Ever wanted to watch YouTube inside your favorite desktop-based media player instead of in the browser? Perhaps the latter offers some functionality such as the ability to resize it, set transparency, or whatever, that you want. Or maybe you want to create a video playlist that combines online and offline videos, etc.
Whatever the reason, there is an extremely simple way to stream YouTube in your desktop player using a free program called SVPTube This post will describe how to do this quickly and easily.
Step1: download SVPTube here, extract it anywhere on your hard drive, and run the “svptube.exe” executable
Step2: go to YouTube and browse to the video that you want, then copy the URL into the clipboard
Step3: left click on the SVPTube icon in your system tray. You will see the prompt shown below. Select the resolution you want from the dropdown (if any), and click on the ‘Copy URL’ button on the right.
Step4: you will need a desktop media player that will accept URLs as source. We tested both VLC and PotPlayer and both worked beautifully.
Launch your desktop media player and find the appropriate place to input the URL. See PotPlayer (bottom left) and VLC (bottom right) as examples.
Paste the URL and the video should start playing.
You can create a playlist if you want as follows; in VLC: view/playlist/ then right click right click ‘add file’ for offline videos or advanced open then network tab for more YouTube videos. In PotPlayer: right click playlist, then right click add & edit, then add file or add URL.
Note: you can also set it up so that clicking the ‘play’ button in the SVPTube dialog will open the URL in the default browser, although that didn’t seem to work for me.
The verdict: a brilliant, portable tool. Works great if you’re looking for this sort of thing. The one thing I would wish for, though, is support for more video sharing sites or a generic tools that works on all or most sites.
[Thanks go to user Panzer for the tip about this software].
Download SVPTube here (Windows).
