Use uBlock Origin. Not AdBlock, not AdBlock Plus, not any other crapware. Looking at AdBlock website they have a blurb about only keeping anonymised data and never selling it and yada yada yada, because it goes against their company ethics.
Company ethics. AdBlock is owned by a company. A for-profit entity. How do you think they make their money? Either they sell the data they have gathered (why does an ad blocking extension need to gather user data?) or they have agreements with ad companies.
Compare the websites of AdBlock and uBlock Origin. The first thing on uBlock Origin website is a link to the publicly available source code. That’s trustworthy. AdBlock’s website has a handpicked list of 5 star reviews.
TL; DR: please switch to uBlock Origin and ditch AdBlock, they (the company behind AdBlock) likely have agreements with advertisers (including Google and YouTube) to make money. Your data is being harvested by using AdBlock. You cannot look at the code for AdBlock. AdBlock is not trustworthy.
I just tried that and it's not working for me. MPV just closes itself and VLC gives me an error message. Do I need to do more that just drag and drop the URL?
`mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e9_l2oGxdw
[ytdl_hook] ERROR: [youtube] 3e9_l2oGxdw: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U
[ytdl_hook] youtube-dl failed: unexpected error occurred
Failed to recognize file format.
Well, while MPV might be outdated, I already mentioned that I was able to get YouTube videos working by downloading a newer version of yt-dlp and creating a conf file for MPV that links to it. While I was looking into the problem, the versions available in apt for all three of these are outdated by at least a year, possible 3 years for MPV. I'm not sure if this is just a Linux Mint issue but I have noticed that a lot of the software both preinstalled and available in it's repository, are pretty outdated.
I might try downloading the newer versions of these later. I got MPV working and that's good enough for me right now.
Mint is known to use old software in its repositories as it's based on Ubuntu LTS. The flatpak mpv should work though. flatpak install flathub io.mpv.Mpv and then run it with flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
If you don't want to type flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv all the time, you can create an alias in your ~/.bashrc file. For example: alias play='flatpak run io.mpv.Mpv'. (After editing your bashrc file, run: source ~/.bashrc to activate the change). Then you can run it with play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ.
I know it's been a while but I tried the flatpak version of mpv and it's not working. If I open the flatpak version without any music it opens but it becomes unresponsive as soon as I try to load any music. I also have no idea how to diagnose this issue as running the flatpak version in the terminal gives no error messages.
The version that comes with Linux Mint works perfectly fine, so I don't need the flatpak version, I'm just curious as to why the flatpak version doesn't work.
I think I also had this issue using Cinnamon once, but then I just used VLC instead. Never bothered to look into why. Worked fine in GNOME for me though.
If the issue is with the DE, I'm actually using the Xfce edition of Linux Mint. I would just use VLC but it gives me performance issues because I don't have the best hardware and mpv seems to work much more efficiently. But yeah, changing the audio output fixed this issue, I'm guessing the flatpak version of mpv defaults to pipewire. I was curious and I did test pipewire with both versions and I got the same results that they did.
I might try that later because, like I said earlier, I got the version of MPV that's already installed to play YouTube videos and that fine for me. I also made configurations to the preinstalled version and I don't know if it would be easy, or even possible, to transfer them to the flatpak version.
For the flatpak version the mpv.conf file can be created in ~/.var/app/io.mpv.Mpv/config/mpv/. You probably don't need to link it to the yt-dlp python file as the flatpak mpv version should come with the latest yt-dlp.
I got YouTube videos working in MPV. While I have no idea if the way I did it was technically not correct, all I did was download the newest version of yt-dlp from github and created a file name mpv.conf which links to the yt-dlp python file. I was also able to set a preferred resolution using that conf file.
That is way too much faff if you are watching youtube daily.
Get something like FreeTube, FOSS with all the ad blocking and sponsor blocking automatically enabled. And your subscriptions and other settings are all saved locally.