Faster(?) download speed using mpv when watching online content

[Obegg]

Hold on, I know what you're thinking: "but, but... yt-dlp is not the one you should blame, it's ffmpeg, they should add fragmented downloads because mpv only uses yt-dlp to extract the url and the only solution to slow download speeds while using mpv to watch youtube for example is to fix it on ffmpeg side"
But untill ffmpeg will implement such thing...................
In the meantime, my idea is as follows:

• mpv needs to be open in the background
• mpv waits for the user to copy a URL
• once the user copied a URL and mpv detected that then mpv will open a cmd/batch/powershell/python/whatever cli you want to download that copied URL using yt-dlp to a designed location such as %temp% (temp files), we can also use Download Options here so it even faster
• mpv will wait for that download to finish (cli window to close) and then will play the newly downloaded video

Here's the real kicker - I wonder how much faster this whole process will be compared to just simply drag and drop the video from youtube to mpv
Also we want to have a toggle so the user has a choice to opt-in to this kind of behavior, in cases where the user has fast connection such as fiber this could be beneficial.

[veganomy]

The problem is only with hls/vp9 streams. Either exclude m3u8 protocol, or just pipe them into mpv stdout & the seekbar will steadily update till the end of the file reaches.

Method 1 (https, proper seek, but slow) :

mpv --ytdl-format "bv[protocol!*=m3u8]/bv)+ba / b*" <url>

Method 2 (hls, faster, with updating seekbar) :

yt-dlp <url> -o - | mpv -

[Obegg]

Why are you using an option inside an option ?

My bad, sorry about that.
Either way - shortly after creating this discussion, I noticed that now I get faster download speeds even without changing any setting in mpv, which is weird, this only happened once before to me.
mpv playing a YouTube video:

It's probably a "bug" that will be fixed tomorrow or something.

[Obegg]

So the slow download speed issue is back.
I tried the following:

yt-dlp -f 'bv[protocol*=m3u8]+ba/b*' -o - | mpv --force-seekable=yes -

I get:

The following content is not available on this app.. Watch on the latest version of YouTube.
[file] Reading from stdin...
Failed to recognize file format.
Exiting... (Errors when loading file)

I also tried the following:

ytdl-format="bv[protocol!*=m3u8]/bv+ba"

In mpv.conf.
This one doesn't improve download speed and also did not download audio (I guess the ba part is not configured properly)

Either way - download speed is slow now.

[guidocella]

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/PO-Token-Guide

[Obegg]

@guidocella Nowhere in this page mentions anything related to download speed, I saw this token thing mainly as a way to bypass restrictions in case I won't be able to watch YouTube, so I did not even bother with this.
Do you think this will improve download speed? Can you tell me where you learned that information from (links)?

[guidocella]

It doesn't improve download speed, but it can avoid the "not available on this app" error.

[mrfragger]

I'd just figure out which format it lists then choose one that doesn't download fragments and muxes them back together. Although it can save bandwidth by downloading a smaller file size the 10 times longer to download isn't worth it usually.

yt-dlp --list-formats "url"

then try excluding ones that fragment
ytdl-format = bestvideo*[vcodec!*=vp09][height<=?360]+bestaudio/best
and can try these by themselves or together...

ytdl-raw-options = extractor-args="youtube:skip=hls"
ytdl-raw-options = format-sort="proto"

[Obegg]

Tried all 3 of your suggestions (by themselves/together) - Nothing fixed the slow download speed.