mpv

May 7, 2020

mpv is super powerful multimedia player. Though I use SMPlayer sometimes, SMPlayer can either use mplayer or mpv as its multimedia engine.

I found a useful usage of mpv, that’s to play YouTube playlist through command-line, without opening the video or through web browser.

To invoke a YouTube playlist, we must make sure the playlist URL has only the list parameter, if there is v parameter, then it will not work. Eg,

will not work, but

will work.

After we have this URL, then we can play the playlist with mpv,

mpv --no-video 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLdGBzlQIzMHdw2fc7N9TZCO-01T6HqBFG'

We can also play the playlist with shuffling feature,

mpv --no-video --shuffle 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLdGBzlQIzMHdw2fc7N9TZCO-01T6HqBFG'

To navigate the playlist, we can use the keyboard keys “<” and “>”.