Youtube app for Ubuntu 14.04 and later?

I'd like somebody could tell what is currently the best solution to play youtube videos with a desktop app?

I like minitube app but since 2015 Google updates its policy so often so the app seems to be redundant or left to constant updates. I tried lots of ppas all of them reached up to 2.3.1 version max.

And as of today SMtube browser in SMPlayer stopped working at all, Google reconstructed their API completely, so as its developer said regardly SMtube needs to be completely rebuild and not sure if that's gonna happen soon.

Other suggestions I heard is to use the new engine fork of mplayer mpv+youtube-dl. Does anybody managed to do so? I would appreciate if somebody explain any tutorial on that. Thanks.

So, by far the best solution I could find for Ubuntu 14.04LTS and later is the software called GTK Youtube Viewer it has rich set of features and the ability to login to Youtube account.

To install GTK Youtube Viewer:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install youtube-viewer

It reproduces all videos despite of new Google restrictions on Vevo etc. Also I did a few tweaks to it, by default it uses mplayer engine so you can substitute any front-end player that uses mplayer engine just to get a nice GUI. This is how you can do it: in Youtube Viewer navigate to "Menu" --> "Preferences", you'll get a script opened, find these lines:

video_player_selected      => "mplayer",
video_players              => {
                            mplayer => {
                              arg   => "-prefer-ipv4 -really-quiet-cache %d -cache-min %d",
                              audio => "-audiofile *AUDIO*",
                              cmd   => "/usr/bin/mplayer",
                              fs    => "-fs",
                              srt   => "-sub *SUB*",
                            },
                            mpv => {
                              arg   => "--really-quiet",

then simply change the line:

cmd   => "/usr/bin/mplayer",

to e.g.:

cmd   => "/usr/bin/smplayer",

Next open SMPlayer and navigate to "SMPlayer Preferences" --> "Network" tab and put the marks at Enable Youtube internal support and Enable MPV's support for streaming sites that's it. Now go back to Youtube Viewer and click on any video it will launch it with SMPlayer.

Edit

A small fix/improvement when using SMPlayer if you want to avoid breaking a link into threads when clicking on the video to play remove this argument line from mplayer section:

arg   => "-prefer-ipv4 -really-quiet -cache %d -cache-min %d",

I found 3 Options:

1 Install Kodi app and use the YouTube addon works very smooth

2 Install smplayer and smtube

3 Install chrome browser and use an extension call user agent swticher this addon forces chrome and firefox to use ur browser as a mobile browser and youtube loads pretty fast! Once enabled..click and change settings to android tablet and save the settings.

Good Luck

Youtube app for Ubuntu 14.04 and later?

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