A perk of trying new GNU/Linux distributions is finding new things they’ve added that you might not be familiar with. Enter in SMTube which is a really neat way to interact with Youtube videos without having to use the Youtube web interface and browser, and best of all it downloads and plays the video in an actual video player, MPV. There is also a Youtube interface view (below), but the video plays within the window and I saw advertisements (not logged in), so the Tonvid.com view is my preference as it uses a video player making playback much more efficient and responsive, and no advertisements without needing to be logged in. The Youtube view is handy in one regard, and that’s to access Youtube music and albums if you’re a Youtube Music user (I prefer the Youtube Music Android application linked through Bluetooth to my computer and controllable by phone integration with Linux). You’d still need to use the Youtube web interface to interact with video subscriptions or comments, but if just searching for a video to play this is a much cleaner way.
The performance of the flash or html5 player in a web browser is bad… You’ll get much better results by using a real media player: smoother playback, no flickering, no frame drops and HD video in fullscreen, even in old computers. With SMTube you can choose the media player to play your favorite YouTube videos.
https://www.smtube.org/
Or switch from Tonvid.com to Youtube view below.
And you can order your preferred video players and even use just an audio player if you’re just listening to music by right clicking on the title of the video and selecting player. Note, this is a standard list of players, and they weren’t all installed on my Voyager OS system.
So there is a better way to search and play Youtube videos outside of the browser, and it’s SMTube with MPV available for Linux and Windows.