VideoLAN VLC control skill?

Plugins & Skills Feedback / Support
1

Hey guys, did some searching but couldn’t find the right skill / version / etc. I am sure I saw it somewhere in the past, so here it goes…

Is there a skill that controls VideoLAN VLC?

Most of the times I use VLC to play some music and use KDE Connect to skip to the next track, lower volume, pause, etc… However discovered the MIC in my laptop is a lot better then expected and picks up my voice around the room.

The lazy guy I am, was thinking to even skip the KDE connect stuff and just talk.

“Hey Mycroft, next track please”
“Hey Mycroft, pause song”

Can’t find it anymore ???

2

mycroft audio service integrates with vlc directly, just use the audio service normally and vlc is used in the background! no need for a skill

a skill makes sense only if you want to use it in desktop for videos and such

3

Thought of that, but didn’t work.

On my laptop when vlc is playing my music, mycroft does not control it? Checked the logs, but vlc audio is loaded. Python-vlc is also installed within the venv.

If it should work, then that is my pointer and will see if I can figure out why.

4

As in, it doesnt know what to do with; pause, stop, next, skip, etc keywords

Edit; “next song” mycroft tells me not knowing that command

“Skip song” and “stop song” just silently ignores me. No speech or cli text feedback, nothing in the logs…

5

i meant self.audioservice.play(“file”) uses vlc in background, it wont control a existing vlc instance, it will use vlc to play any audio ,

6

Thank, although no clue how this translate to my user specific case and feeds into my laziness :smiley:

Anyhow, @forslund I believe we found a bug of some sort as “stop song” “skip song” gets silently ignored if nothing is playing. The utterance is catched, but there is just nothing that can handle it. However no user feedback is given.

7

Thanks, in the next iteration of the playback_control_skill we could add a requirement for responses from skills utilizing the next/prev track and stop messages to check if someone handled the request. Might be a 19.02 feature since it’d be sort of breaking current behaviour.

1 Like
8

It is a minor thing, almost nice to have as it does not happen often that someone is not playing something and then asks mycroft to stop the non playing song.:joy:

It is only a few small cases where something could be playing through for instance my case on the desktop where mycroft could not hook into the player and performs the task.

However with no response whatsoever a user could start thinking mycroft stalled or the mic stopped working etc. (Me guilty). It was only after connecting the cli that I saw nothing was wrong, just nothing to do.:wink: