Not only that, but there are very small extensions that place a button on your toolbar that will launch MPV with the current URL. It's the only way I watch YouTube nowadays, it always launches fullscreen on the second monitor and quits when the video is done.

It's such a small change, but has a very large impact on the quality of my video-watching experience, I couldn't believe it initially.

I wonder whether youtube-dl (which is what mpv uses to get audio/video over the web, I think) is going to get completely neutered by EME. Your setup is similar to how I use Youtube lately, and the recent progression of EME has got me worried that the setup won't be working for too much longer.

Is there any reason mpv couldn't stream encrypted video to the GPU? Or implement its own EME wrapper and use the same blob the browser uses?

Could you point to such an extension?

Sure, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/watch-with-mp...

What should I do if I get the following error?

    [ytdl_hook] ERROR: Signature extraction failed: Traceback (most recent call last):
    [ytdl_hook]   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 905, in _decrypt_signature
    [ytdl_hook]     video_id, player_url, s
    [ytdl_hook]   File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 797, in _extract_signature_function
    [ytdl_hook]     raise ExtractorError('Cannot identify player %r' % player_url)
    [ytdl_hook] ExtractorError: Cannot identify player u'/yts/jsbin/player-vflC3ZxIh/en_US/base.js'; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
    [ytdl_hook]  (caused by ExtractorError(u"Cannot identify player u'/yts/jsbin/player-vflC3ZxIh/en_US/base.js'; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.",)); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
    [ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed, trying to play URL directly ... 
    [ffmpeg] tls: The TLS connection was non-properly terminated.
    Failed to recognize file format.

    Exiting... (Errors when loading file)

Update youtube-dl, as it says: https://yt-dl.org/update

This is so cool. Combined with RSS for channel subscriptions, I won't even have to go to the site and get a properly manageable window. Now I just need to figure out how to get newsbeuter to use specific commands based on the url.

.newsbeuter/config has a "browser" command where you can give arbitrary a shell command where %u is the URL, you could give it your own script that matches on the URL.

For example, mine is 'browser "urxvt -e elinks %u"'.

And on Android there's a free software app that implements a similar thing (without needing any proprietary libraries), and actually is much better than the official app. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

I've used it a while and can confirm its great featureset (backgrounding, no ads, downloading) ... one issue is no subscription feature in-app. I don't want to play around with RSS

They're working on it, the plan is to fake subscription by subscribing to channel RSS feeds. https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/pull/620

I did know that mpv/vlc supports playing youtube but I didn't connect the dots, until now. Thanks for suggestion! This could be big because I also struggle a bit with Youtube's poor playlist management tools. Now I can use plain text files.

There is also the option of downloading with http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ and queuing up the local files in your preferred local media player's playlist support. Particularly useful if you might want to watch the content while travelling as you don't need a reliable connection as you would for streaming.

yt-dl directly supports a fair few other video sites (http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html) too, and indirectly a large number of others as its generic resource locator does a fairly good job of finding the object you want unless the site actively tries to obfuscate the video's location.

I always copy links to Youtube (or other) videos instead of opening them, then I do `mpv --ytdl --ytdl-format best "$(xsel -b)"` via a shell alias.

You don't need "--ytdl-format best" anymore; youtube-dl defaults to "best".

And normally, mpv will automatically recognize when it needs to use "--ytdl".

VLC seems to work, too.

mpv is awesome. Cannot recommend it enough.