Can I Run Youtube Entirely From My Terminal? (No Browser) 

Hi everyone! First off, I want to thank you all so much for the insane amounts of support / feedback and all around great discussions and suggestions. It's always a pleasure to read so many different opinions and ideas, especially as I try to tackle projects with many unknown factors to me, so thanks for teaching me stuff as well! Now, I noticed a lot of you suggested adding a couple of things, and I'll go in order: 1. A requirements.txt file - I mean yeah, duhh, idk how I forgot about that one, consider it done. 2. Add support for subtitles - Also, great suggestion so I went and did just that. You can now specify if you want to use subtitles and in which language using some new flags: --subtitles, -s | --subtitles-lang, -l. If none are found, it'll try to get autogenerated ones. I hope this is a pretty satisfying solution, and maybe an alleviator for point 4. 3. Add support for RGB - Again, awesome idea (I mean they all are tbf), but for this one I had to sneak some trade-offs in, as for some reason, to this day and age, there are enough terminals that don't even support colors by default, nevermind a large palette of them. So I decided to use the basic ANSI-8 color palette (let's just embrace the vintage style ig) when rendering them, and also made it so it's disabled by default, in case your terminal doesn't support it. Also I should mention that, due to the fact that the project is based around an on-the-fly way of running, with everything rendered in real time, adding colors is quite the intensive task, so if you're set on using them, consider playing around with the frame size. You can enable this using the --colors, -c flag. Ah, also if the basic palette is too narrow for your tastes, I made it so you can expand the ANSIConstants.COLORS dictionary - just make sure to follow the established structure, and also beware that the more colors there are to choose from, the slower the conversion. 4. And now for the final and most debated point - audio. As you might surmise from that nod in point 2, I decided against adding support for audio. I fiddled with the idea and tried some implementations, but I realized the added complexity would slow down the app, and raise a lot (and I mean a lot) of syncing problems, because, compared to other video-to-ASCII converters, this one does everything in real time, so merging the audio and video at the end into a file is out of the question. * Also I expanded the README file so there is more info about how to use the damn thing. ** Also also fixed the color scheme (it was inverted if the background of the terminal was darker than the characters, which is pretty much the base case, so... thanks for pointing it out), allowing to specify if the color scheme should be inverted or not and also (the 3rd one) now it's possible to render using Unicode characters instead of the default ASCII ones - just make sure your terminal fonts support Unicode. All of these are commited to the same repo: github.com/icitry/RU-vidCLI

great! now add full RGB support and make it 8k HDR

Linux users removing bloat:

Literally this is a good option for dopamine detoxers

just watched this video again using the tool. text was a bit hard to read, which is funny, because its a literal terminal made for text lmao

Reminds me of a decade ago when I was a kid and my only computer was a raspberry pi. It couldn't run youtube in a browser, so I installed a CLI interface for it that would let you search videos with the keyboard and then write the video directly to the framebuffer device.

linux users would rather make a custom JS engine than just using a web browser

Dude! This is far out stuff! This reminds me of, back in 1990 when we were making "video" with ANSI characters (in color), frame by frame. I wish I had a tape drive to read these old tapes - lot's of crazy ass code we did back then (and had 2 BBSes running continually). Great times!

At first i thought this was just going to be some youtube-dl frontend for selecting videos to open in mpv... Holy shit this is even better :D

3:41, this guy is fully dedicated, he even bothered fixing the responsive issues, lmao. I totally lost it.

Cool project, now play Bad Apple on it!

No, the actual usable youtube in text based environment is tty + framebuffer (fbdev) + mpv with framebuffer support + mps-youtube

Does this support ads? If not, you better expect them coming for you over their TOS /s This is the final boss for RU-vid in their war against ad-block lmao Really great work btw. I'm blown away how well you got it to work.

Awesome video! Dude you put in effort and the best part is, its not like it was extreme effort but it was so much more then i would've for a youtube CLI! You totally made one better!!! Im gunna subscribe for more fun coding with different clis and apis ❤️

Advanced AA libs can use the shape of characters to better represent multiple pixels than just average them, which can lead to much better results.

Yeah, i'm just overwhelmed by the video quality; I've been watching every .000000000000004K video out there.

Now i can finally watch youtube from my Ubuntu Server

I feel like a simple fix that would've made the videos look so much better would've been to simply... invert the character list. Since the characters are white and the background is blue, it makes sense to use the densest character with the lighter pixels, not the darker ones.

What about... sound?

You are an excellent software engineer. Great video.

icitry: Builds a CLI YT player to have less bloat Also icitry: Processes raw frames in Python...

This is awesome, you should try using a color library or something. Though this would likely complicate it a lot it would be worth a shot.

you can get double resolution and full RGB by displaying a half block with a custom background color and foreground color. as a side effect this also removes the stretching

This was a great video! I now wanna try it in PHP as well 😬

Cool project idea! I think you could implement colors though, not really sure about how to do it in windows, but under linux I think you could play around with the terminal emulator's colorscheme

dang the intro made me fall asleep so good

I mean, for example for Linux at least, there is the Kitty terminal which supports images?

(Edit: just read your pinned comment) audio world be nice.. hopefully someone figures out a simple & efficient way to implement it some day. I'm honestly not trolling here, I enjoyed this and it's been something on my todo list! And I also know I've seen other command line. Terminal video players do it in the past. Although it's been years

I genuinely want to try this!

