Unity YouTube Lens Updates with Browser Free Video Playback

By , Published January 2, 2012

Remember that rather handy YouTube Unity lens we covered a few days back? Well it’s just gotten better!

What is the YouTube Lens?

The Lens and Scope set lets you browse and search YouTube’s millions of videos without leaving the Ubuntu desktop or having to open a browser.

You can manually refine video results using the available filters. These include sorting by video relevance, viewcount or ratings.

Clicking on a video result opens up the video for immediate watching.

So what’s new?

In our earlier post on the Lens we, along with many you, wished that clicking on a video result would open the video in a local media player and not in the browser.

The latest update to the Lens adds just that; flash-free playback of videos in VLC (if it’s installed) when clicking on a video result.

Youtube video via VLC in Linux

The ‘Filter’ options have been rejigged slightly, ratings are now at the top of the folder pane, and an ‘Upload Date’ filter has been added.

How do I install it?

The Lens, which is only compatible with Ubuntu 11.10, requires the ‘Atareao Lenses’ PPA to be added to your Software Sources. 

This is done quickest by using the Terminal.

Open a new Terminal window and entering the following commands: -

  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/lenses
  • sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lens-video scope-youtube

Once both parts have successfully been installed you will need to log out and back in before you can use them.

All that’s left then is to open the Dash and click on the ‘Video Lens’ icon (a right-pointing triangle/play button) positioned towards the bottom of the screen.

 

Related posts:

  1. So Long Productivity – YouTube Lens Puts Browser-free Searching of Videos in the Unity Dash
  2. Search Grooveshark Tracks From the Unity Music Lens
  3. Drag n’ Drop YouTube Video Uploader for Unity
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  • Bart Willemsen

    Nice new feature! That was the only thing I missed with it actually. :P Installing it right now!

  • Miriam Noe La Bomba Chepeña

    +1

  • Iulian Georgescu

    Yea. It works!

  • http://twitter.com/cerda86 Andre Lacerda

    Anyway to make it compatible with other video players? or even better, use the default video player.

    • Anonymous

      Yeah, the ability to open the video in any stream-capable player would be fantastic.

  • Bailey Bootthanoo

    OMG! Can someone send me the link to that wallpaper?

  • http://twitter.com/chaeMil Michal Mlejnek

    hi. i’ve installed only vlc and it will still open the videos on firefox :/

    • Anonymous

      Maybe logout and log back in? That’s all I’ve got :/ or restart machine

      • http://twitter.com/chaeMil Michal Mlejnek

        restart or loggout wont work i have to purge the vlc and then install it again…

  • Stijn Verwaaijen

    My girl would LOVE this! ;-)

  • http://twitter.com/Zta77 Stephan Henningsen

    I don’t want to log out and back in.  How can I get the lenses and scopes reloaded? There has to be a way like “killall -USR1 unity”

    • http://twitter.com/PeachyLuigi I’m the watermelon

      lazy level: over9000

    • Will Moorhead

      unity –replace
      or
      nohup unity –replace (supposed to keep unity from crashing when you close the terminal, but I never tried it)

    • Anonymous

      press alt-f2 and type setsid unity

  • Bjartur Mortensen

    This is probably a stupid question, but would it be possible to have a media player integrated within a Unity lens?

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      No, that’s not possible. Not currently, anyway. Remember, there are no stupid questions. Only stupid people. :>

      • Bjartur Mortensen

        Haha, okay =P.

        Thanks for replying!

    • Anonymous

      but maybe you could have a previewer like sushi or covergloobus, which would be cool. Not just for video, but to preview pics and lots of documents in a slick way.

  • http://twitter.com/howythegeek Howy

    I don’t like VLC… Why is there no support for Totem, since this package is made for Ubuntu, which includes Totem by default?

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      Probably because Youtube uses WebM to stream, which is not supported properly by GStreamer, which Totem uses.

      • Anonymous

        Rreally? I have a bunch WebM videos and they work just fine on Totem.

        • Conner Lee

          Totem even has a youtube plugin. That does not make any sense.

    • Anonymous

      i wonder if it has vlc as a dependency and installs it for you in case you dont already have it.

      • Anonymous

        Would probably be a little to much to download for just one lens.

