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This is why I always use `mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...` instead of clicking on Youtube links. It bypasses all the Javascript and plays the raw video stream. (youtube-dl needs to be installed.)


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If you have mpv and youtube-dl, you can just `mpv http://youtube.com/whatever` and it'll play. Much better performance than anything in browser from my experience.

I just have a keybinding for `mpv $(xsel -o)` which plays whatever url I have in my clipboard in mpv.


or use https://mpv.io/ which will use ytdl internally to 'just play the fkn vid from the url' kthxby

You can just run “vlc https://youtube.com/watch/…”. There’s also YouTube-dl integration for mpv if I’m not mistaken.

fun fact: mpv couples youtube-dl to itself and can view youtube videos simply from the command line.

example:

mpv "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU"

(you need quotes because most shells will try to glob match)


I wish mpv/youtube-dl worked with this. I often like watching videos from the terminal and piped URLs don't work through mpv/youtube-dl

mpv can directly play youtube urls, so you can just do e.g.

    mpv --vo=null https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

youtube-dl [1] can handle it, you can use it together with mpv [2] to directly play the video.

[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ [2] https://mpv.io/


there are browser addons that directly pass the current site's URL to mpv, which in turn uses youtube-dl to fetch the contents. so it's pretty much 1-click playback.

Tip: `mpv`, the video player, natively supports youtube videos (as well as many other video streaming sites through the fabulous youtube-dl).

Watch videos using an awesome, efficient video player with `mpv https://youtube.com/watch?v=...`. I believe vlc offers the same feature.


That's one more reason I would prefer that sites provide a direct link to the video instead of forcing whatever plugin or js-thing or other crappy UI on me.

For youtube, I always yget the videos in /tmp and watch using mplayer. I use the speed-up often.


Or use an extension to make this more convenient: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/send-to-mpv-p...

Personally, I much prefer playing all videos in an external mpv window anyway.


I often use mpv with a yt-dlp hook, which means I can basically just do ``mpv youtube.com/watch/whatever``, and stream the video in mpv.

Yes, I have a browser plugin to open youtube links in mpv, but it's been unusable recently with constant buffering. I dont even fetch them at best quality.

You can simply open youtube links with mpv.

https://mpv.io/ has yt-dlp support, if yt-dlp is installed you just need to throw the URL at it and it plays the video (without download).

I find myself increasingly frequently using 'youtube-dl' to grab clips, advantages being that youtube sometimes only buffers a little bit before stopping and this way I don't need to care about keeping tabs open or codecs.

Everything always plays fine with VLC and I can mess with the playback speed by simply pressing '[]'.

Should probably automate this. Maybe independently of browsers, just sniff my own traffic and MITM myself (request goes to youtube-dl, browser gets a page that closes itself immediately).


FWIW you can use mpv to play just the audio from any site supported by youtube-dl or yt-dlp (so youtube/twitch/a hundred other platforms):

  $ mpv --no-video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx
or maybe even something like this:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mpv#youtube-dl_audio_with_s...

I've been using a variation on this theme for years, don't even really know how YouTube looks these days


It is even possible without mods, like [1]. This obviously assumes the prerecorded video (and pretty large datapacks), but it does work even with servers...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a8ka1v42CM


[right click] -> Open With -> mpv

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/

(If your desktop environment supports drag and drop, you can also drag and drop vimeo or youtube URLs into mpv.)

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