Hack92.Kaffeinate Konqueror

Hack 92. Kaffeinate Konqueror

Use the Kaffeine video player to watch videos embedded into the Konqueror browser.

If you are a Konqueror user and read "Watch Videos Within Firefox" [Hack #91], you might feel a bit left out. The mplayerplug-in is all fine and good, but you want an embedded video player that fits in with KDE and its Swiss Army knife browser Konqueror. There are a few options to embed video inside Konqueror, and this hack focuses on how to use the Kaffeine video player from within the web browser.

Kaffeine is one of a few graphical video players designed for KDE (although it works with GNOME or other desktop environments as well), so from the start it integrates well with KDE's general look and feel. Kaffeine uses xine-lib behind the scenes to manage video playback and, as such, can play basically any type of media xine can.

To install Kaffeine, visit the official page at http://kaffeine.sourceforge.net and download the package for your Linux distribution from their download page. If your distribution doesn't have a prepackaged Kaffeine binary, download and compile the source according to the installation instructions.

Once installed, Kaffeine automatically integrates with your Konqueror browser. This means that if you don't already have an embedded video player configured, Kaffeine will assume that role for most embedded video content. Visit a streaming video page such as http://quicktime.apple.com and try out one of the videos. Kaffeine will load the video inside the web page and start playback. Right-click on the video to pause, stop, play, and skip through the video. This embedded plug-in will work with default settings even if you haven't started up the full Kaffeine application yet.

The Kaffeine embedded player won't show up as a plug-in for Konqueror, so don't worry if you don't see it there.

If Kaffeine doesn't automatically start up when you visit a page with streaming video, or it starts in a window of its own, you need to modify Kon-queror's file associations. Click Settings Configure Konqueror, and select File Associations from the left side of the window that appears. Next click on the video part of the file association tree and make sure that it is set to embed video by default. Also open up the video tree and find the particular video stream type from the list and make sure that it is set to play embedded in Konqueror and that Kaffeine is the first application on the list to try.