> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I rememb

> does Youtube actively do anything to prevent such clients from existing? Not really, no. Though they took some kind of legal action against Hooktube I remember. > Will they one day change the service so the video stream urls are generated randomly, or obfuscated, and break every 3rd party client? They already do this to some extent for videos with copyrighted content, but it's not very aggressive and has long been reverse-engineered and dealt with. They use a series of three string transformations like reversal, replacing a single letter, etc. on an alphanumeric signature parameter. The sequence of transformations varies per video but can be extracted from the Javascript source using regular expressions. Here are some available clients I know of. I do not know if there any that use floating videos or dim the desktop as you say: mps-youtube (terminal-only): https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube youtube-viewer: https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer https://github.com/trizen/youtube-viewer FreeTube (which uses the invidious API): https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube Invidious: https://invidio.us/ https://invidio.us/, https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious youtube-local (my project): https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local smtube: https://www.smtube.org/ https://www.smtube.org/ Minitube: https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube, https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube https://github.com/flaviotordini/minitube