the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format. But the audio can just be copied. My mac's fan never spins with the hardware acceleration so it runs in the background and I just forget about it.
That’s not true at all. QuickTime is far from the best video player, but it’s also not entirely worthless. It can play “modern” popular formats like H264 MP4, which is exactly what YouTube recommends.
yt-dlp --format 18 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxh9lGOeqQ' --output 'FuckingGenius.mp4' && open -a 'QuickTime Player' 'FuckingGenius.mp4'
Thanks. I played around with your idea and got this. It’s still not 100% of videos. Only YouTube videos that have any H.264+AAC stream available (which is 99.9% of public YouTube today, even if the main/default version is VP9 or AV1).
But re encoding to solve this is not required. I stand corrected.
Which seems a little short sighted to me. VLC or Jellyfin are obviously superior because they're accessible across multiple platforms.
the default is mov
That being said, that makes zero sense. Just linking to a library, doesn't precluded using a protocol over a socket to talk to a graphic/audio server. Access control like remote code isolation (webAPIs), CORS and DRM also don't change anything about decoding and mixing video streams.