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mps-youtube
yewtube
Python2015–2023
mps-youtube / yewtube

yewtube

yewtube, forked from mps-youtube , is a Terminal based YouTube player and downloader. No Youtube API key required.

Command Line
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
17Distinct people
31Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
8.8KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

yewtube, forked from mps-youtube , is a Terminal based YouTube player and downloader. No Youtube API key required.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year31 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-11-09 16:46:31 UTC to 2023-05-20 19:06:29 UTC.

024682015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 2 submissions, 4 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC624
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

31 sources
dredmorbius·May 20, 2023
Does this rely on an API key? There have been earlier tools which permitted command-line / terminal access to Youtube, one of the best being mps-youtube: <https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube> That permitted searches for terms and channels (though not subtitle text within channel AFAIK), for music specifically, and compiliation of either temporary or saved playlists, with the option to play through a full selection of videos. It also offered either full-video or audio-only playback. Google killed it by throttling API-key access. Discussed previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32919545> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28571421>
In Show HN: YouTube Full Text Search – Search all of a channel from the commandline
dredmorbius·Nov 11, 2022
I'll load the URL directly either in mpv (desktop or Mobile via Termux), or VLC. Fuck YouTube entirely. The pain of using the Web interface is precisely the point, as someone's KPIs are steering users to apps. That's succeeding, though it's not YT's apps which are substituting.... I still miss the mps-yt app, though I'd found an alternative recently, yewtube (still need to try it out). <https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191> <https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation>
In YouTube confirms that it has removed the “sort by oldest/newest” option
dredmorbius·Sep 21, 2022
The tool that I was in love with for a few months before Google / YouTube effectively killed it off was mpsyt / mps-youtube. <https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube> It was (well, still is) a terminal-based YouTube client which provided search, locally-managed playlists, choice of playback mode (video or audio-only), downloads, and a number of other features. YouTube quashed it with an API-key limitations such that it is now effectively unusable. But for a brief moment, YouTube content was accessible from a terminal window or console, without all the godawful dark patterns of the site itself. That was tremendously useful. These days I'll snag videos by URL via youtube-dl/ytdl, and/or mpv (which invokes those transparently). Not quite as magickal, but still pretty good. Hrm... Apparently there's a successor project, yewtube: <https
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://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube/issues/1191> <https://iamtalhaasghar.github.io/yewtube/#installation> I'm going to have to check that out...
In YouTube’s ‘dislike’ barely works according to new study on recommendations
dredmorbius·Jul 18, 2021
A nice alternative to add to the arsenal, along with Invidious (https://redirect.invidious.io/) and federated hosting alternatives such as PeerTube (https://joinpeertube.org/). The now-largely-unusable (thanks to API key limitations) mps-youtube command-line utility still remains the most useful interface to YouTube I've ever used. https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube - Runs without any browser at all. - From a console. - Without video, if you so specify. - Enables full search, can be limited to music posts only, includes both content and account search. That is, you can search for content matching terms, or for a username / account matching a term. Also playlists IIRC. - Can play based on a given account's videos / postings. - Individual items can be saved to a queue. Those may be ephemeral (session-only), or saved to disk. - Conte
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nt can be downloaded if preferred. - No YouTube account required, no play history on YouTube. The only feature missing that I can recall is the ability to blacklist specific accounts. A chief problem with clickbait, propaganda, baiting, and radicalisation channel proliferation is that the activities carry little risk. Yes, YouTube itself occasionally removes high-profile cases, but people themselves cannot say "never show me anything from this source again", at least last I checked. Curation of sources, and killing high-noise sources, continues to be my most effective techique for boosting S/N. That said, mps-youtube was and remains the best interface I've found for searching for, curating, and managing online video access to my interests and without any tracking or ads, both of which have massive negative social externalities. I'd used it fairly extensively for my own preferred use of the site: finding lectures (and occasionally book-readings or similar content), and queuing up playlists or downloading archives of those. Works on absolutely minimal hardware. YouTube apparently did all they could to kill this, and have largely succeeded.
In Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design
Labo333·Jul 26, 2020
