pipe-viewer

A lightweight application (fork of straw-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.

pipe-viewer

• command-line interface to YouTube.

gtk-pipe-viewer

• GTK+ interface to YouTube.

AVAILABILITY

• 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, do guix install pipe-viewer. To test without installing, do guix environment --pure --ad-hoc pipe-viewer mpv -- pipe-viewer.

REVIEWS

• [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/

VIDEO REVIEWS

• [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

TRY

For trying the latest commit of pipe-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

INSTALLATION

To install pipe-viewer, run:

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

To install gtk-pipe-viewer along with pipe-viewer, run:

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

DEPENDENCIES

For pipe-viewer:

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

For gtk-pipe-viewer:

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

Build dependencies:

• Module::Build

Optional dependencies:

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

PACKAGING

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

INVIDIOUS INSTANCES

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, like invidious.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",

When api_host is set to "auto", pipe-viewer picks a random invidious instance from api.invidious.io.

SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

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

man pipe-viewer
perldoc WWW::PipeViewer

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

Copyright (C) 2012-2026 Trizen

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

See https://dev.perl.org/licenses/ for more information.