[vlc-devel] Use case for the youtube-dl filter?

[Ross Finlayson]

I’ve read the recent threads about the proposed “youtube-dl filter” with interest, because I am an avid user of youtube-dl.  I use it several times each day to download (ad-free!) video files from YouTube (and other sites), which I later play (when I have free time) using VLC.

But I’m struggling to figure out why one would want youtube-dl’s functionality embedded within VLC.  What benefit would this give you?  For most videos, youtube-dl works by downloading the video track, then the audio track, then merging them together (into a .mp4 or .mkv file).  VLC could not play the stream until youtube-dl has finished its work.

VLC can already play a YouTube stream directly, from its URL.  That’s presumably also the case for most other URLs that point only to video streams (i.e., without a web page).  But if you have video that’s embedded within a web page (i.e., with text), then why would you want to give the page’s URL to VLC?  If you did this, you wouldn’t be able to read the page’s text.  Why not instead just load the page into a web browser (to read the text), then - if you want to save the embedded video, run youtube-dl in a console window, pasting the page’s URL as argument.  That’s what I do (again, several times each day).

So I don’t understand why anyone would want youtube-dl embedded within VLC.  What am I missing?


Ross Finlayson
Live Networks, Inc.
http://www.live555.com/