videos play in non-preferred player

[Anonymous]

Greetings! First, a big thanks to the antiX team… looks like I’ve finally come to the end of my distro-hopping.

I’m running antiX on a large laptop; it is my free-to-air TV station (off a Sony PlayTV), and eventually I will spill stuff off my main computer (which is getting a bit overpowered by stuff that I throw at it; coincidentally running MX 🙂

I have a hybrid instance of antiX; I chose the “testing” repository at install so I could get the latest MATE (I like a “traditional” desktop, and I wanted MATE for its hi-dpi support). This leaves me with a few rough edges, but working well enough.

For TV support I installed kaffeine, since it seems no one is packaging Me-TV any more. Kaffeine works fine, for watching live or making recordings, and didn’t drag in half of KDE like I expected 🙂

Then I have a folder with MPEG files piling up. These play fine, so I’m sweet, except…

I’m a command-line kind of guy; I have nearly 50 years of experience with computers (going back to the days when the “command line” was a queue at the verifying card punch), and over 20 years with Linux; I’m currently working at a university looking after several hundred instances of RHEL (and other stuff). My favourite file manager is Midnight Commander, because, command line.

I would normally bring up the directory of MPEGs in a Midnight Commander panel, highlight one, press Enter, and it plays in mpv, my preferred player (because, command line). This is what happens on my computer running MX. As I recall, all I did was change the MC extension file to map MPEGs to mpv.

But on my antiX computer, MPEGs opens in kaffeine. Even drives via SpaceFM open in kaffeine. Don’t want that!

Of course I edited the MC extension file, both as my user and the system file as root. Everything still opens in kaffeine. Then I edited the mailcap file and changed every ‘kaffeine’ to ‘mpv’. Everything still opens in kaffeine. Set up my user’s .mailcap (with mpv). Everything still opens in kaffeine. Played around with mailcap.order. Everything still opens in kaffeine. Looked into ‘alternatives’; kaffeine not mentioned there.

So I’ve exhausted all my clues! Of course I can just type ‘mpv %f &’ and be done with it, but I’d like to replicate the behaviour of my MX computer.

Any suggestions?

[Forum Admin Dave]

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To be able to specify default applications, a mimeapps.list file (previously named defaults.list up to debian 5) must be created. It can be system-wide (in /usr/share/applications or a subdirectory) or user-specific (in $HOME/.local/share/applications).

Quoted from the debian wiki here
https://wiki.debian.org/MIME

There is a default applications program that is intended to try and do this in a few different ways but it is more geared towards the default antiX desktops.

Computers are like air conditioners. They work fine until you start opening Windows. ~Author Unknown

[Anonymous]

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these “midnight commander play mpg|mpeg” top websearch results look promising:
http://www.softpanorama.org/OFM/MC/extension_menu.shtml
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-942648-start-0.html
https://github.com/MidnightCommander/mc/blob/master/misc/mc.ext.in

[Anonymous]

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Thanks for everyone’s interest.

Solved! There was a file /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache in which kaffeine featured; I moved it to root’s home directory (in case I needed it later), and videos now open with mpv from mc’s panel.

Not a full explanation that I could find in 5 minutes, but a relevant entry here: https://wiki.debian.org/MIME

So special thanks to Dave 🙂

[Author]

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