A few days back I came across an interesting project on git known as ytfzf. To cut things short it scrapes youtube videos without using its API and lets you view videos with thumbnails and download them through youtube-dl.
Sounds interesting right. So I went ahead and gave this script a short.
The installation was pretty simple. It needs four things to work out of the box.
Youtube-dl, fzf, mpv and ueberzug
If you’re on arch, installation is pretty simple,
“sudo pacman -S youtube-dl fzf mpv ueberzug”
and for the main script, we’ll use AUR. I’m using the paru helper for AUR so it goes this way
“paru -S ytfzf”
After the installation, you can use ytfzf right away.
What makes ytfzf really cool is videos can be searched and played and downloaded all from the terminal without opening the browser.
To search you simply type in
ytfzf “search query” -t
here the search query is the video that you are looking for and -t argument lets you display the thumbnails of the video.
The search query generates a video list with thumbnails in the above command. Now to simply play the video press Enter and we’ll have our video playing on MPV player.
Trending videos show up
ytfzf -Tt
to see trending videos with thumbnails
You can use this script as a music player too.
Ytfzf -ml “search query”
the m arguments only plays audio from a video and the l argument takes you back to the search after audio playback is over.
Music opens up in the background in MPV
Subscriptions can be added too
you can add your preferred channels too by using the config file at
~/.config/ytfzf/subscriptions
You need to go to youtube, to the videos section of the channel and copy the URL there and paste it into the subscriptions file and save it.
“Ytfzf -St”
the -S will show the 10 results from subscriptions along with the t argument it also shows thumbnails.
-d for downloads
downloading videos is pretty simple you just need to add the -d argument to search and the video will get downloaded.
To conclude the ease with which ytfzf works is amazing, I personally have been using it for music and it works fabulously instead of going to youtube. It’s fast and does the job. This is my go-to for youtube now.
