3 ms·
Ask HN: Why isn't YouTube-dl part of VLC?
If VLC supported youtube-dl (both are open source software so I don't see why not) then one could copy and paste a URL from YouTube from a video or playlist and save/play it in VLC. Specially if VLC for iOS did this would be great.
My current flow is copy the video URL, use terminal on my laptop to download the video/audio with youtube-dl, open iphone.local in my browser while VLC is open on my phone and upload the file there. This could be simplified a lot specially for playlists.
Maybe a more generic question is why aren't there more integrations of the form x in y while both are open source and would clearly improve the user experience?
- gostsamo 6y agoAt minimum, one of them is c++ project with lua extensions, while the other is a python app with single purpose and relatively large size due to the packed python interpreter. So, a merge would increase the binary size of vlc for a single function that is not core to VLC and not everyone will use.
- soheil 6y agoHow big is a minimal python interpreter? It seems to me relative to the size of VLC adding python support shouldn't be a huge increase.
- gostsamo 6y agoWe are talking tens of megabytes. Even cutting the base installer in order to keep only the functionality YoutubeDL needs will have big size impact while increasing build infrastructure and efforts for a single functionality that not everyone uses. So, whoever needs it, better download it themselves. An option is to create a VLC plugin which will download and install YoutubeDL and will interface it if the user asks.
- jolmg 6y agoVLC already supports Youtube URLs via an included lua script[1]. You can feed the URL as an argument or open it from a VLC window with Ctrl+n, which is equivalent to using the menu for "Media > Open Network Stream...". It's failing me at the moment, though. Perhaps the script needs updating. It's a valid argument to perhaps modify the script to use youtube-dl when available, since it might be more reliable. Merging the 2 projects doesn't make sense when one can just optionally depend on the other. If you're looking for a video player that uses youtube-dl to support Youtube URLs, mpv[2] does that. Just feed it Youtube URLs as arguments to make your playlist. You can also pass in the option --no-video to just play the sound of the youtube video. You can probably pass in options to mpv to play all the videos of a Youtube playlist URL, too. > Maybe a more generic question is why aren't there more integrations of the form x in y while both are open source and would clearly improve the user experience? Because it's work. If you see something is lacking in open source, it's because nobody has wanted it badly enough to do the work themselves. And even if somebody did, choosing to share their work is another matter. [1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-3.0/-/blob/d590d61de4001c9ddb155613bbe9b269a9fc9daa/share/lua/playlist/youtube.lua https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-3.0/-/blob/d590d61de4... [2] https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/