tube - Youtube CLI
About
tube was a Python script for extracting video metadata (I.E. the actual video stream URL) from an arbitrary Youtube (youtube.com, youtu.be) URL and then launch a player of choice (such as MPV or VLC) to watch the video, or pipe the output from yt-dlp to said player.
I say was, and I mean it: after years of faithful service, I no longer even use it myself. As of 2024, I have decided to stop offering it for download here. Keeping up with Youtube's race against scraping is, sadly, something I have neither the time nor energy for. Besides, there are other, better tools for this these days.
For historical reasons, a screenshot has been preserved below.
Screenshot
Example tubeshell session, showing the search function.