You can watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts in VLC player. Unlike most media players that only focus on playing content from your hard drive, VLC player can stream online content also. If the media player for an online stream or an online video has low features, watching it in VLC Player is a reasonable option. It’s somehow time wasting adding a link to VLC player. The procedure isn’t the easiest to remember either but Open in VLC is a Firefox add-on that makes it less easy to watch online videos in VLC player. It allows you to open links in VLC player from the context menu. Of course, you must have VLC player installed on your system. The add-on does not download any content to your hard drive.
VLC Native Client Patch
Before you will be able to use the add-on to open links in VLC player from the context menu, you have to install Open in native client. It’s a small open source patch that actually allows your browsers to communicate directly with native applications. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Download it and run the installation file.
Open In VLC
Install Open in VLC in Firefox. Before you can be able to use it to open links in VLC player from the context menu, you must make sure it can find the VLC.exe file on your system. Now, open the add-on manager in Firefox (Ctrl+Shift+A). Go to Open in VLC’s option and enter the path to the VLC.exe file on your system. By default, the add-on enters the likely path that will point to the EXE file, in any case, the path can be wrong.
Now, all you have to do is right-click a live stream or a video link and select ‘Open in VLC’ from the context menu.
VLC player will automatically load the stream and start playing it.
Limitations
Open in VLC is great for a single video link but it does not play nice with playlists. We tried it on YouTube playlists and videos. A single YouTube video is sent to VLC player without a hitch. When you send a playlist though, just the first video in the list plays. It doesn’t automatically play the next video in the list when the first video ends.
The add-on should work with most online content though it will probably stop with regards to playing let’s say Netflix or Hulu. The content on both those sites is copyright protected and there isn’t any known way to extract the stream. It’s reasonable to assume that you won’t have the ability to use Open in VLC to play content from either sites in VLC player.
