** Deprecated in favor of: pipe-viewer. (info)

straw-viewer

A lightweight application (fork of youtube-viewer) for searching and playing videos from YouTube, using the API of invidio.us.

straw-viewer

• command-line interface to YouTube.

gtk-straw-viewer

• GTK+ interface to YouTube.

STATUS

The project is in its early stages of development and some features are not implemented yet.

AVAILABILITY

• Arch Linux (AUR): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/straw-viewer-git/

• openSUSE: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:Aptrug/straw-viewer

• Slackware: https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/multimedia/straw-viewer/

VIDEO REVIEWS

• [EN] Pipe-Viewer and Straw-Viewer -- Search Youtube via Terminal - Linux CLI
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4tfHUmklWo

TRY

For trying the latest commit of straw-viewer, without installing it, execute the following commands:

    cd /tmp
    wget https://github.com/trizen/straw-viewer/archive/master.zip -O straw-viewer-master.zip
    unzip -n straw-viewer-master.zip
    cd straw-viewer-master/bin
    ./straw-viewer

INSTALLATION

To install straw-viewer, run:

    perl Build.PL
    sudo ./Build installdeps
    sudo ./Build install

To install gtk-straw-viewer along with straw-viewer, run:

    perl Build.PL --gtk
    sudo ./Build installdeps
    sudo ./Build install

DEPENDENCIES

For straw-viewer:

• libwww-perl
• LWP::Protocol::https
• Data::Dump
• JSON

For gtk-straw-viewer:

• Gtk3
• File::ShareDir
• + the dependencies required by straw-viewer.

Build dependencies:

• Module::Build

Optional dependencies:

• Local cache support: LWP::UserAgent::Cached
• Better STDIN support (+ history): Term::ReadLine::Gnu
• Faster JSON deserialization: JSON::XS
• Fixed-width formatting (--fixed-width, -W): Unicode::LineBreak or Text::CharWidth

PACKAGING

To package this application, run the following commands:

    perl Build.PL --destdir "/my/package/path" --installdirs vendor [--gtk]
    ./Build test
    ./Build install --install_path script=/usr/bin

INVIDIOUS INSTANCES

Sometimes, the default instance, invidious.snopyta.org, may fail to work properly. When this happens, we can change the API host to some other instance of invidious, such as invidious.tube:

    straw-viewer --api=invidious.tube

To make the change permanent, set in the configuration file:

    api_host => "invidious.tube",

Alternatively, the following will automatically pick a random invidious instance everytime the program is started:

    api_host => "auto",

The available instances are listed at: https://api.invidious.io/

PIPE-VIEWER

pipe-viewer is an experimental fork of straw-viewer with the goal of parsing the YouTube website directly, and thus it may be a faster and more reliable alternative.

SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION