As I’ve written many times before, the Irreal bunker strives to be Google free. We mainly succeed in that endeavor with the single exception of YouTube. It’s far and away the best in class service of its type and more importantly it has no viable alternatives.
It turns out, though, that you can lessen the pain a bit. Michał Sapka has a nice blog post reporting on Yeetube, an Emacs wrapper around YouTube that lets you play YouTube videos (via MPV). It does away with the ads, has less tracking, and allows you to download and save videos for later viewing.
In addition to doing away with the worst aspects of YouTube, it lets you deal with the videos from within Emacs. I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet and I don’t know what the video quality is like versus native YouTube but it seems like a worthwhile project. Take a look at Sapka’s post for the details.