The other day someone was complaining about the new ad blocker-blocker on YouTube and I mentioned that it might be fun to write a Firefox extension that would just load up yt-dlp and play the video through mpv.
It turns out, writing a Firefox extension is easy and tricking Firefox into launching yt-dlp isn’t much harder (though it does require some annoying configuration on the user’s end).
Anyway, if you’re a Linux user, feel free to try it out. I don’t know how much I’m going to pour into this, but as an exercise of “can this be done”, it was pretty good for a few hours on a Friday night.
I don’t think I have it in me to put together a video, but I can describe it if you like.
Once you install the extension and follow the setup instructions, you just go to a YouTube page. The extension adds an ugly button to the top-left of the page that says “bypass”. When you click it, Firefox launches
yt-dlp [the URL you're at] -o - | mpv -which basically just downloads the video and streams the output through thempvvideo player. So now you’re watching just the video, with no web page necessary.