I played with smtube, it's alright, but for youtube app I like minitube better. But the version in repos is too old, and version on site is for ubu 19.1+, so it's kinda a hassle to get going. Gotta make your own google dev account to get api access, then by adding the right ppa's it's possible to make on 18... I use it on my kids computers, which can only get 360p youtube in a browser due to being ancient, but 720p no problem in minitube (or smtube). One thing I didnt like about smtube is its start page, another thing is that it opens seperate windows for video playback of various size, incosistent UI. Whereas minitube starts with your previous search history, and then plays all videos in its own UI in the same size window.

It's not a question of "GUI vs CLI" - graphical frontends for youtube-dl exist, use them by all means.
The point most people don't get is the constant battle against changes in the youtube (and other similar sites') website layout.
youtube-dl has a huge community, users on all major OSs, developers etc. and such changes are met almost instantly, at least for youtube.
But I currently know of no other independent youtube downloading/watching software that can keep up with these constant, deliberate changes. Their software breaks sooner or later, or takes too long to fix. youtube-dl are the only one's (to my knowledge) that stay on top of this, and for many, many years already.

[ AFAIK it's also possible to get a youtube API key and use a completely different approach to downloading the videos, but when software users don't bother to get their own and use the developer's, it will get disabled when too many machines use it. ]

So:

• youtube-dl has GUI frontends. Use them if you're uncomfortable with the CLI.
• youtube-dl needs to be updated constantly. It's pointless to use the Debian stable repo version from 2018. Best if your frontend does that automatically.
• youtube-dl can do a lot more than just youtube. A LOT!
• youtube-dl always downloads the highest quality by default, but that is configurable. A LOT is configurable!
• youtube-dl integrates seemlessly with the mpv media player, which essentially enables it to directly pay video links.
• mpv in turn has nice GUI frontends

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I find that watching videos in any browser seems to be a hit or miss proposition depending on what versions of browser are installed and the phase of the moon. Apparently, Google's YouTube developers have way too much time on their hands and can't keep from tweaking their site.

What I've found to be pretty reliable -- lately, anyway -- is to:

• Right-click on the video in the browser and select "copy location" or "copy location at this time".
• Fire up VLC, go to "Media -> Open Network Stream..."
• Right click on the "Network URL" field and paste in the location and then click on "Play".

As a last resort, I'll use "youtube-dl" to download it using that "copy location at this time" information and play the video from my hard disk.

HTH...

I am 100% convinced that this is done deliberately to thwart attempts at downloading videos without being exposed to your share of social influencing & ads first.

I even heard that youtube works best on Chrome, they have elements that explicitely work only with Chrome's rendering engine. Surprise, surprise. It's all one big Alphabet.

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Half the reason I have chrome installed is for the times I want to cast youtube to my TV. Can't do that from firefox/etc under linux. (And on my kids pcs for voice search; voice search doesn't even work even on chromium, has to be chrome.)

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I'm sure that's the opinion held by the developer behind youtube-dl. Bless him, otherwise I would be watching very few videos online---Google's people keep him pretty busy staying current.

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Thank you.
According to this youtube-dl has more than 1 dedicated developer. IMO it's a true collaborative work in the best spirit of FOSS, and has been for a long time. Which is an important part of my praise.

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