        • Anonymous

          yea probably.

          i hope lenses get a default section in usc and they can also show any of optional addons

    • https://launchpad.net/~afccarl1994 Carl Ansell

      On the developers website, it says that he wanted to use Totem as it is installed by default, but couldn’t get it working and had to go with VLC instead. For now, anyway.

  • Zombifier

    Nice work!

  • Anonymous

    Now, didn’t Youtube ask some FOSS media player developer to halt full support? To only show 240p?

    It was somewhere on this website if I remember it right, so who says Youtube won’t block playback VLC now? (cant seem to find the original article)

    • http://rubenverhack.be/ Ruben Verhack

      I was wondering the same thing. The application was MiniTube. 

    • Anonymous

      They asked totem to stop.

  • https://launchpad.net/~afccarl1994 Carl Ansell

    Anyone else get ‘sorry, the program “unity-scope-youtube” closed unexpectedly’ whenever the lens is opened? :(

  • Mohab Soliman-smoke

    still open with chromium any ideas !! 

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ActionParsnip ActionParsnip

    Not available in Precise though :(

  • http://doragonden.wordpress.com/ DragonHunter

    Anyone noticed that the author still had the Adult lenses installed (Look at the second screenshot closely and notice the X at the lenses selection below)

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      I actually don’t know what that looks like. You obviously do, though. :)

    • Will Kromer

      Notice too how he still has every lens he has reviewed installed.

  • Anonymous

    wow. that’s handy. now you did convince me to install it.

    no flash… my cpu is calm… and cold for once!   greattt

  • Dylan Coakley

    Completely unrelated to this but how does one get in contact with the guys at OMGubuntu?? I have tried the e-mail address already….

  • Anonymous

    That’s really awesome. thanks to the Atareao guys for this! Would it be possible to do the same with Vimeo videos?

  • Anonymous

    Close enough to the in-Dash video playback I was talking about. Honestly, I really can’t wait until this Flash crap is all over with. It’s difficult, though, seeing how many features are added to the Flash YouTube client. It almost seems we won’t be able to go Flash-free.

    Then again, I don’t really care about 3D playback and thumbnails in the timeline, so long as I have the option to uninstall Flash. The flowplayer can do ads using Javascript and HTML5, so I think YouTube can certainly do it.

    The day is coming, though. Flash can export to canvas, so I think even the most complex applications will come to HTML5 in the long run.

  • Anonymous

    It works yeah , but the search doesn’t give the best results, not even remotely the same as when you search on Youtube….

    • Anonymous

      Yeah, I kinda noticed that, too (I was doing a search for episodes of
      The Zeta Project and kept coming up with the Mexico TV versions despite a
      number of the English version on YouTube).  I assuming this is a work
      in progress type of issue.

      • Anonymous

        yeah  thats probably the case, but since they added the browser free playback feature pretty fast, I expect it to get better soon. :)

  • http://twitter.com/woddy68 coppa carlo

    Fantastic ! I like Unity ! Tank you.

  • Jorge Encarnação

    Love this, it is awesome!

  • Michael Schmid

    For some reason new lenses don’t appear in my dash. The youtube lens doesn’t show up at all (though i followed the steps described & logged off and on again, did setsid unity, …) and the gdocs lens appears occasionally.
    Is there anything I can do abaout this?

  • Daniel Brainard

    Any way you can set the default filter for relevance to at first be checked? Kind of annoying to have to make the extra 2 clicks when searching for something… Without it, it doesn’t make it more convenient to search through the dash vs. using minitube or youtube.com…

  • owain harris

    When I search for something, it gives me a whole lot of results, which have nothing close to anything in similar what I typed. I need to filter results by ‘relevance’, to see what I want. Still really cool though!

  • http://twitter.com/Torq07 Denis Presnov

    Hey guys, thats great lens and cool update about VLC player. I have one little problem about it. When i click on video VLC player give error: The format of ‘http://www.youtube.com/v/e82VE8UtW8A‘ cannot be detected. Have a look at the log for details. Can anybody help me with it?

  • Jeremi Thebeau

    I have the You Tube lense installed and I get results, but I can’t click on any of them. Has anyone had this problem? Need help please!

  • Jia-Jun Xu

    it didn’t work on my computer /__
    I installed both lens-video and scope-youtube, and I saw the icon show on my dash, but when I search, there was no result.can anybody help me? thank you!!

 
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