> One thing I find rather frustrating about YouTube’s redesign (on desktop) is that it devotes so much screen real estate to promoting videos other than the one you’re actually there to watch. I’d prefer fewer distractions.
Theater mode (shortcut 't') is a bit better. But yes, I too would like a mode where the video fills the whole browser window.
I tried the same route, but got the logs correctly. It gave me a HTTP 410 error. I wouldn't be surprised at all if VLC's youtube plugin is just too old and there's a better one somewhere else. But in the meanwhile, mpv's plugin works (if you're using yt-dlp and not youtube-dl, that is)
Logs not being directly visible in the VLC UI and not having a default log file location plus the fact that even going to advanced settings and configuring things doesn't make logs show up after the first try is not Google's fault, though.
Despite having defended FOSS and advocated VLC ... I understand your viewpoint here. Calling on people to contribute bugfixes isn't especially realistic. Filing a bug on the fact that VLC has poor debug/log tools would be helpful though.
Particularly as a useful logging / debugging capability should enable more useful bug reports specific to function.
Sorry it's not working out for you, thanks for trying regardless.
I'm just jaded at this point. FOSS won the battle and lost the war. It's been subsumed into the bowels of these corporations that are ending up mega predatory.
I've used VLC successfully in the past on Android using the "stream" option. When I want to view video (as opposed to just listen to audio, my usual Android mpv use-case) that's delivered joy. On MacOS, I'll use mpv to play either audio only or video, with joy in both cases.
Don't forget that the other side of the equation is YouTube ACTIVELY WORKING TO BREAK COMPATIBILITY, and with considerable success. E.g., Invidious and Piped had been b0rk3n for a few months, though on checking again in the past few days, Invidious at least seems to be working again. So placing the whole burden on FOSS devs is at best exceedingly biased criticism. Those are in fact your friends, not Google.
Its the nature of the beast. For a while I used a custom ublock filter to strip out the recommended videos section, the comments, whatever I considered junk pixels. Now I just pull the video to /tmp/ and don't have to deal with buffering (somehow still an issue in 2024).
Theater mode (shortcut 't') is a bit better. But yes, I too would like a mode where the video fills the whole browser window.