I've started doing:

    yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -

And never been happier. I hope it still counts as a view for the channel/owner though, but never investigated if that's actually the case.

▲ mariusor 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

	▲	embedding-shape 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Ay, but then I don't get to teach beginners about the unix principle and how easy it is to pipe stuff between different tools :) Thanks for the heads up regardless, I'm sure there was others who didn't know, who learned something new! :)
	▲	thaumasiotes 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it. Last time I was passing youtube URLs to mpv, it relied on having an executable named youtube-dl.exe somewhere visible to the mpv executable. To get it to work with yt-dlp, I had to copy and rename the yt-dlp executable. > has yt-dlp integrated Have they switched to supplying their own youtube downloader instead of just working with whatever you happen to have in your path?

▲ 0-_-0 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Very unlikely, you need the browser for that

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petcat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)

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basilikum 7 hours ago | parent [-]

yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.

	▲	netsharc 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...

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estimator7292 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.

	▲	direwolf20 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's not. It runs enough JavaScript to pass the CAPTCCA (completely automated public turing test to tell computers and computers apart) challenge but it doesn't actually load the page and execute everything.