This is really really cool but I wish that you would do it with the graphical protocol in kitty. Since you are still going to be using the full bandwidth when downloading the video, it would be nice to show it for real.

No sixels? Not even colors? No audio? Windows is truly abomination

They probably are less worried about their algorithm and more about apps that can replace yt apps and in result, their premium features and can remove or replace their ads. Algorithm changes, maybe even daily and for different users is probably different anyway, but they fight with for example with yt vanced for years now. They don't want to block all functionalities, but want to make competition worse than it could be, as bad as they can. What about... sound? Not possible?

Awesome video, your code is so clean, it appreciate the architectural design haha Is there a repo for this? Id really like to fork it and try make it colour with some health threading abuse. Might even pull out the c++

bro the mr beast edit lmaooooo insane idea, excecuted brilliantly.

you should have the "pixels" inverted and add a couple more blank spaces ' ' to the string. it will give you a better result

Amazing, Love it

1:18 I loved that part

"...or does it?" *vsause music starts playing* im dying 🤣

Excellent work

Well daaaaammmmnnnn! Subscribed!

He just rickrolled everyone watching the video

We now need the audio

Your ascii conversion is inverted. You are making a video player but you don't care about the image at all?

you should look into the kitty graphics protocol if you want to keep working on this

This is how youtube was back in 1995 on DOS. Reminds me of the good old days watching Felix the Cat YTPs and lets plays of Minecraft on Virtual Boy. Good times.

for the love of god, the only thing this needs is rgb. that is. nice job.

It is unironically batter than actual RU-vid: 1. You can watch it without ads 2. You don't have shorts all over your screen 3. Search should be functional instead of showing random videos that "you might also like" You really have to implement sound thought speaker and \a symbol. I know it wouldn't really work(

Duh, im watching this video in my computer's terminal, easy stuff bro.

you can find everything on youtube for real.

And ofc I've watched this on the terminal :>

I wonder if you use colorama for printing coloured ascii to terminal. Heh that'd be interesting

We can definitely survive the apocalypse now

Very cool project, what about instead of sound you somehow use the subtitles?

This is art.

The Sponsorblock and RU-vid Plugin for MPV makes this actually a legit viable option. Just a lot less janky, haha.

I WILL SUBSCRIBE, but please make more terminal apps, like for spotify or whatever else, i would love to have this run on a remote stream, these days theres not many people use the terminal like a genius

your terminal ASCII palette seems to be inversed: dark parts are light and light parts are dark

i had the idea yesterday to do that and was going to code it today lol

lets play the h1t1 video for the weirdest ways to play his video!

👍 now add RGB and Sound Support (I would sadly use this it had that…)

This is awesome

you should make the ascii colored (most cli support it) kind of like neofetch

Terminal supports color, using ansi escaoe codes. would be interesting to them used in the video

sub deservered. Such a great project, you inspired me to do the same and if i do and publish it to github, i won't forget to mention you.

This is perfect.

Haha😂 i like the idea You are crazy man

Instead of doing ascii black and white you could've done Unicode Upper Half Block foreground and background color keycodes in the terminal

Yep, long overdue.

This would be funny to do to avoid ads 😂

The video player is badass

Wouldn't a monospaced font be better to use instead of a user defined aspect ratio?

when i clicked this i thought "lol i wonder how wild itd be to make it ascii based" cuz i expected it to just load frames at a time... ur actually doin it. absolute madlad. im stupid so this may sound stupid but if you got it running in neovim so i could watch primeagen in neovim while he talks about neovim, i think we could achieve world peace.

You need to add captions!

Terminals can show colors right ? I feel like there is way to make this works for real

You "Almost" mentioned my first 8th-grade teacher's name (before the switch).

You got something wrong: Hipster cli tools made so that you dont have to use an official UI client and can use the terminal are written in rust, not python. Also use Linux, rice that terminal and add colors.

Amazing. Now implement sound.

Why don't you use sixels for rendering the videos?

Love you bro

The amount of times I got Rick Rolled in this video is insane.

Could you use the subtitles potentially? Maybe this could be a future feature

good job!

aint no shot i just got rick rolled in ASCII

look into the sixel protocol and get video that actually looks good in the terminal

It's neat, it itches my newly aquired terminal and vim motion monkey brain, but it's not practical :(

imagine using fore for the coloration oh my that would be a shitfuck

I wonder how this video would display in the cli

Well... A couple of years ago I setup a on of my sever to converter news video for the RU-vidr that I follow into my RSS client... So I I found you project cool 😎 useless but cool 😎

I just wanna say one big WOW!

Now let it play bad apple

you should make it colorful

How did you manage to make it stream the video off of youtube into your App?

if there is a way you should add subtitles since there is no sound

9:33 "...beginning a simple oauth flow..." is it just me or is oauth always a massive pain in the backside to get working properly?

I made like the same thing a few months ago lol but with just the video Great minds think alike

Underrated

Please can anyone tell me what alarm sound that is? 00:05 I swear I've heard a song that starts with it!

How wonderfully unuseless!

Is the distribution or use of yt dlp in any capacity illegal ?

0:59 IS THAT JOHNNY SINS 💀💀💀💀