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Comment by ghrifter | Hacker News Reader

> videos through youtube-dl these days

how do you find the video you want without using youtube? do you just use the youtube search interface then download the video by copying the url (w/o even clicking on the link to start the video buffer)

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I browse the site and copy the URL. Often, I'll copy the URL of a playlist, and use -A to download and number a series of videos.

Or, for something sufficiently ephemeral, I'll hand the URL directly to mpv and let it stream. Particularly useful if I suspect I won't care to watch the entire video. And I find mpv's player interface far better than YouTube's.

Occasionally I still use the browser video player as well.

I use the web interface and have a keybinding in my web browser to download the video using youtube-dl and play it in mpv.

If you want to completely bypass the web interface, you can subscribe to channels by RSS.

youtube-dl can fetch a video via its ID, the part after the "/watch?v=<ID>" in the URL. Combined with a video player, such as vlc, mpv, mpc-hc or similar, you can stream youtube videos without viewing from the youtube website. There are scripts available that make this less DIY, such as ones that launch your video player with youtube-dl when you load a page on youtube, though I do not have any of those on hand to show you.

The question was more about discovery than how the tool worked... I'd imagine he doesn't watch much YouTube but just uses youtube-dl when the videos are found on other sites.

I watch a bit of YouTube, but I only use YouTube-dl to doownload videos I really like - like abridgements or YTPs - stuff that can easily be copyright notice'd down

You can stream videos through VLC even if you don't download them. Just Select File->Open Network, and put in the url of the YouTube video.