TuneCatcher - A Youtube Audio Player

I've often heard people on the MacRumors PowerPC forum say that they like to use Youtube for audio playback only - listening to albums or gigs etc so don't really require all the CPU intensive donkey work of playing video.

With that in mind I've cobbled together TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer - scripts that play audio only and save on all important CPU cycles.

Included in the install is Choob - a TenFourFoxBox Youtube browser preloaded with a vintage Nokia N90 user agent (hence the groovy app icon) which eschews all the usual Youtube script clutter and allows you to browse for videos quickly and efficiently.

Download and unzip the installer dmg - once mounted there is a choice of two installers. Youtube-dl is a requirement for this package, so if you have it installed as normal or with PPCMC, choose the appropriate installer.

Incidentally, PPCMC is a must have application for any PowerPC Mac - apart from it's core functionality it's also a Swiss Army Knife of essential tools including Python, youtube-dl, ffmpeg, curl and soon, ffplay all in one package without the usual fuss of needing X11 and Macports.

The installer will create a TubeAudio folder in ~/Music and place Choob, mplayer, TuneCatcher and TuneStreamer in /Applications.

Use Choob to browse for your desired clip, right click and Copy Link Location, then click on TuneCatcher in the dock (assuming you made a shortcut earlier.)
The link is passed to youtube-dl, the m4a audio file is downloaded and opened by MPlayer where the normal keyboard shortcuts apply for playback control.
When the clip is finished (or stopped) it is moved to ~/Music/TubeAudio/Archive.

Note, the m4a encoding used on Youtube is problematic to PowerPC Macs - without conversion they'll need to be played in either MPlayer or VLC.

If the Youtube clip you want to play is of a length unreasonable to download, choose TuneStreamer instead but be aware this will not keep a copy of the clip.
Also because of piping the stream via stdin the normal MPlayer controls aren't available.

Download is available here.

Download the G3 compatible version here. Unfortunately, mplayer for G3 doesn't accommodate streaming or playing m4a audio, so using TuneCatcher, a standard 360P video is downloaded which mplayer plays without processing the video.

MPlayer keyboard shortcuts for reference:

Pause/Play.....Space
Left/Right.......Back/Forward 10 seconds
Up/Down........Back/Forward 1 minute
9/0................Volume -/+
[ ].................Decrease/Increase playback speed by 10%
ESC...............Stop and quit