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Comment by zajio1am | Hacker News Reader

I use yt-dlp primarily not for download, but for playing/streaming Youtube videos directly in media player (mpv) instead of browser.

Does YouTube Premium help with that?

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Out of interest why do you do this? Because your computer struggles to play them in browser? I was doing something similar with vlc in the Flash era because I couldn’t run Flash on my PowerPC Mac running Linux

I do this because it lets me have each video in its own resizeable window, scrub around much more quickly using keyboard/mouse shortcuts, customize many aspects of playback like subtitle styling ,brightness, hue, even flip or rotate the video if I want, set the volume on a per-video basis even >100%, save exactly where I was in a video and how it was set up, not have every video I see a part of show up in my history (even hovering for preview does that now, annoyingly), and install a multitude of plugins to augment the player even further.

Though, I initially did start using mpv for watching videos back in 2014 when I was stuck with a core2duo laptop, and it was the only way of watching 720p or higher video without slowing the machine to a crawl. I'm so used to this setup now that I wouldn't want to go back to having my videos trapped a browser tab. (or an always-on-top firefox popout window)

Several reasons:

- Until recently, Firefox did not support VA-API video acceleration on Linux, while mpv supported it for a long time. My last computer struggled to play 1080p videos without hardware acceleration.

- I am used to mpv keybindings, i do not want to use two completely different sets of keybindings for playing local videos and Youtube.

- I like videos in a separate window (this feature Firefox started to support recently as PiP mode).

I doubt it. The videos are downloaded, but not readily accessible to other applications. But I don't have your workflow, so I've never investigated.

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