What does HackerNews think of mps-youtube?

There have been earlier tools which permitted command-line / terminal access to Youtube, one of the best being mps-youtube:

<https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube>

That permitted searches for terms and channels (though not subtitle text within channel AFAIK), for music specifically, and compiliation of either temporary or saved playlists, with the option to play through a full selection of videos. It also offered either full-video or audio-only playback.

Google killed it by throttling API-key access.

Discussed previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32919545> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28571421>

The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

- Runs without any browser at all.

- From a console.

- Without video, if you so specify.

- Enables full search, can be limited to music posts only, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC.

- Can play based on a given account's videos / postings.

- Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk.

- Content can be downloaded if preferred.

- No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube.

The only feature missing that I can recall is the ability to blacklist specific accounts. A chief problem with clickbait, propaganda, baiting, and radicalisation channel proliferation is that the activities carry little risk. Yes, YouTube itself occasionally removes high-profile cases, but people themselves cannot say "never show me anything from this source again", at least last I checked. Curation of sources, and killing high-noise sources, continues to be my most effective techique for boosting S/N.

That said, mps-youtube was and remains the best interface I've found for searching for, curating, and managing online video access to my interests and without any tracking or ads, both of which have massive negative social externalities. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware.

YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and have largely succeeded.

> Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs.

Using the OpenGL compositor (which should be the default in latests versions of Manjaro) is a lifesaver! Web apps are and will still be slow sometimes (I don't use slack but messenger can be sluggish).

> Video playback on browsers is not really nice.

Depends, YouTube is indeed quite slow (I think it became slower after some YouTube update), but if YouTube was optimized for speed there wouldn't be all those adds, right? I like to listen to YouTube music in the background, I use https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube for that and it works like a charm, uses 10% CPU and a few MB of RAM. I don't use mpsyt for video but I guess it would also improve your experience. Other websites (kissanime) work like a charm, even in 1080p.

> Manjaro does not provide a way to disable tap-to-click True, but installing `xf86-input-synaptics` (although it's deprecated) provides such an option. Also, I use ctrl+F7 to disable the touchpad while I type large chunks of text.

From the specs, one could think that the RAM is the problem but zram totally solves that (I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox, including heavy apps like Messenger, Trello and Overleaf). The slow CPU is a larger issue, with Gmail being so slow to load it's almost unusable (loading my mailbox takes 20s and creating a new email takes 3s).

Overall, I find the machine very much usable though. I only have two complaints:

- static noises

- under "heavy" load (eg html5 games with compilation in the background), the alimentation is less powerful than what the machine consumes, which leads to the battery discharging.

I wrote a guide on my setup that includes other tricks. Shameless plug: https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/pinebook-pro-setup.h...

- Delete your Google account (if you can);

- Install NewPipe [0] on Android;

- Install gtk-youtube-viewer [1] on your computer;

- Install mpsyt [2] if you'd like a terminal client.

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[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

[1] https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer

[2] https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

* ranger is vim-inspired file manager with built-in viewers and extensive capabilities. In addition to POB (plain old bash) and mc, it's a go-to for me. https://github.com/ranger/ranger

* TWIN is the Text WINdowing environment. Yes, it's a full-on windowmanager for console. Somewhat rusty, but if nothing else, a novelty. https://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/

* mutt: email, 'nuf said

* irssi: IRC

* surfraw; "elvi" providing CLI access to online tools and an Ecuadorian connection. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Surfraw

* wikipedia2text: Wikipedia on the command line. https://packages.debian.org/stretch/wikipedia2text

* tootstream: CLI Mastodon client. https://github.com/magicalraccoon/tootstream

* mpv and mps-youtube: play media (audio and video) in console. mpv supports many sites and formats, while mps-youtube specialises in everyone's favourite video monopoly. Both offer numerous compelling advantages over Web UIs, starting with no comments or recommendations. mpsyt's search and locally-managed playlist features are a real treat. https://mpv.io https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

* xine and mpv framebuffer and ascii-art (aalib) modes. Play full-screen video in console, either as framebuffer graphics, or rendered as text characters (not great, though novel). Bonus: try the 'bb' aalib demo.

* bc, dc, units, and ipcalc; all forms of calculators, from general to RPN to units-aware to IP functions.

* BSD Games. Because.

- Do I know of a youtube channel I like and want to watch: mps-youtube [1]

- Do I want to get youtube content randomly/reddit-recommended: reddytt [2]

- Do I just want some images and gifs, not whole videos: redditp [3]

- Do I want to explore twitch, but do not know of a streamer I like: ryck [4]

[2] and [4] are my own tools for a more optimised time-wasting (I apologise if self-plugging is considered bad behaviour).

[1] https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

[2] https://github.com/johanbluecreek/reddytt

[3] https://github.com/ubershmekel/redditp

[4] (early stages of development) https://github.com/johanbluecreek/ryck

This is a console-based audio- and video-playing tool which allows me to:

1. Search for content.

2. View detailed information.

3. Search by user or YouTube playlist.

4. Selective add or remove items from a current playlist.

5. Save and manage multiple named playlists.

6. Queue up large sets of content to be accessed. Including audio-only, in background (my preferred mode).

7. Works on Android via Termux.

8. Keyboard playback controls to skip, jump, play, pause, speed, or slow playback. (Similar to mplayer's if you're familiar with those.)

9. No ads.

10. No comments.

11. No recommended "fail", "dash-cam", or "blackhead" crap. That corner of YouTube.

It's everything I've wished YouTube was, and that it isn't.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

And for Pandora, there is Pianobar, a console based pandora player: https://github.com/PromyLOPh/pianobar

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube