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Not necessarily.

A while ago, I found the need to stream directly from yt-dlp instead of downloading full videos[1]. You can have yt-dlp write to stdout and pipe that stream into your player of choice.

[1] "Using Unix Pipes to Improve Chromecast Playback": https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes

mpv will play youtube videos given the URL if it can see a youtube-dl executable.

oh sure, you can stream too if you want but I generally queue up a lot of videos so the latency doesn't bother me, and I appreciate the lack of latency when seeking

I also really like having the resultant archive.

VLC can stream Youtube can't it?