Geso

Geso is a web interface to control multimedia players. It lets you browse and play videos in a specific directory, and also search and play YouTube videos.

It's quick and dirty, so while I hope there are no critical security issues, there's hardly any error reporting, or robustness whatsoever. If you need authentication, you'll have to use your webservers' facilities like HTTP Basic Auth.

Features

• Playback controls.
• Directory listing.
• YouTube support: searching, and streaming using youtube-dl.
• An undocumented but simple REST API.

Dependencies

You need the following:

• perl-cgi,
• perl-cgi-fast,
• perl-fcgi,
• perl-string-shellquote,
• perl-html-parser,
• perl-json,
• perl-uri,
• perl-libwww.

You probably also want those:

• mpv,
• youtube-dl.

For the Raspberry Pi, you're going to need ffmpeg compiled with --enable-mmal and mpv compiled with --enable-rpi. The latter is enough for software decoding, while the former enables accelerated video output.

omxplayer was the default player until the tag omxplayer in the Git tree. It could be supported with newer versions using a custom .play command, see below.

Spawning

Use spawn-fcgi, or some fancy webserver.

Nginx

A minimal configuration looks like this:

location / {
	root /srv/geso/;
	include fastcgi.conf;
	fastcgi_pass unix:/run/geso.sock;
}
location /geso.css {
	alias somewhere/geso.css;
}

The DOCUMENT_ROOT tells where the video library is located, for browsing.

YouTube

Searching is straightforward. Clicking on the thumbnail streams the video, clicking on the title downloads it in the library's youtube subdirectory.

Custom player

If you want a directory to use a different player, you may write a .play executable file in that directory. It should emulate mpv's behavior, which is as follow.

The program is started with one argument, the path or URL to the file we want to play.

Once started, it reads line-by-line commands from standard input. The most useful commands :

• pause to toggle pause/play state,
• quit to exit the player and the wrapper,
• seek N to forward/rewind N seconds.