• Search and play audio/video from YouTube
• Search tracks of albums by album title
• Search and import YouTube playlists
• Create and save local playlists
• Download audio/video
• Convert to mp3 & other formats (requires ffmpeg or avconv)
• View video comments
• Works with Python 3.x
• Works with Windows, Linux and Mac OS X
• Requires mplayer or mpv

This project is based on mps, a terminal based program to search, stream and download music. This implementation uses YouTube as a source of content and can play and download video as well as audio. The pafy library handles interfacing with YouTube.

FAQ / Troubleshooting common issues

A standard search is performed by entering / followed by search terms.

Search result items can easily be stored in local playlists.

YouTube playlists can be searched and played or saved as local playlists.

Content can be downloaded in various formats and resolutions.

A basic comments browser is available to view YouTube user comments.

An album title can be specified and mps-youtube will attempt to find matches for each track of the album, based on title and duration. Type help search for more info.

Search results can be customised to display additional fields and ordered by various criteria.

This configuration was set up using the following commands:

set order views
set columns user:14 date comments rating likes dislikes category:9 views

Type help config for help on configuration options

Using pip:

[sudo] pip3 install mps-youtube

Installing youtube_dl is highly recommended:

[sudo] pip3 install youtube_dl

Install mplayer with MacPorts:

sudo port install MPlayer

Or with Homebrew:

brew install mplayer

As an alternative to installing with pip, there is a standalone binary available. Go to Releases and download mpsyt-VERSION.exe under downloads for the latest release.

Install the python colorama module to get colors (optional):

pip3 install colorama

Download mplayer for your CPU type from the "Build Selection table" here.

Extract the mplayer.exe file, saving it to the folder that mpsyt.exe resides in (usually C:\PythonXX\Scripts\) or to a folder in the system path.

Alternatively to mplayer, use mpv.exe which can be downloaded from: http://mpv.io/installation/

Using Docker, run with:

sudo docker run -v /dev/snd:/dev/snd -it --rm --privileged --name mpsyt mpsyt

If you would like to locally build the container you can run the following steps

Check out this repo:

git clone https://github.com/np1/mps-youtube.git

Enter the directory and run docker build:

cd mps-youtube
sudo docker build -t mpsyt .

Now run the container interactively with:

sudo docker run -v /dev/snd:/dev/snd -it --rm --privileged --name mpsyt mpsyt

In order to have access to the local sound device (/dev/snd) the container needs to be privileged.

Upgrade pip installation:

[sudo] pip3 install mps-youtube --upgrade

mps-youtube is run on the command line using the command:

mpsyt

Enter h from within the program for help.

An IRC channel #mps-youtube for the project is available on Freenode (chat.freenode.net:6697).