Any plans to drop FFMPEG for playback when using youtube?

[masterofobzene]

Since ffmpeg is not fixing their code to play youtube as yt-dlp does (the famous workarounds to circumvent youtube's throttling) is it possible to drop the use of ffmpeg while playing URL-based videos? or at least the ones from youtube?
Right now is very difficult to play youtube videos, as it only caches 5 seconds and I have to let it buffer a lot.

For now I'm having to use MPC-BE since it doesn't have any problems with youtube. So I have mpv for local media and mpc-be for streaming.

[llyyr]

is it possible to drop the use of ffmpeg

no

but you can try forcing hls streams, they shouldn't be throttled.

[masterofobzene]

interesting... what is that black magic sir? can you share it?

[mrfragger]

mpv.conf

ytdl-raw-options = format-sort="proto"
ytdl-raw-options = extractor-args="youtube:skip=hls"
# 4320,2160,1440,1080,720,480,360,240,144
ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?360]+bestaudio/best

whenever there are issues must update yt-dlp and it fixes it

[masterofobzene]

Thank you non-creepy-anime-avatar good sir!
Will try it out.

[PietJanHein]

mpv.conf

ytdl-raw-options = format-sort="proto"
ytdl-raw-options = extractor-args="youtube:skip=hls"
# 4320,2160,1440,1080,720,480,360,240,144
ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?360]+bestaudio/best

whenever there are issues must update yt-dlp and it fixes it

I just tried this out with a YouTube-video, it didn't work. Without these lines added the video is being played in the best quality, for that video 1920x1080, with these lines added the resolution drops down to 640x360 in the same video. I tried it out twice with and without these lines in my mpv-config, I got the same result.

It would be wonderful if somehow the mpv-developers could prevent the throttling and not throw away cached video until the video gets closed. If you pause and timejump in a video then it is nice if that data still is there but I notice that mpv throws away the cached data while the video still is playing. With the amount of RAM which most users have on their motherboards these days that seems unnecessary. I tried out to set the cache-size larger than the size of the video but there seems to be a set maximum (in the code) which you can't go above.

I notice that mpv struggles more to open a video at any other time than the beginning. Most of the time as long as you start the video at 0 seconds and you don't pause the video for too long (dropped connection?) or timejump past the cached data it goes all right. As soon as you timejump past the cached data most of the times mpv gets stuck. For longer videos it is best to download the video first with yt-dlp.

[masterofobzene]

That is probably because you are telling mpv/yt-dlp that you want videos smaller or equal of 360p with this line:

ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?360]+bestaudio/best

Try changing it to something like:
ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best

[PietJanHein]

That is probably because you are telling mpv/yt-dlp that you want videos smaller or equal of 360p with this line:

ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?360]+bestaudio/best

Try changing it to something like: ytdl-format = bestvideo*[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best

Yes, silly me. That indeed works, if I set it to 1440 or 2160 then it drops down to the highest resolution which is available if it is missing.