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by roelschroeven 705 days ago
> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.

Theater mode (shortcut 't') is a bit better. But yes, I too would like a mode where the video fills the whole browser window.
3 comments
dredmorbius 704 days ago
Use an external video player. mpv and VLC are my usual go-to's. Both will stream straight from a URL (and both handle far more than just YT).

You can also of course download and play at your leisure with ytdlp.

<https://mpv.io/>

<https://www.videolan.org/vlc/>

<https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>

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oblio 704 days ago
I just tried VLC.

Media - From Network Stream - pasted Youtube URL.

Nope, error message, said check the logs.

Searched the UI for an entry for the logs, found nothing.

Googled for "vlc logs". Found a guide. Configured the path to be on the desktop.

Restarted VLC.

Tried again, same error message.

No log file created and of course no log file entries.

The joys of FOSS.

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thatloststudent 704 days ago
I tried the same route, but got the logs correctly. It gave me a HTTP 410 error. I wouldn't be surprised at all if VLC's youtube plugin is just too old and there's a better one somewhere else. But in the meanwhile, mpv's plugin works (if you're using yt-dlp and not youtube-dl, that is)
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oblio 703 days ago
Logs not being directly visible in the VLC UI and not having a default log file location plus the fact that even going to advanced settings and configuring things doesn't make logs show up after the first try is not Google's fault, though.
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allarm 702 days ago
It's hardly a fault though. And if you need this feature go ahead and implement it.
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oblio 702 days ago
The first part is a feature, the second one is a bug.

And no, I don't think I will, I'll just use Youtube with ad blockers for as long as I can.

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dredmorbius 704 days ago
TBH I almost always use mpv or ytdl these days.

I've used VLC successfully in the past on Android using the "stream" option. When I want to view video (as opposed to just listen to audio, my usual Android mpv use-case) that's delivered joy. On MacOS, I'll use mpv to play either audio only or video, with joy in both cases.

Don't forget that the other side of the equation is YouTube ACTIVELY WORKING TO BREAK COMPATIBILITY, and with considerable success. E.g., Invidious and Piped had been b0rk3n for a few months, though on checking again in the past few days, Invidious at least seems to be working again. So placing the whole burden on FOSS devs is at best exceedingly biased criticism. Those are in fact your friends, not Google.

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asdff 704 days ago
Its the nature of the beast. For a while I used a custom ublock filter to strip out the recommended videos section, the comments, whatever I considered junk pixels. Now I just pull the video to /tmp/ and don't have to deal with buffering (somehow still an issue in 2024).
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davkan 704 days ago
If I’m watching a video longer than 10 minutes or so I usually use a Firefox popout window.
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