Minitube: A YouTube Desktop Application for Linux

By
SK

Minitube is a YouTube Desktop client to play your YouTube videos in your desktop/laptop without having to create a YouTube account. You can watch 1080p HD videos without any stuttering. It provides you a TV like experience and consumes less CPU resources, because it does not use Flash Player. Also it gives you the download option, so that you can download the video’s instantly what you like. It will run on Windows OS, Mac OS and Ubuntu platforms.

Features

Here are some of the notable features mentioned in the developer’s website:

  • Channel subscriptions without using a YouTube account
  • Find missing parts of a multi-part video
  • Sort videos by relevance, date, view count and rating
  • Filter videos by publication date, video duration and video quality
  • Choose the maximum video resolution up to 1080p
  • Editable play list: drag’n’drop and remove videos
  • Search by keyword, channel name or paste a YouTube link. Suggestions while typing.
  • Spell suggestions: “Did you mean…”
  • Remembers recent keywords and channels. These can be cleared if needed.
  • YouTube feeds: “Most Popular”, “Featured”, etc.
  • YouTube categories: “Music”, “Games”, etc.
  • Related videos
  • Compact mode: a small, always-on-top window
  • Fullscreen mode: mouse cursor, toolbar and playlist autohide
  • Float on top
  • Stop after this video option
  • Copy YouTube link to clipboard
  • Share on Facebook, Twitter, Buffer and via email
  • Translated to more than 30 languages including German, French, Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew and Chinese and many more.

Install Minitube On Ubuntu/Linux Mint

You can download and compile the source tarball here. Extract the tar package in any location and refer the Readme file to install Minitube. One our of author has written a decent guide about how to compile and install software from source in an easy steps. And wepu8 team has a PPA to ease our installation work.

Add the Minitube PPA using the following command:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8

Update the source list:

$ sudo apt-get update

And install it with following command:

$ sudo apt-get install minitube

Usage

Now launch it from Menu or Dash. Minitube home screen will look like below.

Minitube_005Enter the keyword or channel name to play back your videos. Also you can select the video quality by clicking on the lower right corner icon. Once you selected the video, Minitube will play it for you. You don’t have to create an account in YouTube.

Minitube_006That’s it. Enjoy!