This is the result of a several week venture without X. I found myself totally happy without X (and by extension without flash) and was able to do just about anything but watch YouTube videos... so this a the solution I came up with for that. I am sure this can be done better but this does indeed work... and tends to work far better than YouTube's ghetto proprietary flash player ;-) Replace $i with any YouTube ID you want and this will scrape the site for the _real_ URL to the full quality .FLV file on Youtube's server and will then will hand that over to mplayer (or vlc or whatever you want) to be streamed. In some browsers you can replace $i with just a % or put this in a shell script so all YouTube IDs can be handed directly off to your media player of choice for true streaming without the need for Flash or a downloader like clive. (I do however fully recommend clive if you wish to archive videos instead of streaming them) If any interest is shown I would be more than happy to provide similar commands for other sites. Most streaming flash players use similar logic to YouTube. Edit: 05/03/2011 - Updated line to work with current YouTube. It could be a lot prettier but I will probably follow up with another update when I figure out how to get rid of that pesky Grep. Sed should take that syntax... but it doesn't. Original (no longer working) command: mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$(curl -s $youtube_url | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.*\(video_id.\+\)&title.*;\1;p")") Show Sample Output

youtube-dl has this functionality built in. If you're running an older version of youtube-dl, you can update it using `youtube-dl -U` (although if you have an older version, it probably doesn't download youtube videos anyway.) youtube-dl --help will show you other options that may come in useful.

A function for streaming youtube to mplayer. The option "-g" for youtube-dl tells it to output the direct video URL, instead of downloading the video. "-fs" tells MPlayer to go FullScreen, and "-quit" makes it less verbose. Requires: youdube-dl ( http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/ ) (Tested in zsh) Show Sample Output

requires "youtube-dl" -- sure you can do this with wget and some more obscurity but why waste your time when this great tool is available? the guts consist of mplayer converting a video to a gif -- study this command and read the man page for more information mplayer video.flv -ss 00:23 -endpos 6 -vo gif89a:fps=5:output=output.gif -vf scale=400:300 -nosound generates a 6 second gif starting at 23 seconds of play time at 5 fps and a scale of 400x300 start time (-ss)/end time (-endpos) formats: 00:00:00.000 end time should be relative to start time, not absolute. i.e. -endpos 5 == seconds after 0:42 = 0:47 end point play with fps and scale for lower gif sizes the subshell is a solution for the -b flag on youtube-dl which downloads the best quality video, sometimes, which can be various video formats $(ls ${url##*=}*| tail -n1) Show Sample Output

The original doesn't work for me - but this does. I'm guessing that Youtube updated the video page so the original doesn't work.

Certain Flash video players (e.g. Youtube) write their video streams to disk in /tmp/ , but the files are unlinked. i.e. the player creates the file and then immediately deletes the filename (unlinking files in this way makes it hard to find them, and/or ensures their cleanup if the browser or plugin should crash etc.) But as long as the flash plugin's process runs, a file descriptor remains in its /proc/ hierarchy, from which we (and the player) still have access to the file. The method above worked nicely for me when I had 50 tabs open with Youtube videos and didn't want to have to re-download them all with some tool.

Streams youtube video with v=ID directly into the mplayer. If exists, it uses the HD-quality stream. If you don't want to watch it in HD-quality, you can use the shorter form: ID=52DnUo6wJto; mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?&video_id=$ID$(wget -qO - 'http://youtube.com/watch?v='$ID | perl -ne 'print $1."&asv=" if /^.*(&t=.*?)&.*$/')")

generate playlists from youtube ( or othre things that support yt-dlp) Show Sample Output

This will download a Youtube playlist and mostly anything http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/2.0/reference.html#Video_Feeds The files will be saved by $id.flv

url can be like any one of followings: url="MejbOFk7H6c" url="http://youtu.be/MejbOFk7H6c" url="https://youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MejbOFk7H6c#t" url="//www.youtube.com/v/MejbOFk7H6c?hl=ru_RU&version=3&rel=0" url="http://www.youtube.com/embed/MejbOFk7H6c?feature=player_embedded" If url mismatching, whole url will be returned. Show Sample Output

opens a new session with video stream

There's another version on here that uses GET but some people don't have lwp-request, so here's an alternative. It's also a little shorter and should work with most youtube URLs since it truncates at the first &

in place of "output-filename.mp4" put the name you want the file to be named with. in place of "youtube-video-link" put the link of the Video page eg: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AclA-7YntvE in place of "format-number" put the number of the file format you would like How to get the "format-number" to get format number type in below command before running this command youtube-dl -F "youtube-video-link" and it will list all the available formats with the format number, like to download in 360p mp4 use the number "18" To automatically let it fetch the best quality available just remove the -f "format-number" and you are good to go. Show Sample Output

Listen YouTube radios streaming. I use it on an alias to easily enter kinda flow state for study/programming. Show Sample Output

Gives MPEG-4/DivX output video file ready for uploading to YouTube from FLV file downloaded from the site and your own subtitle file UTF-8 encoded. No resizing needed. (?)

Make your own MP3s from Youtube videos. Show Sample Output

Kodi needs the youtube plugin to be installed. Show Sample Output

Explanation Firstly the function checks if user gave it any input, and notifies the user if they failed to do so. If user has inputed a search string, the function will call upon youtube-dl to find url of the audio of the first matching youtube video and play that with mpv. Call function by wrapping search string in quotes: listen-to-yt "sultans of swing" You have to paste the line in your .zshrc and source .zshrc for it to work. Limitations The dependancies are youtube-dl and mpv. this oneliner is stolen from http://www.bashoneliners.com/oneliners/302/

First, we convert the VMware avi (VMnc format) to the Microsoft avi format. Next, we convert the Microsoft avi format to FLV format. You can play around with the -r switch (rate per second) and the -b switch (bitrate). But, if those get larger, so does your FLV file.

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yt2mp3(){ for j in `seq 1 301`;do i=`curl -s gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/$1/uploads\?start-index=$j\&max-results=1|grep -o "watch[^&]*"`;ffmpeg -i `wget youtube.com/$i -qO-|grep -o 'url_map"[^,]*'|sed -n '1{s_.*|__;s_\\\__g;p}'` -vn -ab 128k "`youtube-dl -e ${i#*=}`.mp3";done;} squeezed the monster (and nifty ☺) command from 7776 from 531 characters to 284 characters, but I don't see a way to get it down to 255. This is definitely a kludge!

umph is parsing video links from Youtube playlists ( http://code.google.com/p/umph/ ) cclive is downloading videos from Youtube ( http://cclive.sourceforge.net/ ) Example: yt-pl2mp3 7AB74822FE7D03E8

Creates a better looking gif than the original post via imagemagick processing high quality jpgs, rather than converting directly to gif from the video itself.

Before you use this command you want to replace everything after the "https:" with the url of the video which you want to download. This string and it's switches will use "youtube-dl" to download the Youtube url into the directory/folder where it is called from. It will output the video using the same name as Youtube uses.