May 19, 2020

Over the past few days, I figured out how to use YouTube without using YouTube, which has been the coolest and best breakthrough ever.

Enter Indivio.us: “https://invidio.us/”

It’s basically a website which you can run with a JavaScript-less browser like w3m which allows you to search YouTube without ever be thrown a targeted ad, nor be given any mention of any forced suggested videos.

What you can do is to literally pipe the link you’re currently on, and then output it to mpv on a separate shell window.

This basically allows you to stream any YouTube video you want with mpv, again WITHOUT USING YOUTUBE.

This is totally awesome, and just helps overall as YouTube has been crazy with too much targeted content lately.

I’m just the kind of person who wants to be on their site for Linux info, music, and that’s about it. Other than that, could care less about any other content period.

That being said, give it a shot. There’s a really good video by the YouTube user, ‘gotbletu’, that goes over how to add links to Linux clipboard in ‘w3m’ which I highly recommend.

Here’s the video from ‘gotbletu’ on w3m external commands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzgCgarUa_M&list=PLqv94xWU9zZ35Yv0s6zMID5JoS8qu19Kh&index=5

I now have remapped the “EXTERN” function in w3m to be the ’e’ key, and also remapped the “EXTERN_LINK” function in w3m to be the ‘f’ key.

Combined with the two separate macros from the video from ‘gotbletu’, I can easily copy the current URL link (EXTERN) to the clipboard OR the one I’m hovering over (EXTERN_LINK), so that I can pipe it into mpv to stream YouTube videos without ever involving YouTube.

Here are my current modifications to the ‘keymap’ file in ~/.w3m: code ######################## ## CUSTOM KEYBINDINGS ## ########################

keymap e EXTERN

keymap f EXTERN_LINK code

Also, you can still output your YouTube Subscriptions into an OPML XML file to be imported by an RSS feed reader like Newsboat here: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager/

It took a while as it seems YouTube hid this feature, but alas I found it, and was super happy I did.

You can basically download this file, and ‘cd’ to your Downloads directory, and run the following command to import it into Newsboat: newsboat -i (name of file)

Also, here is the more example of a YouTube based OPML XML link as well for a given YouTube channel which exposes some possibilities for cool scripting possibilities as you can add any of the XML tags as ‘&’ parameters for the URL itself: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA

Example: From that example above, you can see the “<yt:channelId>” tag present.

This means that you can add the ‘channel_id’ as a parameter to the base URL pattern: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?

BECOMES:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2eYFnH61tmytImy1mTYvhA

This allows you to specifically look throughout a YouTube user’s videos, and would allow you to create a OPML file yourself for YouTube if you needed to.

The More You Know :)

Also, I totally want to learn ‘pywal’ which allows you to change your terminal’s color scheme based on your current wallpaper background: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pywal

Plus, I installed ‘qtox’ so that I can get into video chats as well, so I’m pretty stoked about that as well.

More stuff to learn this week ^_^