youtube-local

My project here is similar: https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local It keeps everything in the browser while still being local to the machine

Somewhat related self-plug: Self-hosted browser client for watching YouTube anonymously (Python): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local It supports downloading all the raw formats (the video only ones, audio only ones, and the 360p & 720p integrated formats). More meant for watching than downloading, but some more advanced downloading features, such as merging audio+video with ffmpeg to get more downloadable qualities and auto-downloading options for playlists are planned.

You might enjoy youtube-local: https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local

> 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

If your concern is privacy, I've developed this project which routes everything through Tor except for the video file: https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local There is also this project which is similar but much better, more polished, and with more features than what I have currently, but I haven't tried it to see if it supports a similar kind of selective proxying: https://github.com/omarroth/invidious Then there's Freetube, which supports proxying but I'm not sure of the details either. It doesn't scrape Youtube itself as far as I know; instead it consults with the main Invidous instance at invidio.us which provides an api: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube