Opening Media

Media Blob

Media Extended supports opening media files from local files and publicly hosted media files. The supported formats and codecs are determined by obsidian's capabilities.

Local Files

For media files in your vault, just open it as you would any other file. The plugin will recognize it and open it in the player.

In desktop, we also support opening local media files in your hard drive. You can use media picker to open them without copying them to your vault. You can find it in the ribbon on the left.

You can select files from your hard drive by selecting the Open local file option that will show a file picker. Also, you can drag media files from file explorer (Finder) to the media picker to open them.

Remote Media Files

Media Extended supports opening videos and audio from publicly hosted media files that is not password protected, commonly served via WebDAV, or static file servers.

To open a publicly hosted media file, simply paste its URL into the media picker and press enter. Of course, you can open them from link in your note, as long as Handle link to remote url in settings is enabled.

Format and Codec Support

Media Extended relies on your obsidian's built-in media playback capabilities. This means:

• Video Formats: MP4 (H.264), WebM, Ogg in general, (MKV are only supported in Chrome)
• Audio Formats: MP3, WAV, Ogg, AAC in general
• Codecs: H.264, VP8/VP9, Opus, AAC in general
  • H.265/HEVC and AV1 are supported in obsidian with latest installer version in general.

Media-hosting services

Media Extended supports opening videos and audio from embedable media hosting services, including YouTube and Vimeo.

Similar to remote media files, you can open media-hosting services by pasting the url into the media picker and press enter. In addition, you can open YouTube and Vimeo videos from your browser using Obsidian URI.

Browser Connect

In future releases, we will support opening non-embedable websites via browser connect with the help of an companion browser extension. Stay tuned!

Quick Open from Browser

Media Extended supports opening remote media url via Obsidian URI in two format:

1. obsidian://mx-open?url=encoded-link-to-media, or
2. obsidian://mx-open/https://link/to/media, so that you could open it in the player by simply adding obsidian://mx-open/ prefix to the url in address bar.

You can use bookmarklet to open media in active tab of the browser in one click, with current timestamp. Add the following code to your bookmarklet and follow the instructions to create a bookmarklet.

javascript:(()=>{const t=document.querySelector("video, audio")?.currentTime,u=new URL(window.location.href);t&&(u.hash?u.hash+=`&t=${t}`:u.hash=`#t=${t}`),window.open(`obsidian://mx-open?url=${encodeURIComponent(u.toString())}`)})();