I’m regularly sitting in front of my TV with my laptop, surfing and chatting; many YouTube links pass on IRC or while browsing forums and such. Watching these videos would be a lot nicer on the TV than on the small laptop screen with abysmal speakers, but using the XBMC YouTube Plugin I would have to look for the clip, entering its details again. On my Android phone, I have installed the Yatse XBMC Remote app, which provides a “Play on XBMC” option when opening a Youtube video. For Firefox, Chrome and Opera, there are add-ons that can send a YouTube clip URL to XBMC as well.

However, I’m more of a command-line person, so I decided to conjure up a little bash script opening up a YouTube movie on my TV. From one of the Chrome plugins, I borrowed the regex to parse out the movie ID.

#!/bin/bash

## YouTube XBMC Script 1.0
## (c) 2013, Tom Laermans - http://tom.laermans.net
##
## This script is released into the public domain.

## Configure your XBMC RPC details here

XBMC_HOST=xbmc
XBMC_PORT=8080
XBMC_USER=xbmc
XBMC_PASS=xbmc

## Don't touch anything under here

REGEX="^.*((youtu.be\/)|(v\/)|(\/u\/\w\/)|(embed\/)|(watch\?))\??v?=?([^#\&\?]*).*"

ID=$1

if [ "$ID" == "" ];
then
  echo "Syntax $0 <id|url>"
  exit
fi

if [[ $ID =~ $REGEX ]]; then
  ID=${BASH_REMATCH[7]}
fi

function xbmc_req {
  curl -s -i -X POST --header "Content-Type: application/json" -d "$1" http://$XBMC_USER:$XBMC_PASS@$XBMC_HOST:$XBMC_PORT/jsonrpc >/dev/null
}

echo -n "Opening video id $ID on $XBMC_HOST ..."
xbmc_req '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Playlist.Clear", "params":{"playlistid":1}, "id": 1}';
xbmc_req '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Playlist.Add", "params":{"playlistid":1, "item" :{ "file" : "plugin://plugin.video.youtube/?action=play_video&videoid='$ID'"}}, "id" : 1}';
xbmc_req '{"jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open", "params":{"item":{"playlistid":1, "position" : 0}}, "id": 1}';
echo " done."

Using this is as easy as passing either the complete YouTube URL or just the movie ID to it as a parameter. Remember to quote or escape correctly if there are ampersands in the URL, or you’ll be starting a number of background processes in your shell.

Would be nice to have the TV switch to the HTPC input via CEC, but unfortunately I can’t see anything related to that in XBMC’s current API.