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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> What actually happened to quvi?

Good question, I didn't keep track of its development. Your best option would be asking developers if they are planning to work on it further or not.

> By the way, FFmpeg has support for the 0.4 branch of libquvi

Same as mpv I think. You can play Youtube videos with it directly:

    mpv "$url"

Which is kind of fun, since you can do tons of things that aren't available in the browser player - looping, playing only portions of the video and all other things which mpv can do.

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Note that quvi support has been removed on mpv git recently. They seem to be considering a switch to youtube-dl instead. https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/commit/9b45b48c466765b6491...

That's interesting. How are they planning to use youtube-dl? Does it have a C library or mpv allows some plugins in other languages?

The bit that invokes youtube-dl is a Lua plugin. It checks if the URL starts with http:// or https://, and if so, invokes youtube-dl -J on the command line to dump JSON information about the video.

Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying.

Awesome! Not long ago I switched to mpv from mplayer. mpv being able to use youtube-dl without any glue script would be fantastic.

I think quvi might be dead. mpv-git actually dropped libquvi a little while back because it was buggy and development was inactive. It's been replaced with a youtube-dl based downloader, so in mpv-git, this would invoke youtube-dl to get the video:

  mpv --ytdl "$url"

I wonder if there is any way to specify to it which stream to pick, since Youtube has many options. By default it picks H.264 / AAC, at least when it's using quvi.

IIRC --ytdl-format is passed directly to youtube-dl -f, but all other options have to be set in youtube-dl's config file.

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