Hmm, youtube-dl? I believe it’s no longer the one to use, it’s yt-dlp, and mpv has support yt-dlp for quite some time, but it could be any player as long as it supports yt-dlp. What I’ve noticed is that nothing gets as fast to fix these YT issues than yt-dlp. It’s working fine for me on Artix for quite some time. And unless wanting ton use a browser, that’s what freetube has been documenting every time receiving related bugs. See for example:

https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube/issues/8083#issuecomment-3326565693

Just so you know, if you like freetube, you can configure the external player to mpv, which underneath uses yt-dlp when streaming, and use the button to load the external player. Of course one can also launch smplayer, which underneath is using mpv, which underneath…

But the thing is content creators don’t move out of YT cause they’re there to monetize in the first place. So this thing seems never ending no matter alternatives like peertube exist.

Besides outertune there’s harmonymusic as well

None protect your IP if not using a non self hosted frontend like invidio or piped, cause if self hosted then you’re providing your IP any ways. So now a days actually private is kind of hard. But these applications for sure help a lot.

2025.09.26 can still do it without deno. Besides, when the change happens, node and bun (never heard about bun before) will be supported as well, not just deno, but they will require extra arguments passed to yt-dlp. If using yt-dlp directly, and already having node or bun installed, no need for deno then.