LPT: Open VLC and drag a youtube link to it. It'll play in VLC (with all the capabilities of VLC), and it'll skip ads.

• yt-dlp

  2,360 71,576 9.8 Python

  A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader

  

You can stream videos directly from Youtube and many other video websites Put yt-dlp.exe in the MPC-HC installation folder. Then you can open website URLs in the player: Menu > File > Open File/URL You can even download those videos: Menu > File > Save a copy Tip: to be able to download in best quality with yt-dlp/youtube-dl, it is recommended to also put ffmpeg.exe in the MPC-HC folder.

• mpv

  830 26,027 9.9 C

  🎥 Command line video player

  

The go-to for enthusiasts is currently MPV which has Vulkan support, it has upscaling (and downscaling) algorithms and also built-in support for YT-DLP which lets you download and convert videos and music from most video/music sites.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• brave-browser

  1,367 16,711 9.9 JavaScript

  Brave browser for Android, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows.

  

Just download www.brave.com its Chrome based and will block ads even on YouTube without doing anything extra. I use mobile and desktop versions. Never have ads.

• mpv_sponsorblock

  15 520 0.0 Lua

  mpv script to skip sponsored segments of YouTube videos

• NewPipe

  429 3,330 8.8 Java

  Discontinued A fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock functionality. (by polymorphicshade)

Or the NewPipe x SponsorBlock fork.

• streamlink

  131 9,597 9.6 Python

  Streamlink is a CLI utility which pipes video streams from various services into a video player

  

Much better VLC experience if you use https://streamlink.github.io

• ff2mpv

  23 476 6.3 PowerShell

  A Firefox/Chrome add-on for playing URLs in mpv.

There are also browser extensions that add a toolbar button and a link context menu option to automatically open videos from quite a number of popular sites in MPV. I'm using ff2mpv. It only took a minute to set up.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• LibVLCSharp

  287 1,395 6.0 C#

  Cross-platform .NET/Mono bindings for LibVLC

  

VLC is a free open-source media player with countless features. You can download it from here: https://www.videolan.org/

• yt-dlp-cmdui

  3 4 0.0 Batchfile

  Simple CMD based yt-dlp script

• NewPipe

  2,059 28,785 9.8 Java

  A libre lightweight streaming front-end for Android.

  

For Android, there's NewPipe. No ads, popup player, screen-off play, audio only, and a download button if you need it.

• SponsorBlock

  904 8,831 9.3 TypeScript

  Skip YouTube video sponsors (browser extension)

LPT: Chrome + firefox extensions: ublock origin, sponsorblock

• FilterLists

  129 1,248 9.4 C#

  :shield: The independent, comprehensive directory of filter and host lists for advertisements, trackers, malware, and annoyances.

To add to what /u/awhaling said - there is even a "custom filter" section where you can go to sites like https://filterlists.com/ and get custom filters to block a tone of elements like paywalls etc.

• VidGrab

  1 1 10.0 C#

  Youtube Video Downloader

Eitherway, it's free. It's on my GitHub if you want it.

• mpc-hc

  390 10,091 0.0 C++

  Media Player Classic

• FreeTube

  498 11,791 9.9 JavaScript

  An Open Source YouTube app for privacy

  

VLC is good because of the ease of use. For more features for YT specifically, there's also cross platform FreeTube.

• mpv.net

  74 1,647 9.3 C#

  Discontinued 🎞 mpv.net is a modern media player for Windows that works just like mpv. [Moved to: https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net] (by stax76)

  

Like I mentioned in my initial comment, mpv.net adds a UI and makes mpv lot easier to use.

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

Suggest a related project