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Comment by rwmj | Hacker News Reader

yt-dlp is still working for me, and when/if Google ever break that, I'll stop watching youtube.

How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.

    mpv $youtubeLink

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.

I love that, but lately it seems to freeze a few seconds into the video.

Setting a lower resolution format via "ytdl-format=..." in the mpv.conf file may resolve that. Personally I also use "pause=yes" and find that the few extra seconds it has to cache also helps.

I'll try that, thanks!

Cool!

> mpv with a yt-dlp hook

What does hook mean in this context? Is it some kind of plugin or addon to MPV or can MPV do that out-of-the-box?

As far as I know, it worked out of the box for me after installing both mpv and yt-dlp on Arch linux.

Browser extension

If you are too lazy for that, try the New Pipe app. Works really great. You can also have subscriptions without an account.

I usually like to promote cool FOSS that I use, and Newpipe is a masterpiece, but I do feel reluctant to increase the popularity of something that relies on unpopularity to survive.

This is very true, if everyone used it, no one could use it soon enough.

I use it two ways.

1. A desktop application call yt-dlg/youtube-dl-gui.

2. Metube, which is a selfhosted application and there is a plugin for the browser to send things to it.

Yes, exactly that. So much stuff just vanishes, it's prudent to simply download everything by default. Whether that's a video with yt-dlp, or a webpage with singlefile or other tools, save it all.

I wish I had better tools for simply saving everything I see on the internet at all times. The disk-space cost would be trivial in the era of terabyte drives, and simply never worrying about link-rot would be huge.

I found grab-site to be extremely effective with even complex, content-heavy websites. Dunno about YouTube though, I’m afraid of what would happen if I tried running such an archival routine. My server would probably catch fire.

What I really want is a thing that goes through my browser history and just archives everything unless I specifically exclude it.

Browser history _used_ to do that, almost. You could browse your history offline and pages would still render. And at some point, that stopped working.

Yes, I prefer to download them and watch them using vlc, it's a much better experience than using the website.

I do enjoy chapters when the creator adds them, though.

It turns out that it's easy to rig eww (Emacs's built-in browser) to automatically pass URLs to whatever special handlers you desire, via the "browse-url-handlers" variable. I did that earlier this weekend for Github and Youtube. For Youtube, I have a wrapper function just starts mpv with the supplied url. For Github, a different wrapper just breaks out the user/repo pair from the url and invokes github-explorer, available in MELPA. (When I need more from a repo, I can just clone it and explore it locally. Either way, there's little need to deal with Github's web UI.)

You browse youtube with Emacs? How do you see the thumbnails (or don't you care)?

Not quite. Late last year I began running a Searx instance locally, less for privacy than for having a hackable meta-search engine. Since it supports several "bangs," like !ddg and !yt and the like, I generally use this for quickly searching Youtube without changing context. When I enable images [0], I can see the thumbnails just fine. Regardless, there are plenty of places on the web (like here) where people will post interesting YT links, and having them pop open in mpv is a good default [1].

I've also evolved a CLI YT client, based on mpv/yt-dlp and fzf; it does not show thumbnails. Even so, it's perfectly fine for gathering lots of search results, like

  $ yt 500 medical uses for hollandaise

which will gather the first 500 results about medical hollandaise [1], filter out the shorts, and present the remaining results in an fzf-based UI. I haven't really missed the thumbnails.

---

[0] One of the first things I did with eww was to bind "I" to a function that toggles images on or off and re-displays the current page.

[1] In my setup, I can override all special handling of a URL by holding Ctrl while hitting Enter to follow a link.

[2] Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with TinyLLama about the medical uses of hollandaise and options for regulating it. Did you know that it can be taken intravenously to help fight cancer?

fzf looks interesting, I'll check it out.

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