I've been consuming my YouTube videos via RSS and youtube-dl these days. I have a little python script that collects the video urls from the feed, downloads them, and then NewsBlur notifies me of the new videos. NewsBlur has become the way I find new academic papers (arXiv/journal RSS feeds), consume the news, webcomics, and YouTube videos.
Youtube-dl is an incredible tool, and supports far more than YouTube. I was pleased as punch yesterday to discover that Shoshana Zuboff's talk (shared to HN) on a video site I'd never previously heard of was supported. There are other related tools. VLC, both the desktop client (Linux, MacOS, Windows), and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Android client, can also stream video, most certainly from YouTube. Given the s…
No switch is needed anymore, mpv has built in support for youtube-dl now through the ytdl.lua extension which automatically uses youtube-dl when necessary. Simply run `mpv [URL]`