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.

    • Daniel QuinnOP
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, because I didn’t know (a) that ff2mpv even existed, or that (b) mpv could play YouTube URLs directly. So thanks! I learnt two things today :-)

      It was still a fun project though 'cause I learnt how to write a Firefox extension and get the browser to launch programs on-click, so not a waste of time!