Start videos from the commandline

tldr: Just use mpv VIDEOURL to start watching.

Lets say you want to watch a video, how would you do it from the commandline?

local video file

If the file you want to see is already on your computer, then this can’t be too hard. Just go with your favorite video player (vlc in this example):

vlc ~/Videos/Nyan_Cat.mkv

videos from the internet

So what if the video isn’t already downloaded? Lets say we want to look at this YouTube Video: Nyan Cat.

No problem, we can download it right away with youtube-dl.

youtube-dl -o "~/Videos/Nyan_Cat.mkv" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH2-TGUlwu4" && vlc ~/Videos/Nyan_Cat.mkv

The reason why we don’t use curl/wget here is that we don’t have the url of the video file itself (and if we did, we could just continue to feed it into vlc directly). The video is embedded into a website and there is no trivial way to get its url. If we ask youtube-dl nicely (with --get-url) he will tell us, but at this point we have used youtube-dl anyway, so what’s the point?

Youtube-dl is quite amazing. It supports a great number of video sites and file formats. It also supports playlists, logins for private videos and downloading the audio only. Being controlled from the commandline makes it scriptable, but the best thing about it is that it has been under continuous development for many years now, catching up with all the api-changes from all the supported websites.

streaming, not downloading

Downloading works, but what if we want to start to watch straight away, waiting for the download to finish is unnecessary (especially if the video is a big one, like the 10 hour version of the video above).

Youtube-dl can write the file to stdout (--output -) and tell the video-player to play from stdin (vlc - in this case).

youtube-dl --output - 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZ7oFKsKzY' | vlc -

Unfortunatelly there is no easy way to jump positions in the videos itself.

mpv to the rescue

vlc has a big fanbase, but for quite some time I preferred to use mplayer, because it has the most minimal gui imaginable (a window whith the video in it, nothing more) and is easier to use from the keyboard. Then I found mpv, a pimped version of mplayer - and everything is perfect. Much like feh for images, it does all I want and goes out of the way otherwise. I just love it.

Mpv makes all the problems from above trivial.

mpv 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZ7oFKsKzY'

It uses youtube-dl, can show subtitles in different languages, jumps between positions and has an easy syntax. It is free software (like all the other programs I talked about in this post) and its development continues steadily.

Why not use a browser, like a normal person?

Using a native video-player comes with some cool bonuses. You can configure and finetune it, use media-keys on your keyboard, it plays nicely with the rest of your setup and your window-manager etc.

The only downside I see is that the resolution is not adjusted on the fly if the connection is not good enough to stream in full resolution. That’s why I still use a browser for twitch-streams.