mpv is fantastic. I recently decided to abandon MPlayerX when I found out about their incredibly dishonest malware bundling tactics[1] but was surprised at how few good media players there are for macOS, until I read about mpv.
mpv took a little bit of getting used to since it doesn't offer a lot of useful stuff out of the box (automatically queuing files, subtitle downloads, etc) but since you can write quite powerful scripts for it that didn't remain a problem for long.
If you're on macOS and looking for something with a nice GUI, check out IINA [0]. I saw it on HN [1] last week, and it looks very promising, although it's still an alpha. It's based on mpv.
Iina is very promising. Keep in mind that it is still very early in development, but I really like the mindset of the developer and contributors - creating a macOS experience, not cross-platform that looks bad everywhere.
MPlayerX was once upon a time also that, but its maintenance went vaporware a few years back, and the bundled crap finally killed it. So for a while now, I've been looking for a good player. Seems Iina is that player.
small tempermonkey script replacing all YT embeds with custom URI + custom URI handler calling mpv "youtube_url" (or in my case extracting direct 720p stream https://xxxx.googlevideo.com/videoplayback... link and passing it to SMPlayer)
This lets you watch every single YT clip using player of your choosing. Result is smooth video on 10 year old laptops(1.8GHz Core2) when Flash/browser buildin codecs are barely able to play 480p.
Would you consider publishing the script somewhere? I can't speak for others, but I would personally be inclined to use it as I'm looking for a YouTube client alternative.
Yeah, I don't usually watch that many YouTube videos. In addition, I only follow a handful of content creators, and they don't post that frequently, e.g. Primitive Technology.
Not that it matters to everyone, but YouTube limits users of YouTube-dl to 720p resolution I believe. If you want 1080p or higher you have to do in-browser.
Nope, youtube-dl is able to grab the DASH sources, which includes 4k, 1440p and 1080p. :)
The DASH video and audio sources can then be muxed by mpv on playback.
Instead, I installed mpv [0], and since it embeds youtube-dl [1] you can play any video with the native UI by running:
[0] https://mpv.io/[1] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/