I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129
I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
You can add mpv to FreeTube as an external player. With yt-dlp, it supports playing YouTube videos directly and in any quality. It also has a plugin for SponsorBlock integration.
Yeah, I use MPV as a external player and it’s great because you can highly customize the way you watch videos. I like equalize the sound and through a MPV script I save the video from cache with a keystroke if I liked it. Sadly watching with subtitles stopped working some weeks ago.
