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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Use an external video player. mpv and VLC are my usual go-to's. Both will stream straight from a URL (and both handle far more than just YT).

You can also of course download and play at your leisure with ytdlp.

<https://mpv.io/>

<https://www.videolan.org/vlc/>

<https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>

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I just tried VLC.

Media - From Network Stream - pasted Youtube URL.

Nope, error message, said check the logs.

Searched the UI for an entry for the logs, found nothing.

Googled for "vlc logs". Found a guide. Configured the path to be on the desktop.

Restarted VLC.

Tried again, same error message.

No log file created and of course no log file entries.

The joys of FOSS.

I tried the same route, but got the logs correctly. It gave me a HTTP 410 error. I wouldn't be surprised at all if VLC's youtube plugin is just too old and there's a better one somewhere else. But in the meanwhile, mpv's plugin works (if you're using yt-dlp and not youtube-dl, that is)

Logs not being directly visible in the VLC UI and not having a default log file location plus the fact that even going to advanced settings and configuring things doesn't make logs show up after the first try is not Google's fault, though.

It's hardly a fault though. And if you need this feature go ahead and implement it.

The first part is a feature, the second one is a bug.

And no, I don't think I will, I'll just use Youtube with ad blockers for as long as I can.

Despite having defended FOSS and advocated VLC ... I understand your viewpoint here. Calling on people to contribute bugfixes isn't especially realistic. Filing a bug on the fact that VLC has poor debug/log tools would be helpful though.

Particularly as a useful logging / debugging capability should enable more useful bug reports specific to function.

Sorry it's not working out for you, thanks for trying regardless.

I'm just jaded at this point. FOSS won the battle and lost the war. It's been subsumed into the bowels of these corporations that are ending up mega predatory.

TBH I almost always use mpv or ytdl these days.

I've used VLC successfully in the past on Android using the "stream" option. When I want to view video (as opposed to just listen to audio, my usual Android mpv use-case) that's delivered joy. On MacOS, I'll use mpv to play either audio only or video, with joy in both cases.

Don't forget that the other side of the equation is YouTube ACTIVELY WORKING TO BREAK COMPATIBILITY, and with considerable success. E.g., Invidious and Piped had been b0rk3n for a few months, though on checking again in the past few days, Invidious at least seems to be working again. So placing the whole burden on FOSS devs is at best exceedingly biased criticism. Those are in fact your friends, not Google.

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