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
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.
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 $1."&asv=" if /^.*(&t=.*?)&.*$/')")
Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?
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