[this_machine]

Not necessarily.

A while ago, I found the need to stream directly from yt-dlp instead of downloading full videos[1]. You can have yt-dlp write to stdout and pipe that stream into your player of choice.

[1] "Using Unix Pipes to Improve Chromecast Playback": https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes

[thaumasiotes]

mpv will play youtube videos given the URL if it can see a youtube-dl executable.