VLCTube

A tray-application to launch YouTube videos, from a url, in VLC media player

VLCTube is a simple tray-application that you can use to quickly open a YouTube video in VLC media player, in high quality.

• Can use all the quality options available for a YouTube video, not just 720p as VLC directly supports opening
• Support for enqueueing videos that will automatically start when VLC closes from the previous video ending
• Defaults to use the x264 streams, instead of AV1/VP9, for improved hardware decoding support
  • Uses much less CPU than the player on youtube.com on devices without AV1/VP9 hardware support, of which there are many(!)
  • Defaults to 1080p60 streams, since it is the highest quality that x264 streams are available in, on YouTube
• Uses the get_video_info API to get URLs for the adaptive format streams
• Support for setting a preferred quality, so you can set it to select the 720p60 stream even though a 1080p60 stream is also available (maximum wanted quality)

Installation

• Download the latest release
• Unpack to wanted install location

or

• Clone this repository and navigate inside the VLCTube directory
• Run yarn install or npm install to install dependencies
• Run yarn start or npm start to open the Electron tray-application

Requirements

• VLC media player (tested on v. 3.0.6)
  • Must be added to the PATH variable, so it is available as vlc

PowerShell script to add VLC to path on Windows

if ($env:Path -contains ";C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC") { echo "PATH already contains the path to VLC" } else { [Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable("PATH", $env:path + ";C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC", "Machine"); echo "VLC added to PATH" }

Usage

• Click on the tray icon to open the menu
  • Play from clipboard grabs the URL from the clipboard and plays it immediately
  • Enqueue from clipboard grabs the URL from the clipboard and adds it to the player. Automatically starts playback when a video is enqueued to an empty player and nothing is playing
  • Preferred quality opens a submenu where you can set the preferred quality
  • Only play x264 streams toggles whether to only play x264 streams or also include the AV1/VP9 streams