this post was submitted on 27 May 2024
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You can also just play them directly with MPV or VLC.
That is way too much faff if you are watching youtube daily.
Get something like FreeTube, FOSS with all the ad blocking and sponsor blocking automatically enabled. And your subscriptions and other settings are all saved locally.
I just tried that and it's not working for me. MPV just closes itself and VLC gives me an error message. Do I need to do more that just drag and drop the URL?
For VLC you need to go to Media > Open Network Stream (or Ctrl+N), then paste the youtube link there.
For MPV use command line
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videocodeI got YouTube videos working in MPV. While I have no idea if the way I did it was technically not correct, all I did was download the newest version of yt-dlp from github and created a file name mpv.conf which links to the yt-dlp python file. I was also able to set a preferred resolution using that conf file.
VLC still gives me the same error message.
For MPV, it gives me the following error message:
`mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw [ytdl_hook] ERROR: [youtube] 3e9_l2oGxdw: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred Failed to recognize file format.
Exiting... (Errors when loading file) `
Your mpv or vlc versions may be too old. Try updating them to the latest versions.
Well, while MPV might be outdated, I already mentioned that I was able to get YouTube videos working by downloading a newer version of yt-dlp and creating a conf file for MPV that links to it. While I was looking into the problem, the versions available in apt for all three of these are outdated by at least a year, possible 3 years for MPV. I'm not sure if this is just a Linux Mint issue but I have noticed that a lot of the software both preinstalled and available in it's repository, are pretty outdated.
I might try downloading the newer versions of these later. I got MPV working and that's good enough for me right now.
Mint is known to use old software in its repositories as it's based on Ubuntu LTS. The flatpak mpv should work though.
flatpak install flathub io.mpv.Mpvand then run it withflatpak run io.mpv.Mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQIf you don't want to type
flatpak run io.mpv.Mpvall the time, you can create an alias in your~/.bashrcfile. For example:alias play='flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv'. (After editing your bashrc file, run:source ~/.bashrcto activate the change). Then you can run it withplay https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.I know it's been a while but I tried the flatpak version of mpv and it's not working. If I open the flatpak version without any music it opens but it becomes unresponsive as soon as I try to load any music. I also have no idea how to diagnose this issue as running the flatpak version in the terminal gives no error messages.
The version that comes with Linux Mint works perfectly fine, so I don't need the flatpak version, I'm just curious as to why the flatpak version doesn't work.
I think I also had this issue using Cinnamon once, but then I just used VLC instead. Never bothered to look into why. Worked fine in GNOME for me though.
I found a thread with a similar issue: https://forums.opensuse.org/t/flatpak-mpv-broken-since-20240306-snapshot/172981
There it seems the issue was audio. Try running the flatpak version with
flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv --ao=pulse path-to-your-media-fileIf the issue is with the DE, I'm actually using the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. I would just use VLC but it gives me performance issues because I don't have the best hardware and mpv seems to work much more efficiently. But yeah, changing the audio output fixed this issue, I'm guessing the flatpak version of mpv defaults to pipewire. I was curious and I did test pipewire with both versions and I got the same results that they did.
I might try that later because, like I said earlier, I got the version of MPV that's already installed to play YouTube videos and that fine for me. I also made configurations to the preinstalled version and I don't know if it would be easy, or even possible, to transfer them to the flatpak version.
For the flatpak version the mpv.conf file can be created in
~/.var/app/io.mpv.Mpv/config/mpv/. You probably don't need to link it to the yt-dlp python file as the flatpak mpv version should come with the latest yt-dlp.Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.