content/posts/youtube-adventures.md

   1 ---
   2 title: "Adventures with YouTube"
   3 date: 2020-08-02T05:40:09+05:30
   4 lastmod: 2019-11-04T15:40:09+05:30
   5 tags : [ "free-software", "YouTube", "privacy", "MPV", "NimCoon" ]
   6 categories : [ "free-software", "privacy" ]
   7 layout: post
   8 type:  "post"
   9 highlight: false
  10 ---
  11
  12 ## Why?
  13
  14
  15 I stopped using my Google account several years ago. This means that I can no
  16 longer subscribe to YouTube channels directly in YouTube.
  17
  18 I have been playing YouTube links that I find directly using the [MPV](https://mpv.io) player,
  19 which internally uses [youtube-dl](https://youtube-dl.org) to fetch the video.
  20
  21 ![Y U No Use YouTube Website](/blog/youtube-yuno.png)
  22
  23 Not using the YouTube
  24 website directly has several advantages. YouTube's revenue is based on the
  25 number of advertisements you see on the website. So, the more time you spend on
  26 YouTube the more money they earn. It is easy to get around the advertisements by
  27 using ad-blockers, but the site itself is optimized for binge-watching with
  28 features such as auto-play being turned on by default. If your objective is to
  29 just watch one useful video and leave, YouTube's website doesn't make it easy.
  30
  31 ## Playing YouTube videos on the desktop
  32
  33 Over the years, I experimented with several solutions for playing YouTube videos
  34 without going to the YouTube website.
  35
  36 One of the oldest solutions in this category is SMTube + SMPlayer. SMPlayer is a
  37 GUI player based on MPlayer. [SMTube](https://www.smtube.org/) is add-on for
  38 [SMPlayer](http://www.smplayer.info/) that can fetch YouTube videos from a proxy
  39 called [Tonvid](https://tonvid.com). On clicking on any of the videos in the
  40 interface, it launches the video in SMPlayer. It can also be configured to use
  41 other backends like MPV + youtube-dl (my personal favorite).
  42
  43 ![SMTube](/blog/smtube.png)
  44
  45 There are two other YouTube proxies worth mentioning:
  46 1. [HookTube](hooktube.com)
  47 2. [Invidious](invidio.us)
  48
  49 HookTube is a closed-source project with some amount of advertising. I used this
  50 till the better free software alternative Invidious was released. These proxies
  51 work by downloading the video to the server first and then streaming the video
  52 to the user. There is usually a noticeable lag in fetching the video unless it
  53 has already been cached. Sometimes, the YouTube API key used might run out of
  54 its daily allowed quota. This will be less of a problem if you self-host
  55 Invidious.
  56
  57 [FreeTubeApp](https://freetubeapp.io) is an electron-based desktop app that
  58 allows subscriptions. It fetches its search results using an Invidious backend
  59 and subscriptions using RSS feeds. It is easy to import and export
  60 subscriptions, since they are basically just RSS feeds.
  61
  62 ![FreeTubeApp](https://freetubeapp.io/images/FreeTube1.png)
  63
  64 For a while, I also used a bash script called `ytview` from the
  65 [Bash-Snippets](https://github.com/alexanderepstein/Bash-Snippets) project to
  66 search and play YouTube videos from the commandline. However, over time I was
  67 dissatisfied with the limitations of this script. I extended some of its
  68 features, but writing bash is not fun. So, I ended up writing a commandline
  69 YouTube player called [NimCoon](https://gitlab.com/njoseph/nimcoon). You can see
  70 the list of supported features in the [project
  71 page](https://gitlab.com/njoseph/nimcoon/-/blob/master/README.md#features). I
  72 keep adding features to this project as and when I need them.
  73
  74 ## RSS Feeds? 🤔
  75
  76 Once I exported and imported the list of subscriptions on my FreeTubeApp from
  77 one machine to another, I realized that I might as well import the subscriptions
  78 into my RSS feed reader. The feed reader I use is [Tiny Tiny
  79 RSS](https://tt-rss.org/). It is self-hosted on my
  80 [FreedomBox](https://freedombox.org). The file with the RSS feeds that  I
  81 imported from FreeTubeApp was added as a separate category called "YouTube
  82 Subscriptions" in TT-RSS.
  83
  84 TT-RSS was able to fetch the videos from my YouTube subscriptions. All I need
  85 from the feed reader is just the video name and URL. However, TT-RSS decided to
  86 embed the YouTube video into the page itself which my Firefox extension uMatrix
  87 was happy to block. I ended up having pages that look like this:
  88
  89 ![YouTube feeds displayed in Tiny Tiny RSS](/blog/youtube-tt-rss.png)
  90
  91 I needed a way of playing the video links from my feed reader in my preferred
  92 player (MPV, of course). I found a useful Firefox extension for this purpose
  93 called [ff2mpv](https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv).
  94
  95 ![ff2mpv extension](/blog/ff2mpv.png)
  96
  97 ff2mpv makes use of the "native messaging hosts" feature in Firefox that allows you to
  98 invoke a system executable from Firefox. In this case, ff2mpv uses a [Python
  99 script](https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv/blob/master/ff2mpv.py#L12) to invoke
 100 the MPV player with a YouTube URL.
 101
 102 A right-click option called "Play in MPV" is added to every hyperlink in
 103 Firefox, which when clicked loads the video in MPV. So far, so good.
 104
 105 But I found myself trying to play [PeerTube](https://joinpeertube.org/#/) video
 106 links that I find on the [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)
 107 the same way. Well, MPV + youtube-dl can still play PeerTube videos but it uses
 108 the HTTP stream instead of the WebTorrent stream and doesn't always pick the
 109 highest resolution available. Fortunately, both of these problems have already
 110 been solved in NimCoon. All I had to do was to change the executable invoked by
 111 ff2mpv's Python script from `mpv` to `nimcoon`.
 112
 113 Before:
 114 ```python
 115     args = ["mpv", "--no-terminal", "--", url]
 116 ```
 117 After:
 118 ```python
 119     args = ["/home/joseph/.nimble/bin/nimcoon", url]
 120 ```
 121
 122 There isn't much else to do in the RSS feed reader and the browser. Any
 123 improvements that I make to this setup will be in NimCoon.
 124
 125 ## What else?
 126
 127 While I was on this journey, many people recommended that I use elfeed in emacs
 128 for YouTube subscriptions and use MPV to play the videos. If I had taken that
 129 route, maybe most of NimCoon would've been implemented in emacs Lisp instead of
 130 the Nim language. Using a self-hosted RSS feed reader gives me the advantage of
 131 being able to use it from multiple devices. Also, I was already using TT-RSS
 132 well before I had heard of elfeed. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
 133
 134 If you're interested in finding out what other tools I use for reasons of
 135 privacy and digital minimalism, please check out my [Privacy
 136 Stack](https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Privacy_Stack).
 137
 138 ## Comments
 139
 140 Please post your comments on this [thread](https://social.masto.host/@njoseph/104617325372898963) on Mastodon.