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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

> the video has to be re-encoded because apple quicktime doesn't like the youtube video format.

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.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

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Show me a screen recording of this working. Run yt-dlp and get an mp4 and open in quicktime. I get error every time single.

You can use the -F flag to list all of the available formats, then --merge-output-format mp4 of audio and video formats that will work best for Quicktime at the desired resolution.

can you show me proof of this working? Unless you are re-encoding the mp4 there's no way quicktime will be able to open a youtube mp4.

Here’s your proof:

  yt-dlp --format 18 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxh9lGOeqQ' --output 'FuckingGenius.mp4' && open -a 'QuickTime Player' 'FuckingGenius.mp4'

No reencoding, just getting a video straight from YouTube and playing it in QuickTime Player.

yt-dlp -f "bv*[vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]+ba[acodec^=mp4a][ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4][vcodec^=avc1]" \ --merge-output-format mp4 \ -o "%(title)s.mp4" \ "YOUTUBE_URL_HERE"

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.

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