I recently wanted to view a youtube video using a computer that had no graphical browser installed. Long story short, the computer runs Gentoo and is used almost exclusively for recording and playback of television content: so for almost all use case scenarios, having a graphical browser is not needed, the excessive compile times they would entail (over 24 hours on this somewhat low-resource machine) being unjustifiable.
I decided there must be some way, using the non-graphical browser I did have on this machine--elinks,to view youtube videos. A bit of online research revealed how I could accomplish this task. Though there is undoubtedly more than one way to skin this cat, I used the one that seemed most straightforward to me, as described below.
Since I already had installed the mpv utility, all I had to do was some minor tweaks to elinks. First, I went into Setup > Option manager > Document > URI passing and added a new entry. I simply named it youtube-handle_mpv. Of course the final task for this step is to save that option.
I then edited that entry, using information found at the Arch wiki entry for elinks, and added the line mpv %c (this allows elinks to feed the designated URI to mpv). Having done that, I next needed to assign a key which, when pressed, would trigger the URI passing.
I went to Setup > Keybinding manager > Main mapping > Pass URI of current frame to external command and there designated the grave or backtick key as the one that would trigger the URI passing. Again I selected "save" and exited the Setup menu.
After having done that, I navigated elinks to youtube's site, searched for the video I wanted to view and, having highlighted the desired link using the arrow keys, pressed the grave/backtick key. After a brief pause (for downloading and caching some of the data, I presume), mpv opened and the video began to play.
NOTE: the pause between pressing the designated key and the actual playback of the video under mpv could vary based, I believe, on the length/quality of the video.
