USB infrared dongle attached and in range of my Osaris with Desktop Link activated, I start Windows 98 and launch PsiWin (the connectivity manager designed for Psion PDAs but also fully compatible with the Osaris.)

Once the infrared serial connection is made, from PsiWin I can browse my Osaris and it's Compact Flash card and exchange files - in this instance, an EPOC Word document is imported and converted to a TXT file (MS Word and other options are available too.)

The same applies in reverse if I wanted to import a document to the Osaris with PsiWin converting the file to a native EPOC version.

Once within Windows, my document is readily accessible to OSX where I can work on it or share it to another device via WebDAV.

Virtual PC often gets a rough deal in the PowerPC sphere as being a poor substitute for Windows but I've had good use out of it - the key is to have reasonable expectations, use the oldest compatible version of Windows for your applications and to realise it's performance doesn't scale with the spec of your Mac.

wicknix

 In my two plus years away from this blog, I was also away from using PowerPC hardware most of the time.  So I hadn't been keeping up with the development of PowerPC software much.  Then I come back to find someone named wicknix who frequents the Mac Rumors PowerPC forum.  This guy has been very busy developing PowerPC and early Intel software, and he's done some pretty amazing work for Linux and Mac OS X users alike.  

He also has a blog called Random Mac Stuff where you can find all his software.

So I just wanted to help bring awareness to the amazing efforts this guy has made.  I have had written correspondence with him, and I can tell you he's extremely humble.  I was trying to recruit him to write here, but he's just too busy.  So thanks for all your work, wicknix!   

A list of everything he has done and/or contributed to:

Arctic Fox Browser for 10.6

InterWeb Browser for 10.6 & 10.7+

SpiderWeb Browser for 10.6 & 10.7+

Software for 10.4 - 10.7 and PowerPC Linux

Lubuntu PowerPC 12.04 & 16.04 Remix live DVD + installer

Debian Sid PowerPC Remix installer

How to install Fienix Soar on 32-bit PPC Macs

How to watch Twitch Streams on 10.3/10.4/10.5 (he contributed the twitch script)