VLC media player extension for LibriVox
By Rémi Duraffort on Monday, September 13 2010, 19:17 - VLC media player - Permalink
Thanks to VLC extensions, we recently created a script that fetch books from LibriVox. This website is a directory and a project that provide free audio books from the Public Domain like Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) or War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy).
LibriVox
LibriVox is a website in which you can find and download free audio books. These audio books are all available in the public domain, which means that most of the books were published before 1923. The audio books are also donated to the public domain.
These audio books are read and recorded by volunteers from all over the world. If you wish to participate, just go to http://librivox.org and follow the instructions to participates.
Catalog
The full catalog of LibriVox is available on the website. Actually 3238 audio books are available:
- Franz Kafka: The Metamorphosis (English and German)
- Victor Hugo: Les misérables (English and French)
- Immanuel Kant: Critique of Practical Reason
VLC extension
As we really like the idea of free audio books from the public domain, we wrote an extension that allows VLC users to hear LibriVox audio books directly inside VLC media player.
This extension grab the podcast file from the LibriVox website and extract a list of books. When opening the extension we can see:
A directory is created for each book and contains the associated chapters. When double-clicking on a book you will see the tracks for the corresponding chapters:
Getting the extension
For the moment, the extension is not distributed along with VLC. You can download the extension from the Git repository (librivox.lua) and put the file in the share/lua/sd directory.
Comments
If you know of a website that deserves a VLC extension but does not have one, feal free to ask (maybe I will have time for it) or write one and send it to us.
Hello! How i may contact the administrator of a site? I have a question.
You can directly ask your question here or send me an email to ivoire at videolan dot org.
First: thank you very much for this extension.
I would like to know if you could do an extension to retrieve song lyrics from one of the many lyrics sites and databases on the internet. I've looked for this before with no results. I'm sure it is a feature that many people would found really useful.
An extension already exist to grab subtitles from opensubtitles.org. You can get it from the videolan forum.
What kind of lyrics website do you want to see inside VLC ? Do you have a list ?
There are many lyrics sites according to music genre. Some of them are:
http://www.azlyrics.com/ for rock & pop lyrics.
http://www.darklyrics.com/ for heavy metal lyrics.
http://www.plyrics.com/ for punk & hardcore lyrics.
http://www.urbanlyrics.com/ for hip-hop & rap lyrics.
It would be awesome if these lyrics can be grabbed and displayed in VLC using an extension.
So... when will we have an "extensions" page on the VLC homepage?!
I think it's a no-brainer section to be set up!!! It already has a skins page, so where is the extensions, page???
come on. we need it!
The extension webpage will be added to the new version of the website... I don't know exactly when but that's planned. Just be patient :)
About the lyrics extension I will look at it if I found some time to do it.
XBMC media center has an add-on
that fetch lyrics from LyricWiki
http://lyrics.wikia.com/
and displays it while playing.
That would be cool to see in vlc.