SMTube: Play youtube videos in SMPlayer

Access to YouTube is available from multiple platforms, so we can enjoy several hours of content from any device, either from a smartphone, tablet or from your computer.

In the case of When you use your computer, the way that most of us know is to access the platform with the help of a web browser, but it is not the only one, in this article take the opportunity to take a look at SMTube.

SMTube is an application that works together with the SMPlayer player with which we can navigate the YouTube platform and thus search and play YouTube videos on our computer.

For those who still do not know SMPlayer I will only say that this is a very famous multimedia player, which is the graphical interface of mplayer and mpv.

With SMTube we will save the cost of resources, as we will avoid the consumption that requires the execution of a browser.

Since the videos are played with an SMPlayer media player rather than a flash player, this allows for better performance, particularly with HD content.

Another of the great benefits we have with using SMTube is that the application integrates perfectly with Youtube-dl so we not only have the possibility of watching our favorite videos with SMPlayer, but we can also download them and store them on our computer.

That said, the application is not conditioned to use SMPlayer as a player, we also have the possibility of being able to use other players of which are: MPV, VLC, Mplayer, Dragon Player, Totem, GNOME-MPlayer and more.

How to install SMTube on Linux?

If you want to try this application, what we must do is open a terminal and run the following commands, depending on the distribution we have:

To install SMTube on Ubuntu and derivatives, we must add the following repository to our list:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer

Then we will update our list:

udo apt-get update

And finally we install SMTube with:

sudo apt-get install smtube

While for Debian we must do it as follows:

Debian 9.0

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/smplayerdev/Debian_9.0/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:smplayerdev.list

wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:smplayerdev/Debian_9.0/Release.key -O Release.key

apt-key add - < Release.key

apt-get update

apt-get install smtube

Debian 8.0

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/smplayerdev/Debian_8.0/ /' > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/home:smplayerdev.list

wget -nv https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:smplayerdev/Debian_8.0/Release.key -O Release.key

apt-key add - < Release.key

apt-get update

apt-get install smtube

Whereas, for Fedora, the SMTube installation commands are as follows:

Fedora 27

dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:smplayerdev/Fedora_27/home:smplayerdev.repo

dnf install smtube

Fedora 26

dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:smplayerdev/Fedora_26/home:smplayerdev.repo

dnf install smtube

Fedora 25

dnf config-manager --add-repo https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:smplayerdev/Fedora_25/home:smplayerdev.repo

dnf install smtube

Finally, to install SMTube in ArchLinux and derivatives:

sudo pacman -S smtube

How to use SMTube?

Done the installation of the application, pwe rocede to execute it. Being in it immediately, it will display a list of videos that we can see just by clicking on any of them.

Below the menu we have the internal search engine thatthat will help us to find the videos, toOn the left side we have a filter with which we can restrict the search for the videos to any of the categories that it offers us in this.

On the other hand, in the menu bar In the navigation section we only have available the navigation buttons that any web browser should have.

In See we can activate the toolbar and status and finally SMTube settings. If we access it we will have something like this:

Where we can choose the default resolution that we want the videos to be reproduced, in the players section we will choose which player the application will support to play the videos.

Finally, We can also choose an external service if we want to download the videos.

Finally, We can also use the secondary click on a video where we have the possibility to choose if the video will be opened with a player, if we are going to download it, if only the audio will be played and finally if we want to copy the link or if we want that video to open in our browser. 

Without further ado that the application is visually simple, it has great potential thanks to its ease of being able to integrate with other services. I have seen some people use this application to be able to view their IPTV lists.