Recently, I've discovered just how to use MPV in conjunction with
yt-dlp in order to watch Utube. It actually started on my Android
device because I was looking for an MPlayer app on F-Droid but found
an MPV port instead.
As a minimalist, I like MPV: it plays media and doesn't have a ton of
bells and whistles, but just enough so you're not going totally
keyboard on a touchscreen. I've had issues with unexpected
pauses/backgrounding of MPV with hardware acceleration on freezing it,
but all in all, it's solid. I especially like the ability to edit the
conf files for it on Android. I'll also mention that it has made my
Pinephone much more usable (though the battery life is still
terrible).
Unfortunately the vanilla version on F-Droid doesn't have yt-dlp
compatibility. Fortunately there's an mpv+ytdl apk on a forum that
fixes this issue on Android. It works pretty well.
That got me going back to my PCs and adding MPV and config files to
add that capability. It's much more straightforward way of watching YT
without GUI.
There is, however, a couple glaring flaws that cause me to still
download videos via Newpipe a lot instead: buffering and A/V desync.
For whatever reason, YT videos will often not buffer enough for me to
watch the session uninterrupted. I do watch at 2x speed by default,
but it's pretty annoying. Almost always this causes an audio desync
and you have to scrub around with the arrow keys to try to resync it.
All in all, they're not a huge deal, but compared to the native web
player, it's a worse experience.
Also, in my experience, there's no Sponsorblock integration (which I
expected), so you don't get to skip those unwanted segments without
scrubbing manually. I typically have the videos max out at 720p, 480p,
or 360p depending on the device and my whims.
Still, it's pretty cool. As of right now, the only elegant ways I have
of passing the URL to MPV is via Freetube (a GUI application), which
handles it quite well, or the lynx EXTERNAL config option.
YT DRAMA
A tangential topic, but there has been a massive feud between Idubbbz
and H3H3 going on for about 2 months now and involves a lot more
people than it should. Basically Idubbbz supports a terrorist
supporter who disavowed H3H3 after H3H3 made the unforgivable sin of
not condoning terrorist attacks against civilans. This terrorist
supporter (TS) used to cohost a show with H3H3, but after the
Israel/Palestine conflict got very bloody last October, the sanity of
the cohost was finally revealed to be not present to H3H3.
Anyway, TS has a huge following, unfortunately, and his deranged fans
went after H3H3 because he didn't support murdering innocents. It was
so bad that when H3H3 overshared about poor dog potty training and his
kids getting sick, the TS fans went and called CPS on H3H3. It was a
few TS orbiters that also have Twitch streams that really supported
it. That's when H3H3 rightfully took the gloves off and called out his
best friend, Idubbbz, for not denouncing these deplorable actions as
horrible.
Idubbbz, a marionette for his wife, Anisa, decided he'd rather throw
away a friend of 9 years in order to openly support the TS fans and
harassers of H3H3, laughing at real human skulls being sent to H3H3's
house, and just stabbed H3H3 in the back. It's not an exaggeration to
say they were best friends at one point. I don't think Ian really had
many friends and his wife actually is a horrible fucking psychopath
that is actually physically, emotionally, and mentally abusing him.
Idubbbz used to be a prolific, respected YT creator. Then he married
this succubus and had his soul sucked out of him. And in this
condition, Idubbbz teamed up with some TS fans and TS himself to
launch the worst Content Cop ever. It was so bad even the people who
really dislike H3H3 took his side. It's that bad.
So after a couple weeks, H3H3 decides to make another video. He
specifically copyrighted the video and expected these TS fan Twitch
streamers to blatantly stream his video for the express purpose to rob
him of views and money. Three of them were so unbelievably stupid that
they said they did it just to do that, which is illegal. So H3H3
launches lawsuits against each of them and it's just been absolutely
hilarious seeing these evil, shameless excuses for human beings start
panicking and turning on each other trying to raise funds to fight a
slam-dunk case against each of them.
But the part that makes me laugh is the fact that it's so easy to
watch YT without YT. Invidious, yt-dlp, NewPipe, SkyTube, and a
plethora of similar programs and sites have the ability to circumvent
the privacy-hating video site without giving the creator views. It
would be so easy and I imagine less incriminating if they simply
mentioned one of these methods in a different post. Trivial. They
could even frame it in a way where they were just trying to get people
to try this new program they found and it would be MUCH harder to
prove malice in that instance. But they're idiots, very likely iDiots,
as well.
I've always had a double-edged sword criticism of a lot of FOSS
projects: nobody knows about them because they don't have or use
funding to advertise some great programs, sites, and applications. Big
G is very guilty of this, also. At the same time, it's probably good
that these solutions don't have high popular interest because Big G
would probably try to banhammer them, as they've tried to do with
Invidious and how they've broken the Odysee simultaneous uploader. But
it's just nice to know there are more ways to be less distracted by
recommended videos and advertisements now. MPV is pretty darn cool.
Last thing I'll mention is that maybe 3-5 years ago, I emailed the
Idiotbox gopherhole owner, hiltjo, asking if he could add a link to
that CGI for Yewtu. He understandably said no and that it was meant
to play YT vids with MPV. I finally understand his YT viewing
workflow. Again, I do have issues with some things on it, mainly
buffering, but it's still really cool.
