I hate flash : Watching youtube from terminal

I hate flash. It’s taking a very long time dying but it needs to die. Sadly there are a lot of amazing websites that use it. Fortunately I found a quick trick to watching youtube videos from the terminal. This requires youtube-dl and mplayer. Both should be in most major Linux distros repositories.

mplayer -fs $(youtube-dl -g -f 22 youtube.com/watch?v=3V35jvY0u7I)

The key tags are the “-g” that prints out the actual video location for mplayer and “-f 22″ is an optional tag for selecting the quality / codec Without this tag it will load the highest quality video. You can find a complete list of format tag numbers on the YouTube Wikipedia page.