I continue to explore my Kodi installation, and today I wanted to tell it to play a youtube URL I received in a chat, without having to insert search terms using the on-screen keyboard. After searching the web for API access to the Youtube plugin and testing a bit, I managed to find a recipe that worked. If you got a kodi instance with its API available from http://kodihost/jsonrpc, you can try the following to have check out a nice cover band.
curl --silent --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-binary '{ "id": 1, "jsonrpc": "2.0", "method": "Player.Open",
"params": {"item": { "file":
"plugin://plugin.video.youtube/play/?video_id=LuRGVM9O0qg" } } }' \
http://projector.local/jsonrpcI've extended kodi-stream program to take a video source as its first argument. It can now handle direct video links, youtube links and 'desktop' to stream my desktop to Kodi. It is almost like a Chromecast. :)
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.