YouTube is a video-sharing website, created in February 2005, and purchased by Google in November 2006. The web service lets billions of people find, watch, and share originally-created videos. It displays a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. It also offers a forum for people to communicate with others around the world, and acts as a distribution platform.
A common complaint about YouTube is that to watch the material you need to use a web browser. Fortunately, some funky developers have created applications that allow you to bypass the web-only barrier of YouTube. The software allows users to access YouTube in a different way, creating a TV-like experience.
PlasmaTube lets users watch YouTube videos on a phone or desktop using a user interface designed to be integrated with KDE Plasma. Of course, the software also runs on other desktop environments. PlasmaTube uses mpv and yt-dlp, two programs we highly recommend.
Installation
We evaluated PlasmaTube using Manjaro, an Arch-based distro, as well as the ubiquitous Ubuntu.
With Manjaro, Pamac (Manjaro’s front-end installation tool) lets us install PlasmaTube from a Flatpak. But there’s a package in the Official Repositories, so we went with that one.
Pamac automatically installs a missing dependency for us. MpvQt is a libmpv wrapper for Qt Quick 2/Qml.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation and Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction and Installation
Page 2 – In Operation and Summary