mpvc VS mxplayer

I wrote (many years ago mind you) a shell script to control mpv via the IPC socket. https://github.com/lwilletts/mpvc

Perhaps you could have an mpv instance watching a playlist file in the background though. Like I got pretty far by first just launching an mpv instance with mpv --idle=yes --input-ipc-server=/tmp/mpvsocket, and then I could get that instance to play from a playlist stored in /tmp by sending commands to the socket with echo '{ "command": ["loadlist", "/tmp/your_playlist"] }' | socat - /tmp/mpvsocket. This all a bit advanced perhaps, but if you're interested. also take a look at https://github.com/lwilletts/mpvc

I wrote a mpv interface script called mpvc that uses mpv's json ipc interface to open mpv and send it commands. Sounds to me like this could be a potential use case. if you download the videos using youtube-dl ie hotkey'd with qutebrowser first into a directory then use something find $PATH/directory | shuf | mpvc add it'll playback all the files in a random order. mpvc doesn't quite yet support playback from direct url but it's something that's been on my list for quite awhile.