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A lightweight application (fork ofstraw-viewer) for searching and playing videos from YouTube.

This fork parses the YouTube website directly and relies on the invidious instances only as a fallback method.

• command-line interface to YouTube.

• GTK+ interface to YouTube.

• Alpine Linux:doas apk add pipe-viewer
• Alt Linux:https://packages.altlinux.org/en/sisyphus/srpms/pipe-viewer/
• Arch Linux (AUR):https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pipe-viewer-git/
• Void Linux:sudo xbps-install pipe-viewer
• Parabola GNU/Linux-libre:pacman -S pipe-viewer
• Gentoo Linux (kske overlay):eselect repository enable kske && emerge -av net-misc/pipe-viewer
• Slackware Linux (SBo):https://slackbuilds.org/repository/15.0/multimedia/pipe-viewer/
• Guix:Pipe-Viewer can be deployed on any GNU/Linux distribution using Guix.To install in the user's default profile, doguix install pipe-viewer.To test without installing, doguix environment --pure --ad-hoc pipe-viewer mpv -- pipe-viewer.

• [EN] How-to install pipe-viewer in Debian

  • https://hunden.linuxkompis.se/2021/11/14/how-to-install-pipe-viewer-in-debian.html

• [EN] pipe-viewer – lightweight YouTube client

  • https://www.linuxlinks.com/pipe-viewer-lightweight-youtube-client/

• [EN] Pipe-Viewer and Straw-Viewer -- Search Youtube via Terminal - Linux CLI

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4tfHUmklWo

• [TW] Pipe-viewer！有史以來最佳的 YouTube 體驗就在這裡～

  • https://wiwi.video/videos/watch/798d38cd-9d10-4f8a-ac1f-f776c6d0aa2c

For trying the latest commit ofpipe-viewer, without installing it, execute the following commands:

    cd /tmp    wget https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer/archive/main.zip -O pipe-viewer-main.zip    unzip -n pipe-viewer-main.zip    cd pipe-viewer-main    ./bin/pipe-viewer

To installpipe-viewer, run:

    perl Build.PL    sudo ./Build installdeps    sudo ./Build install

To installgtk-pipe-viewer along withpipe-viewer, run:

    perl Build.PL --gtk    sudo ./Build installdeps    sudo ./Build install

• libwww-perl
• LWP::Protocol::https
• Data::Dump
• JSON
• yt-dlp oryoutube-dl.

• Gtk3
• File::ShareDir
• + the dependencies required by pipe-viewer.

• Module::Build

• Local cache support:LWP::UserAgent::Cached
• Better STDIN support (+history):Term::ReadLine::Gnu
• Faster JSON deserialization:JSON::XS
• Fixed-width formatting:Unicode::LineBreak orText::CharWidth
• For the*_parallel config-options:Parallel::ForkManager

To package this application, run the following commands:

    perl Build.PL --destdir "/my/package/path" --installdirs vendor [--gtk]    ./Build test    ./Build install --install_path script=/usr/bin

To use invidious instances, pass the--invidious option:

    pipe-viewer --invidious

or set in the configuration file (~/.config/pipe-viewer/pipe-viewer.conf):

prefer_invidious=> 1,

To use a specific invidious instance, likeinvidious.fdn.fr, pass the--api=HOST option:

    pipe-viewer --invidious --api=invidious.fdn.fr

To make the change permanent, set in the configuration file:

api_host=>"invidious.fdn.fr",

Whenapi_host is set to"auto",pipe-viewer picks a random invidious instance fromapi.invidious.io.

After installing, you can find documentation with the following commands:

man pipe-viewerperldoc WWW::PipeViewer

Copyright (C) 2012-2025 Trizen

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify itunder the terms of either: the GNU General Public License as publishedby the Free Software Foundation; or the Artistic License.

Seehttps://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.