[gue5t]

Try youtube-dl (before the international copyright police C&D it). I'm sure there's an app wrapper that can handle intents (NewPipe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12591466), and then you can open the videos in the VLC app.

The owners of YouTube do not have it in their best interest to provide you with flexible, no-nonsense tools.

[sergiotapia]

`youtube-dl` is a national treasure. No other tool (except maybe MPV) has made it's way into my day to day usage in years.

[gue5t]

mpv is the gold standard in video players. I use both constantly.

[personjerry]

What's the difference between mpv and vlc?

[tripzilch]

It has better performance on my old laptop, especially when I hook it up to a 1080p screen. Seeking is more instant. It starts much quicker.

It's more minimal in the interface (basically full-screen with a bunch of kbd shortcuts) but has all the features I need (including playback speed), and even some that are not in VLC--for instance, VLC has a key to advance 1 frame ('e', IIRC) and mpv can step both ways (with ',' and '.').

A few downsides: it doesn't seem to have playlist functionality (not that VLC's playlist UI is that great, but it works). to load a subtitle file, you either need to specify it on the command line or it needs to match the filename exactly, in VLC you can just drag'n'drop any subtitle onto the player to load it or use an Open File dialog. mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).

On the whole, I use mpv for almost anything. Indeed in combination with youtube-dl, I've made an alias for `youtube-dl <URL> --exec "mpv --fs --fs-screen 1 {} &"`, which starts the player immediately after download, full-screen, on the second (big) monitor. I still use VLC whenever I want to watch multiple short videos in a playlist. And of course VLC on Android because it's really for both video as well as playing music--although I feel there should be a better musicplayer, one that allows me to browse my collection through the file system instead of tags (which VLC does) but has a real smooth UI to manage playlists (which has been clunky in most Android players I've tried).

[Nadya]

>mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).

There is a setting for this called "After Playback". By default it is "close" but you can also "play next" (video in the folder, useful if shows are organized by folder and by episode) and other options, including "do nothing" or "play from beginning".

I'm at work so don't remember exactly where to change this setting.

[tripzilch]

I guessed as much, didn't look for it because until typing the above comment I never realised this was one of my minor annoyances with mpv :) Will change the setting in my config soon :)

[justifier]

From the readme:

> A not too crappy GPU. mpv is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter, etc. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are current, especially OpenGL. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported. (o)

Whereas VLC has a similar option but it's sort of an afterthought and you have to activate it, from the wiki:

> The VLC media player framework can use your graphic card (a.k.a. GPU) to accelerate decoding of video streams depending on the video codec, graphic card model and operating system.

(o) https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/README.md

(i) https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding/

[Nadya]

In addition to what others have already said, VLC also has a bug with certain graphics cards (I want to say Nvidia?) - resulting in washed out/off-color video. It can be "fixed" with great-but-not-quite-perfect accuracy [0].

[0] https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_washed_out/

[sergiotapia]

`mpv movie.mp4` and boom - you're watching the video with no cruft. Not rebuilding font database and other bullshit you don't care about. It runs really well on older hardware.

[mynameislegion]

More tools along the same lines: cclive get-flash-videos iview-cli nomnom pafy svtplay-dl quvi nicovideo-dl WWW::YouTube::Download

[toomanybeersies]

Wow, cheers for that.

I was looking for a youtube video downloader a week or two back, but was really struggling to find one that wasn't spamware.

[yellowapple]

There's also a Greasemonkey userscript called "YouTube Center" (https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki) that I've found to work pretty well for an in-browser tool.

[rasz_pl]

it hasnt been updated in a while and is mostly broken now :(

"Download YouTube Videos as MP4" on the other hand has active dev, https://github.com/gantt/downloadyoutube

[Endy]

I just like pwnyoutube.com, honestly.

[ljk]

https://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=[link]

also works

[quirkafleeg]

What am I missing here?

I paste a Youtube link into one of the hundreds of Google results for "Youtube downloader" and I get a bunch of clear Google video download links in various formats.

I paste a URL into "PWN Youtube" and I get this (buried in a mass of other text I don't care about, hard selling me to spam the site on FB/Twitter/Friends):

    Download this video as FLV or MP4 files
    Use one of: Peggo | Telecharger(warning) | SaveFrom
        9xbuddy(warning) | File2HD (?) | Dirpy(warning)

If I have to jump through another hoop of visiting some other dodgy website - some literally have warnings next to them (!) - to eventually get a download link, what's the point of "PWN Youtube"? Why don't I just use the dodgy sites directly (or, even easier, use their bookmarklets)?

> This website is not affiliated with YouTube.com "YouTube" is a copyright of YouTube, LLC.

Probably shouldn't be using the word/trademark in its domain name then.

[ljk]

good point; i've been using that link for a long time so it's second nature to me to ignore the warnings