Note: mps-youtube is a much better alternative to this project.
youtube-play is a command-line utility for Windows written in C#, which uses youtube-dl and ffmpeg to stream music from YouTube.
I needed a way to play music from YouTube without having Chrome open with a video playing in the background. That's why youtube-play is very lightweight. A quick analysis with Process Explorer shows 0.00…-0.01… % CPU usage and ~20 MB of RAM usage (including all sub-processes).
youtube-play needs youtube-dl and ffplay to be in your PATH.
The fastest and easiest way to do this is using Chocolatey.
To install Chocolatey, open cmd as Administrator, and run the following command:
@"%SystemRoot%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe" -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET "PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin"Then execute the following command, to install youtube-dl and the ffmpeg package. By installing you accept licenses for the packages.
choco install youtube-dl ffmpeg -yBeware: currently, the ffmpeg build from Chocolatey doesn't support the webm format. To avoid this, use an official nightly build
After that, you are ready to download youtube-play. Recent release with binaries can be found here.
Run youtube-play with any number of arguments, where an argument can be either:
- link to a YouTube video, playlist or channel
-fflag followed by a filename, with a link to a YouTube video, playlist or channel on each line
youtube-play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePX5qgDe9s4- plays the video
youtube-play https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMV832OM2s0zRjsgphR5UJR- plays the whole playlist
youtube-play https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDMV832OM2s0zRjsgphR5UJR https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX44CAz-JhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeMFqkcPYcg- plays the whole playlist and another two videos
youtube-play ScLcV4feihM _QiSu4yO0Kk- plays two videos – note that it's enough to tell the video id
youtube-play _QiSu4yO0Kk -f list1.txt ScLcV4feihM -f list2.txt- plays one video, then reads the file
list1.txtand plays every link on each line of the file, then plays another video and then plays every link in the filelist2.txt
- plays one video, then reads the file
mps-youtube is a much better alternative to this project. It has a huge community of developers, is multi-platform and written in Python. Too bad I found out about mps-youtube so late.
You can use foobar2000 with the foo_youtube component to achieve the same. However, it's not a command-line utility, but a whole music player.
- Global keyboard hook which will allow you to pause/stop the playback or skip the current song
- Random playback –
-rflag which will turn random shuffle on for the videos following the flag, repeating the flag will turn the shuffle off for the following links and vice versa - Support specifying ranges of videos from playlists to be played (currently the whole playlist is played from start to end)
Thanks goes to these wonderful people (emoji key):
 Dennis Pražák 💻 |
 pcroland 🐛 |
 Mayank Jha 🚧 |
 Matt 💻 🐛 |
This project follows the all-contributors specification. Contributions of any kind welcome!
It's pretty easy. I'll show you the process of doing the same thing without youtube-play (youtube-play uses a bit different commands that are more understandable for machines).
Prepare a <link> to a YouTube video. Open up your command-line. Execute youtube-dl -F <link>. youtube-dl will respond with a table with available formats for the video. Example:
| format code | extension | resolution | note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 139 | m4a | audio only | DASH audio 48k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.5@ 48k (22050Hz) |
| 249 | webm | audio only | DASH audio 68k , opus @ 50k, 1.40MiB |
| 250 | webm | audio only | DASH audio 86k , opus @ 70k, 1.85MiB |
| 140 | m4a | audio only | DASH audio 128k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k (44100Hz) |
| 251 | webm | audio only | DASH audio 156k , opus @160k, 3.63MiB |
| 171 | webm | audio only | DASH audio 202k , vorbis@128k, 4.42MiB |
| 278 | webm | 256x144 | 144p 105k , webm container, vp9, 24fps, video only, 2.59MiB |
| 160 | mp4 | 256x144 | DASH video 110k , avc1.4d400c, 24fps, video only |
| 242 | webm | 426x240 | 240p 246k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 5.60MiB |
| 133 | mp4 | 426x240 | DASH video 285k , avc1.4d4015, 24fps, video only |
| 243 | webm | 640x360 | 360p 464k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 10.91MiB |
| 134 | mp4 | 640x360 | DASH video 634k , avc1.4d401e, 24fps, video only |
| 244 | webm | 854x480 | 480p 856k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 20.38MiB |
| 135 | mp4 | 854x480 | DASH video 1254k , avc1.4d401e, 24fps, video only |
| 247 | webm | 1280x720 | 720p 1706k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 41.67MiB |
| 136 | mp4 | 1280x720 | DASH video 2534k , avc1.4d401f, 24fps, video only |
| 248 | webm | 1920x1080 | 1080p 2938k , vp9, 24fps, video only, 74.36MiB |
| 137 | mp4 | 1920x1080 | DASH video 4363k , avc1.640028, 24fps, video only |
| 17 | 3gp | 176x144 | small , mp4v.20.3, mp4a.40.2@ 24k |
| 36 | 3gp | 320x180 | small , mp4v.20.3, mp4a.40.2 |
| 43 | webm | 640x360 | medium , vp8.0, vorbis@128k |
| 18 | mp4 | 640x360 | medium , avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2@ 96k |
| 22 | mp4 | 1280x720 | hd720 , avc1.64001F, mp4a.40.2@192k (best) |
Select the format that suits you the most and remember its format code. youtube-play prefers audio only formats with the largest bitrate possible (which you can find in the note column), but you can choose any format with sound, since the video will be omitted.
Next, execute youtube-dl -f <format code> -g <link>. This will respond with a direct link to the file. You can either copy it in the cmd, or pipe it into your clipboard like this:
youtube-dl -f <format code> -g <link> | clipTo stream the sound from the file, execute this command:
ffplay -volume <number from 0 to 100> -nodisp -vn -autoexit "<paste the direct link here>"ffplay will stream the sound and exit when it's complete.