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.

  • zaknenou@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    can you please share a video of how it looks like when implemented. I think it is already possible to watch videos using VLC ?

    • Telorand@reddthat.com
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had a couple videos that wouldn’t load properly in VLC. Rare, but it happens. Alternatives are always welcome.

    • Daniel Quinn@lemmy.caOP
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      1 year ago

      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 the mpv video player. So now you’re watching just the video, with no web page necessary.

    • Contend6248@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      My best guess would be that the internal player of Firefox comes to play here.

      You can try opening any MP4 with Firefox