YouTube from Terminal (Part 2) 02/09/2018

This is the second part of the Nerd guide to play Youtube videos from your terminal.

In the first part these bash function has been added to my .bashrc (or .bash_profile on Mac OS X):

function yt {
    mpv --ontop --geometry=320x200+0+0 $(youtube-dl -g -f 18 $1)    
}
#download Youtube video using youtube-dl
function dyt {
    curl $(youtube-dl -g -f 18 $1) -o video.mp4
}

Now, the missing part is to search something and play all results. The follow solution will play all results in sequence. Youtube results are paginated on multiple HTML pages. In this case this script will play only the first page of results (who care.. these NERD scripts are insane):

#search Youtube and play all results
function yts {
    curl "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=$(echo $* | sed -E 's/ /%20/g')" -L | grep -o '/watch?[^\"]*' | uniq | grep -v "list=" | while read -r line; do yt "https://www.youtube.com$line"; done;
}

To use this function you only need only to type

yts MY LONG SEARCH STRING

To skip a video that you do not like you need to close mpv window. To terminate the script (looping throught all results) you need to send CTRL-C to the terminal running yts.

If you want to download all files, instead of playing them, you can use dyt instead of yt.

Let's break this function in pieces:

$(echo '$*' | sed -E 's/ /%20/g')

Grab all parameters passed to yts function ($*) and replace all whitespaces with %20 (the space character encoded for HTML URL)

curl "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=$(echo '$*' | sed -E 's/ /%20/g')" -L

Download youtube search results, following HTTP redirection (-L)

grep -o '/watch?[^\"]*' | uniq

Extract all /watch?* video URL. Some URL are duplicated so with uniq the output of the command is a list of unique URLs without duplicates

grep -v "list="

Exclude all lines that contains "list="; these lines are for Youtube playlists

while read -r line; do yt "https://www.youtube.com$line"; done;

Loop throught each line. For each line execute yt function to view the video (or dyt if you want to download videos).

Full code for play and search

#play Youtube video using youtube-dl
function yt {
    mpv --ontop --geometry=320x200+0+0 $(youtube-dl -g -f 18 $1)    
}
#download Youtube video using youtube-dl
function dyt {
    curl $(youtube-dl -g -f 18 $1) -o video.mp4
}
#search Youtube and play all results
function yts {
    curl "https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=$(echo '$*' | sed -E 's/ /%20/g')" -L | grep -o '/watch?[^\"]*' | uniq | grep -v "list=" | while read -r line; do dyt "https://www.youtube.com$line"; done;
}