Use tramp to play remote videos on the local

Question

I use tramp to access my phone through termux and locates the Movies directory

  /ssh:termux:/storage/emulated/0/Movies:
  total 162M
  Superbook - In The Beginning - Season 1 Episode 1 - Full Episode (Official HD Version).mp4
  Superbook - In The Beginning - Season 1 Episode 1 - Full Episode (Official HD Version).srt

Upon placing cursor on the video file Superbook*.mp4 and invoke asynchronous execute & vlc with intention to play it.

but get the error report as

/bin/sh: 2: vlc: Permission denied

then try sudo but get the same error report.

/bin/sh: 2: sudo: Permission denied

In fact, Permission denied might be a wrong report, since I have the full privilege to edit or rm the video file.

What's the problem? Is it an alternative to play remote videos from the dired of emacs?

If the videos are local, they play smoothly after strike & vlc.

Answer 1

When you try to invoke a shell command whilst visiting a remote buffer (a directory in your case), tramp will try to run it on the remote machine. In this case it tries to ssh to your phone and run VLC but this doesn’t work.

You’ll need some other way to get the file into your local filesystem so that vlc may access it. You could just copy it but maybe you could mount it or use some fuse thing.

Tramp is not magic, it just tells emacs how to read and write remote files or directories or how to run commands remotely. That plumbing does not help programs like VLC which are not emacs.