youtube-viewer

> 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

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

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

Cli-junkie brofist! I only drop out of the command line for occasional one-off browser stuff. Depending on your current familiarity with things, I can't recommend enough simply combing through the tools in coreutils, util-linux, find-utils etc. If you take just three or so a day, by the end of a few months you'll have a solid survey-understanding of what almost every *nix shell has available. Apart from that, here are some I use and enjoy: [0]:http://abook.sourceforge.net/ -- Vintage address book; Plays well with mutt [1]:http://git-annex.branchable.com -- A better Dropbox, and via git! [2]:https://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/ -- Index and search the contents and metadata of (pdf, word, etc) documents [3]:https://www.roaringpenguin.com/products/remind -- Vintage and sophisticated tool for doing calendrical stuff. [4]:https://github.com/

If you want a standalone app, I would recommand youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer CLI and GTK!