The other day someone was complaining about the new ad blocker-blocker on YouTube and I mentioned that it might be fun to write a Firefox extension that would just load up yt-dlp and play the video through mpv.
It turns out, writing a Firefox extension is easy and tricking Firefox into launching yt-dlp isn’t much harder (though it does require some annoying configuration on the user’s end).
Anyway, if you’re a Linux user, feel free to try it out. I don’t know how much I’m going to pour into this, but as an exercise of “can this be done”, it was pretty good for a few hours on a Friday night.
can you please share a video of how it looks like when implemented. I think it is already possible to watch videos using VLC ?
I’ve had a couple videos that wouldn’t load properly in VLC. Rare, but it happens. Alternatives are always welcome.
I don’t think I have it in me to put together a video, but I can describe it if you like.
Once you install the extension and follow the setup instructions, you just go to a YouTube page. The extension adds an ugly button to the top-left of the page that says “bypass”. When you click it, Firefox launches
yt-dlp [the URL you're at] -o - | mpv -which basically just downloads the video and streams the output through thempvvideo player. So now you’re watching just the video, with no web page necessary.My best guess would be that the internal player of Firefox comes to play here.
You can try opening any MP4 with Firefox