I have used the Pinebook Pro as a main driver for nearly 6 months because my main died before isolation. > Alt-tabbing between Firefox and a terminal takes one second, as does switching between Firefox tabs. Using the OpenGL compositor (which should be the default in latests versions of Manjaro) is a lifesaver! Web apps are and will still be slow sometimes (I don't use slack but messenger can be sluggish). > Video playback on browsers is not really nice. Depends, YouTube is indeed quite slow (I think it became slower after some YouTube update), but if YouTube was optimized for speed there wouldn't be all those adds, right? I like to listen to YouTube music in the background, I use https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube for that and it works like a charm, uses 10% CPU and a few MB of RAM. I don't use mpsyt for video but I guess it woul
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d also improve your experience. Other websites (kissanime) work like a charm, even in 1080p. > Manjaro does not provide a way to disable tap-to-click True, but installing `xf86-input-synaptics` (although it's deprecated) provides such an option. Also, I use ctrl+F7 to disable the touchpad while I type large chunks of text. From the specs, one could think that the RAM is the problem but zram totally solves that (I have dozens of tabs open in Firefox, including heavy apps like Messenger, Trello and Overleaf). The slow CPU is a larger issue, with Gmail being so slow to load it's almost unusable (loading my mailbox takes 20s and creating a new email takes 3s). Overall, I find the machine very much usable though. I only have two complaints: - static noises - under "heavy" load (eg html5 games with compilation in the background), the alimentation is less powerful than what the machine consumes, which leads to the battery discharging. I wrote a guide on my setup that includes other tricks. Shameless plug: https://louisabraham.github.io/articles/pinebook-pro-setup.h...
In Pinebook Pro longer term usage report
user234683·Jul 17, 2020
> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember. > Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client? They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions. Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say: mps-yout
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ube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube Invidious: https://invidio.us/, https://github.com/iv-org/invidious youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local smtube: https://www.smtube.org/ Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube
In NewPipe – ad-free, open-source Android YouTube client
user234683·Nov 15, 2019
Newpipe (app for android): https://newpipe.schabi.org/ mps-youtube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local smtube: https://www.smtube.org/ Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube
In Invidious: an alternative front-end to YouTube
Funes-·Oct 14, 2019
My humble advice for anyone who comes across this thread: - Delete your Google account (if you can); - Install NewPipe [0] on Android; - Install gtk-youtube-viewer [1] on your computer; - Install mpsyt [2] if you'd like a terminal client. ---------------------------------------------------------------- [0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/ [1] https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer [2] https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
In “My Google account got suspended because of NewPipe”
dredmorbius·Jun 29, 2019
A few other mentions: * ranger is vim-inspired file manager with built-in viewers and extensive capabilities. In addition to POB (plain old bash) and mc, it's a go-to for me. https://github.com/ranger/ranger * TWIN is the Text WINdowing environment. Yes, it's a full-on windowmanager for console. Somewhat rusty, but if nothing else, a novelty. https://sourceforge.net/projects/twin/ * mutt: email, 'nuf said * irssi: IRC * surfraw; "elvi" providing CLI access to online tools and an Ecuadorian connection. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Surfraw * wikipedia2text: Wikipedia on the command line. https://packages.debian.org/stretch/wikipedia2text * tootstream: CLI Mastodon client. https://github.com/magicalraccoon/tootstream * mpv and mps-youtube: play media (audio and video) in console. mpv supports many sites and formats, wh
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ile mps-youtube specialises in everyone's favourite video monopoly. Both offer numerous compelling advantages over Web UIs, starting with no comments or recommendations. mpsyt's search and locally-managed playlist features are a real treat. https://mpv.io https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube * xine and mpv framebuffer and ascii-art (aalib) modes. Play full-screen video in console, either as framebuffer graphics, or rendered as text characters (not great, though novel). Bonus: try the 'bb' aalib demo. * bc, dc, units, and ipcalc; all forms of calculators, from general to RPN to units-aware to IP functions. * BSD Games. Because.
In Without a GUI: How to Live Entirely in a Terminal
userbinator·Mar 24, 2019
For many years I've used a few shell scripts to turn YouTube into a "radio" of sorts, basically going through search results for a specific term (usually a music genre) and playing each one. It works pretty well, and the only ad-like experience is when it decides to play something not-really-related-nor-actually-music that just showed up in the results, but IMHO the "what was that?" aspect is part of the fun. I'm clearly not the only one who came up with such an idea: https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
In Streaming video has surpassed cable subscriptions worldwide

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