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Open in VLC Media Player in Firefox 52.9.0 ESR on WinXP

Recently, the ORF tvthek made some really bad updates to their player.
1) the fullscreen function now throws a javascript error in Firefox 52.9.0 ESR (last version that works on WinXP), so you cannot put the video to fullscreen anymore.
2) No matter what resolution you choose, the video resolution always gets adapted during playback and worsens over time, so videos cannot be viewed in full quality anymore rendeing the player useless.

So I needed an alternative to open up the videos in VLC media player, which also has the advantage that it uses much less CPU than the Firefox integrated video player.
Now there is this usedful “Open in VLC media player” Firefox plugin.
The problem with it is that it requires a node.js native client and nodeJS executable only works up to version v5.12.0 on Windows XP.
Therefore you need an older client script version and need to adapt it for the old node.js version.

1) Download nodejs nativeclient version 0.5.5
2) Download NodeJS node.exe v5.12.0
3) Unpack the nativeclient above and replace node\x86\node.exe with version from 2)
4) Fix install.bat and uninstall.bat by adding the following line after @echo off, as Windows XP doesn’t have a %LocalAPPData% environment (which can get quite danerous on later versions of uninstall.bat):

if "%LocalAPPData%"=="" set LocalAPPData=%AppData%

5) The host.js file is not fully compatible with the node.js version, therefore you have to patch the following lines:

a) Replace

const walk = (dir, depth = 0) => {

with

const walk = (dir, depth) => {

b) Replace

walk(msg.path);

with

walk(msg.path, 0);

6) Now you can run install.bat and finally install the “open in VLC” plugin into Firefox.

Here is a patched version of the nodejs-nativeclient that contains the appropriate node.js exe and patched files so that you just need to install it.

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