You can use third party media players like MPC-BE or MPC-HC that leverage yt-dlp to stream the video into a media player without any ads of course.
Yes, sometimes it makes sense to download if you want to keep the video, but to just watch just stream it via yt-dlp to a media player.
mpv urlA major part apart from building a queue by getting behind is the ability of the file manager to sort, to classify, to filter, to move into folders, to search, etc. Far better than the youtube web interface, which only has the options of displaying your subscriptions as a grid or as a list. So I now have a local queue of videos which I can use, in which weird expeditions into obscure genres are into their own folders, must-match-now videos are tagged, etc, and I can pick and choose according to my own tastes of the moment.
That is one of my pet peeves in UI design in the last decade and it is not only web applications – shoebox apps are often as limited. If you want to do anything to your data or just have different sort orders or views, you only have what the app developer allows and often that is nothing.
Thanks to the web and shoebox apps I appreciate file managers like Finder even more now. It’s amazing what UI controls like NSTableView/NSOutlineView gives the user in functionality. Modern collection views often look better and I appreciate that, but I do miss the functionality which, while possible, often simply is not implemented.
Because it will likely get harder and harder to download from Youtube, and the option may actually disappear forever eventually.
- You can stream directly. I do this via a bash function for cases where mpv itself doesn't play a video (for reasons I've been unable to / not had the spoons to track down):
ytmpv () { yt-dlp -o - -f bestaudio "$1" | mpv - ; }
- There are times when downloading a video is the only way to be assured that you'll have access to content in the future, or when offline. Note that when YouTube removes content it also removes all metadata associated with that content, including title, description, and the account which had posted it.
This is on Android / F-Droid / pip. I've hacked those specifically to keep yt-dlp and mpv as updated as possible.
I use invidious with Yattee on iOS/macOS/tvOS.
Total bliss.