CLI Youtube Viewer

CLI Youtube Viewer is a command line application that uses MPlayer to play high definition YouTube videos. It also features a built-in search function that finds YouTube videos based on user-defined keywords.

It is not a YouTube client, seeing as it can’t play videos directly, it simply facilitates an export operation of YouTube content to MPlayer. The advantage that comes from this is that you won’t need Flash Player in order to watch videos, as YouTube traditionally requests when you play content in a web browser.

CLI Youtube Viewer runs from command line and as such, there’s no actual interface to it. Despite this approach, usage is extremely simple and intuitive.

There are two way of exploring its features: the first one is mostly aimed at beginners and it can be explored by double-clicking the EXE file inside the download package, at which point you’ll be presented with the possibility to play a YouTube video by inserting the link or to search for a certain clip by entering custom keywords.

If you opt for the latter, the program will display a maximum of twenty results, which will be accompanied by the name of the videos, their owner, as well as their length. A video can be sent to MPlayer by inserting the number of the result in the search list.

A more advanced approach becomes available if you run the application from command line with various arguments. Just have the application brought to CMD and add it this string: ‘-h’ or ‘-help’ in order to get a full overview of more options.

A quick summary includes the possibility to retrieve today’s YouTube tops or YouTube’s all time tops, search for playlists, order entries by various criteria, show YouTube movie categories, as well as to play all the video results in order, to name just a few.

As a conclusion, CLI Youtube Viewer does provide a few tempting possibilities to explore YouTube, but because it’s a command-line based application, users might be reluctant to it.