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Search and Play Youtube Videos from the Terminal - yt


yt

For a long time I've been searching for a command-line utility to search YouTube for videos and play them with mpv (or any other video player) without having to open the browser and the slow and bloated YouTube web-page. There exists many such tools like mps-youtube and youtube-viewer, but all of them require you to have a YouTube API key.
Although using API makes the tool much more useful and adds many features, it has a major flaw, that is you cant search use it anymore if you exceed your daily API quota. Also, getting an API key and setting the tool up is a pain. 

To combat this, I wrote a script myself that uses simple web-scraping using grep.
As it uses web-scraping, it doesn't need any API key to work, and can work out of the box perfectly. You dont even need to be logged in to use it.

yt

The script itself is pretty small and simple, and is written in bash. So can be run directly from the terminal. It takes the user's search query, gives it to the youtube search, and then greps out the results along with their ids from the response and shows them to the user. Any of the video can be then chosen to be played and is played directly by mpv (which uses youtube-dl under the hood).

It also supports playlists (playlists are marked with a '(playlist)' at the beginning of their name).
On choosing a playlist, its first video starts playing in mpv, and the next and previous buttons can be used to navigate the playlist.

The script can be found here: https://github.com/sayan01/scripts/blob/master/yt

To use it, just download the script and put it somewhere in your PATH. Then call it:

yt <Search Term>

The script can also be run with the -r flag which runs it in rofi mode (change it to dmenu in the code if you use that instead) and we dont even need to use the terminal if we bind yt -r to a hotkey.

For more details on the script and how to use it, check this video out:


Hope you find this script as useful as I do. You can also check out other scripts I've written over the span of the years in the same GitHub repo.

If you have any suggestion or comment on the script, feel free to leave them here or open an issue.

Sayan
Jan 6, 2021
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