Up until now I never felt the need to play Youtube videos anywhere other than my browser (at least music ones), but Youtube’s politics of pausing videos every now and then finally pissed me off so much that I decided - that’s it. I’m ending it.

There are multiple (valid) solutions to this problem, one of them being writing a browser extension. I decided to go the other way, why exactly I might explain in one of my future posts.

Because I’m a big fan of VLC I was surprised it doesn’t support playing Youtube videos out of the box. Or does it?

Simply adding Youtube video URL to playlist and playing it didn’t work. VLC managed to parse video name but after that removed the video from playlist. I figured something might be wrong with the Youtube parser. You bet it was!

Luckily, VLC is an open source software. I pranced to Github repository and found out they support more than just Youtube. The list includes:

• Soundcloud
• Vimeo
• Twitch
• DailyMotion
• Jamendo etc.

Perfect. But I still haven’t figured out why playing Youtube videos doesn’t work. According to Github repo latest stable version is 3.0.x, version 4.0 is still in development phase. Let’s check installed version on my computer (using Ubuntu 18.04 btw).

vlc --version

returns: 
VLC media player 3.0.8 Vetinari (revision 3.0.8-0-gf350b6b5a7)
VLC version 3.0.8 Vetinari (3.0.8-0-gf350b6b5a7)
Compiled by buildd on lcy01-amd64-014.buildd (Sep 11 2019 11:39:37)

Seems like something was changed between September and now. Ok, let’s find out where VLC is installed. You might think following command would work:

which vlc

returns:
/usr/bin/vlc

Nope, it just return path to VLC binary. Not quite there. But where is it?

Few minutes later, looks like there is a similar command which returns more detailed information like path to binary, source and man pages. Perfect!

whereis vlc

returns:
vlc: /usr/bin/vlc /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/vlc /usr/share/vlc /usr/share/man/man1/vlc.1.gz

Seems /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/vlc is the way to go. Copy the content of this file to

/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/vlc/lua/playlist/youtube.lua

and restart VLC.

That’s it, fixed it! Youtube videos can now be played directly in your VLC player without annoying pauses.