Last Updated on September 1, 2020
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.
youtube-viewer is a lightweight application for searching and streaming videos from YouTube. youtube-viewer is free and open source software.
The project hosts a command-line interface to YouTube which is creatively called youtube-viewer. And if you prefer a graphical interface, there’s also a GTK+ interface. Again, the developer has called on all of his creative juices, imaginatively naming the application gtk-youtube-viewer.
Installation
The project doesn’t provide any packages on its GitHub repository for the multitude of Linux distributions available. That’s not a criticism of the developers. After all, there’s more than 900 mature distros alone, not counting all the respins. There are packages available for Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Gentoo, Puppy Linux, Slackware, and others.
If there’s not a convenient package for each application in your distro’s repositories, the developers set out the steps including the required dependencies. But as I’ve been so busy this month, I’ve installed both programs via my package manager. Sometimes life is too short, but I’ll be probably be spending time on the naughty step.
The developer has run into issues with the YouTube API Services team. The software won’t work unless you create your own API key and client ID/SECRET values. It’s a bit of a convoluted process, requiring you to create a Google Platform project if you don’t have one already. Once you enable the YouTube Data v3 API, created an API key, and create a OAuth 2.0 Client ID, you can then update ~/.config/youtube-viewer/api.json with your API key, native client ID, and client secret values. It only takes a few minutes to complete the process.
Next page: Page 2 – In Operation
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Summary
This is the stupidest and most convoluted thing ever. You can already stream yt vids in linux with youtube-dl without any of this braindamged setup process by simply doing `youtube-dl ${url} -o – | mpv -` or similar (Adjust for your media player of choice.
If you read the review, you’d have noticed that the reviewer says the program doesn’t come near to youtube-dl or You-Get.
Why is youtube-viewer stupid or convoluted? Because there’s other software out there that performs a similar function? On that basis, just about all software is stupid and convoluted.
I have become wary of such tools. Not because of the tools themselves. But, because of the content source.
Downloaders and scrapers have been against Youtube’s EULA for the past few months now. While they may not be acting on it just yet; I feel that once Youtube has stabilized on original content creation as an owner, they will begin cracking down on all “misuse” cases en masse. They specifically do not want even paying subscribers to be able to accelerate viewing consumption in any form which may cost them ad revenue.