How to play voice messages within nchat?

[PJBer]

Is it possible to play a voice message from within nchat?
Currently I'm always downloading the file and playing it, in another terminal, with ogg123. But playing it from within the chat would be a great improvment.

[d99kris]

Hi @PJBer - it should be possible to select the message and press CTRL-v (OpenFile). By default nchat uses xdg-open (Linux) or open (macOS) to open the file, so for it to work properly a player needs to be registered for the (ogg) filetype. To make sure the system is set up properly it's a good idea to try xdg-open / open (depending on OS) with an ogg/oga file received/downloaded using nchat. If that works, then CTRL-v should work too.

Alternatively one can use a custom OpenFile command by configuring attachment_open_command (see README for details) - just take note that the command needs to handle all filetypes you want to view (so one could create a wrapper script which calls different viewers/players depending on filetype for example).

[PJBer]

Thanks a lot, seems xdg-open has no default application for the ogg-filetype configured. So I'll dive into some man pages and try to set it to ogg123.

[Disonantemus]

I have ogg123 (vorbis-tools package), but to use xdg-open, you need to create a *.desktop file, associated to ogg123 and then set association with xdg-mime, maybe you can create one using /usr/share/applications/mpv.desktop as template or just use mpv to open every audio/video file (or something more simple like htop.desktop):

Something like this should work in your case, if you have mpv installed:
xdg-mime default mpv.desktop audio/ogg

To change any file associations:

xdg-open only looks which desktop environment you have, and then run:

gnome-open
gvfs-open
xfce-open
... etc

• Identify MIME type for a specified file:

  $ file -i in.pdf
  in.pdf: application/pdf; charset=binary

  $ xdg-mime query filetype in.pdf
  application/pdf

• Search 4 possible .desktop openers:

  $ find /usr/share/applications/ -type f -iname zathura.desktop
  applications/org.pwmt.zathura-pdf-mupdf.desktop
  applications/org.pwmt.zathura.desktop

• Set new default association:

  $ xdg-mime default org.pwmt.zathura.desktop application/pdf

• Query default for specified MIME type [optional]:

  $ xdg-mime query default application/pdf
  org.pwmt.zathura.desktop

Note: this in Arch Linux.

[d99kris]

Thanks for sharing 👍