shellTube/README.md

#Shelltube

Shelltube is a collection of (pretty POSIX) shell scripts to browse YouTube quickly, efficiently, and without the bloat most command-line clients require.

Shelltube is written in pure shell; its only dependencies are any modern shell (pdksh, bash, zsh), curl/wget, and vlc/mplayer/kaffeine.

Even these dependencies, though, can easily be changed. If, for example, you don't have vlc, you can just modify a single line and be good-to-go using another player.

Also, Shelltube doesn't use the YouTube API at all. This avoids the annoying red-tapey stuff that goes with it-- IDs, registration, quotas-- but has some disadvantages. We'll power through the downsides, though! :)

Usage

Shelltube is quite simple to use; this tutorial will go over the usage of the wrapper script, shelltube.sh.
When running the script, you'll see a prompt:
>>

In this prompt you can type any of the following commands:
(!) about
View the about page.
(cls) clear
Clear the screen.
(dl) download [URL]
Download the selected/specified video.
exit
Exit Shelltube.
(?) help
Display this message.
(md) metadata [URL]
Display selected/specified video's MD.
(/) search {term}
Perform a search.
(str) stream [URL]
Stream the selected/specified video.
(sel) video {URL}
Select video based on URL or ID.

In (parenthesis), smaller aliases for the commands are written.
In {curly brackets}, required arguments are written.
In [brackets], optional arguments are written.

You can use Shelltube in one of two ways (or both):
A) By selecting a video and then doing something with it
B) By doing something and specifying the video

Method A entails using either the "video" or "search" command to select a video, which will then be displayed before the prompt like so:
$VIDEO-ID-HERE >>
When a video is selected, you use the "download", "stream", or "metadata" commands without arguments to act on the video.

Method B entails just using the "download", "stream", or "metadata" commands while using a URL or video ID as an argument. For example:
>> download $VIDEO-ID-HERE

You could opt to not use this interactive wrapper script and instead just use the yt-down.sh, yt-search.sh, and yt-metadata.sh scripts on their own.

They are each pretty simple, and you can read their USAGE messages at the top of each script.

Licensing

All of ST is released under the ISC license
(https://opensource.org/licenses/ISC)
except for the yt-down.sh script, which is released under the GPLv2
(https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html)

Credit

jadedctrl wrote most of ST, but iluaster wrote almost all of yt-down.sh