alt Hacker News> Why would I want to mess with using a web browser for video in my living room
No need for all that. Just use yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) to download them as video files, and then just play the video files as you would any other video file.
Just tested yt-dlp on s1e1 to verify it worked, and it worked perfectly to download the video.
Nope.
> ERROR: [youtube] Y235YEQstLo: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cook... for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-y... for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies
That's the latest version of yt-dlp, just downloaded. I tried from two different IPs, both actually also having signed-in Google sessions (so not even really trying to hide).
As always with the surveillance industry, your experience may vary. I'm sure there are workarounds - less-hassled IPs you can get access through, etc. The point is that going for the straightforward libre software solution lets you avoid playing any of those constantly-churning games to begin with. It's much nicer to use software systems that straightforwardly work in your interests, rather than having to trick adversarial systems.