Ok kiddos, I just setup Fedora on my Desktop and was looking into a way to make VLC be an "alarm clock" if you will. More like an alarm video player but hey who cares? I just wanted it to greet my inert, sleeping, lazy ass with awesomesauce in the morning. (Specifically, Empire Records Fan Edition in this case.)
So I made a bash script to handle this. One caveat, the script worked awesomely stand-alone. As a cron-job? Forget it. Cron's output of the console information was useful because vlc was barking about not finding a display to play to. So I set about looking for information through Google and a lot of it was old postings, so I felt it was possibly outdated so I checked only the last year and found some newer threads but nothing extremely useful. I looked over the older (3+ years old) threads and after lots of poking about and tinkering, found one that works as a cronjob and conveniently found it works as a regular executable script afterwards as well, so I can still easily debug any edits to the file linking.
#!/bin/bash
# DISPLAY=:0.0 is what allows vlc to display to the screen without error because your forcing it to a screen. Theoretically you should be able to output to an alternate screen on your local machine, potentially on another machine altogether.
DISPLAY=:0.0 vlc --rc-fake-tty -f file:///path/to/file/of/choice/or/link
That's it. Seriously. I lol'd at it's simplicity. Essentially, anything VLC can play, you just edit the line to accommodate that. I'm going to try a playlist because that would be easier to maintain seeing as I can make one in VLC and save it when I'm done, and just reference that in the script.
Ok, I mentioned in the comments of the script that you can output to another screen. Let me break that down for you:
DISPLAY is the variable your modifying.
DISPLAY:0.0 is set to your primary screen on your localhost.
DISPLAY:localhost.0 is the same thing. You could also set it to the hostname, but why would you???
DISPLAY:randomhostname.0 routes your output to the primary screen on another machine of choosing, can be useful if displaying information to someone else or sharing a video stream to someone else.
That being said, I do not believe it transmits audio, will test that later myself from my desktop to my laptop. It's late now, I must retire to my bedchambers. I will make an edit to this post later telling you of my results.
Edit: I found that doing it from the server to my machine was... unpleasant with VLC. The video stuttered, and no audio (I'm guessing it was playing locally.) However I could see this being useful with say a web browser and getting particular files and instead of using wget for everything you could use Chrome or Firefox instead. Just food for thought.
--Dustin Klingele (hackersarchangel)
So I made a bash script to handle this. One caveat, the script worked awesomely stand-alone. As a cron-job? Forget it. Cron's output of the console information was useful because vlc was barking about not finding a display to play to. So I set about looking for information through Google and a lot of it was old postings, so I felt it was possibly outdated so I checked only the last year and found some newer threads but nothing extremely useful. I looked over the older (3+ years old) threads and after lots of poking about and tinkering, found one that works as a cronjob and conveniently found it works as a regular executable script afterwards as well, so I can still easily debug any edits to the file linking.
#!/bin/bash
# DISPLAY=:0.0 is what allows vlc to display to the screen without error because your forcing it to a screen. Theoretically you should be able to output to an alternate screen on your local machine, potentially on another machine altogether.
DISPLAY=:0.0 vlc --rc-fake-tty -f file:///path/to/file/of/choice/or/link
That's it. Seriously. I lol'd at it's simplicity. Essentially, anything VLC can play, you just edit the line to accommodate that. I'm going to try a playlist because that would be easier to maintain seeing as I can make one in VLC and save it when I'm done, and just reference that in the script.
Ok, I mentioned in the comments of the script that you can output to another screen. Let me break that down for you:
DISPLAY is the variable your modifying.
DISPLAY:0.0 is set to your primary screen on your localhost.
DISPLAY:localhost.0 is the same thing. You could also set it to the hostname, but why would you???
DISPLAY:randomhostname.0 routes your output to the primary screen on another machine of choosing, can be useful if displaying information to someone else or sharing a video stream to someone else.
That being said, I do not believe it transmits audio, will test that later myself from my desktop to my laptop. It's late now, I must retire to my bedchambers. I will make an edit to this post later telling you of my results.
Edit: I found that doing it from the server to my machine was... unpleasant with VLC. The video stuttered, and no audio (I'm guessing it was playing locally.) However I could see this being useful with say a web browser and getting particular files and instead of using wget for everything you could use Chrome or Firefox instead. Just food for thought.
--Dustin Klingele (hackersarchangel)
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