--- /dev/null
+---
+title: "Adventures with YouTube"
+date: 2020-08-02T05:40:09+05:30
+lastmod: 2019-11-04T15:40:09+05:30
+tags : [ "free-software", "YouTube", "privacy", "MPV", "NimCoon" ]
+categories : [ "free-software", "privacy" ]
+layout: post
+type: "post"
+highlight: false
+---
+
+## Why?
+
+
+I stopped using my Google account several years ago. This means that I can no
+longer subscribe to YouTube channels directly in YouTube.
+
+I have been playing YouTube links that I find directly using the [MPV](https://mpv.io) player,
+which internally uses [youtube-dl](https://youtube-dl.org) to fetch the video.
+
+
+
+Not using the YouTube
+website directly has several advantages. YouTube's revenue is based on the
+number of advertisements you see on the website. So, the more time you spend on
+YouTube the more money they earn. It is easy to get around the advertisements by
+using ad-blockers, but the site itself is optimized for binge-watching with
+features such as auto-play being turned on by default. If your objective is to
+just watch one useful video and leave, YouTube's website doesn't make it easy.
+
+## Playing YouTube videos on the desktop
+
+Over the years, I experimented with several solutions for playing YouTube videos
+without going to the YouTube website.
+
+One of the oldest solutions in this category is SMTube + SMPlayer. SMPlayer is a
+GUI player based on MPlayer. [SMTube](https://www.smtube.org/) is add-on for
+[SMPlayer](http://www.smplayer.info/) that can fetch YouTube videos from a proxy
+called [Tonvid](https://tonvid.com). On clicking on any of the videos in the
+interface, it launches the video in SMPlayer. It can also be configured to use
+other backends like MPV + youtube-dl (my personal favorite).
+
+
+
+There are two other YouTube proxies worth mentioning:
+1. [HookTube](hooktube.com)
+2. [Invidious](invidio.us)
+
+HookTube is a closed-source project with some amount of advertising. I used this
+till the better free software alternative Invidious was released. These proxies
+work by downloading the video to the server first and then streaming the video
+to the user. There is usually a noticeable lag in fetching the video unless it
+has already been cached. Sometimes, the YouTube API key used might run out of
+its daily allowed quota. This will be less of a problem if you self-host
+Invidious.
+
+[FreeTubeApp](https://freetubeapp.io) is an electron-based desktop app that
+allows subscriptions. It fetches its search results using an Invidious backend
+and subscriptions using RSS feeds. It is easy to import and export
+subscriptions, since they are basically just RSS feeds.
+
+
+
+For a while, I also used a bash script called `ytview` from the
+[Bash-Snippets](https://github.com/alexanderepstein/Bash-Snippets) project to
+search and play YouTube videos from the commandline. However, over time I was
+dissatisfied with the limitations of this script. I extended some of its
+features, but writing bash is not fun. So, I ended up writing a commandline
+YouTube player called [NimCoon](https://gitlab.com/njoseph/nimcoon). You can see
+the list of supported features in the [project
+page](https://gitlab.com/njoseph/nimcoon/-/blob/master/README.md#features). I
+keep adding features to this project as and when I need them.
+
+## RSS Feeds? 🤔
+
+Once I exported and imported the list of subscriptions on my FreeTubeApp from
+one machine to another, I realized that I might as well import the subscriptions
+into my RSS feed reader. The feed reader I use is [Tiny Tiny
+RSS](https://tt-rss.org/). It is self-hosted on my
+[FreedomBox](https://freedombox.org). The file with the RSS feeds that I
+imported from FreeTubeApp was added as a separate category called "YouTube
+Subscriptions" in TT-RSS.
+
+TT-RSS was able to fetch the videos from my YouTube subscriptions. All I need
+from the feed reader is just the video name and URL. However, TT-RSS decided to
+embed the YouTube video into the page itself which my Firefox extension uMatrix
+was happy to block. I ended up having pages that look like this:
+
+
+
+I needed a way of playing the video links from my feed reader in my preferred
+player (MPV, of course). I found a useful Firefox extension for this purpose
+called [ff2mpv](https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv).
+
+
+
+ff2mpv makes use of the "native messaging hosts" feature in Firefox that allows you to
+invoke a system executable from Firefox. In this case, ff2mpv uses a [Python
+script](https://github.com/woodruffw/ff2mpv/blob/master/ff2mpv.py#L12) to invoke
+the MPV player with a YouTube URL.
+
+A right-click option called "Play in MPV" is added to every hyperlink in
+Firefox, which when clicked loads the video in MPV. So far, so good.
+
+But I found myself trying to play [PeerTube](https://joinpeertube.org/#/) video
+links that I find on the [Fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)
+the same way. Well, MPV + youtube-dl can still play PeerTube videos but it uses
+the HTTP stream instead of the WebTorrent stream and doesn't always pick the
+highest resolution available. Fortunately, both of these problems have already
+been solved in NimCoon. All I had to do was to change the executable invoked by
+ff2mpv's Python script from `mpv` to `nimcoon`.
+
+Before:
+```python
+ args = ["mpv", "--no-terminal", "--", url]
+```
+After:
+```python
+ args = ["/home/joseph/.nimble/bin/nimcoon", url]
+```
+
+There isn't much else to do in the RSS feed reader and the browser. Any
+improvements that I make to this setup will be in NimCoon.
+
+## What else?
+
+While I was on this journey, many people recommended that I use elfeed in emacs
+for YouTube subscriptions and use MPV to play the videos. If I had taken that
+route, maybe most of NimCoon would've been implemented in emacs Lisp instead of
+the Nim language. Using a self-hosted RSS feed reader gives me the advantage of
+being able to use it from multiple devices. Also, I was already using TT-RSS
+well before I had heard of elfeed. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
+
+If you're interested in finding out what other tools I use for reasons of
+privacy and digital minimalism, please check out my [Privacy
+Stack](https://njoseph.me/mediawiki/Privacy_Stack).
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