Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

SINC

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Nov 21, 2012
3
0
Hey there! I'm reaching out for some assistance in troubleshooting the IINA video player.

https://iina.io/

I can't find the answers I'm looking for using google, so hopefully, here I can find a solution.

I love the IINA video app but I'm struggling to have it playback video streams from youtube without it constantly choking and buffering every 1.5 seconds.

I've played around with the settings Prefs with in IINA but for the life of me, regardless how I set the buffer ranges it doesn't change anything.

I don't know much if anything about terminal so I wouldn't know what to type in to change settings with Youtube-DL but this seems to be a possible key player to this issue. It's also something that's often mentioned as an ongoing issue for some using IINA, but I can't seem to track down a workaround or resolution.

It's either the IINA app or its youtube-dl.

Does anyone here have any clues or can guide me?

Many thanks!
 
I can only think of a few things that perhaps could help.
The setting; Force dedicated GPU

Then updating youtube-dl

You can try MPV and see if there's a difference. I tried streaming now, but I see no buffering. I admit to trying out a m3u playlist that shows me live-tv and not a youtube stream
 
youtube has been throttling youtube-dl recently, people switched to yt-dlp with varying levels of success
 
  • Like
Reactions: kryten2
Hey there, thanks for the responses. I tried Force Dedicated GPU and resinstalled/updated youtube-dl. I also installed MPV from brew... but I couldn't connect the two ie. MPV<--> youtube-dl. In any case, the issue still remains, although I started to get another issue saying "stream cannot be opened". After some tinkering searching the net, I entered some random terminal commands and got it working again but still with the buffering issues.

I have very little knowledge of terminal and really don't know wtf I'm doing.

with yt-dip, is that something that can hook into youtube-dl? IINA app only allows you to specify a "youtube-dl" location. How would I use yt-dip with IINA? Can you tell me what terminal commands I'd need to use yt-dip in place of youtube-dl?

Thanks for any assistance
 
I'm not sure. I guess you might be able to install yt-dlp using on of the methods here, then direct IINA to its location (not sure where), and hope IINA thinks it's youtube-dl ?‍♂️ bit of a long shot, though.
 
I started to get another issue saying "stream cannot be opened".

This is all I’ve gotten for the last year. So I gave up trying and switched to new options.

If it’s something I watch once I watch it with Brave browser

If it’s something I watch repeatedly I DL it with macytdl then load it into IINA as needed
 
I've figured out a temporary fix. Basically, you install `yt-dlp` instead of `youtube-dl` and set your custom IINA `youtube-dl` binary to `yt-dlp`

Run the follwoing commands

Step 1: brew install yt-dlp
Step 2: [ -d $HOME/bin ] || mkdir $HOME/bin
Step 3: ln -s $(which yt-dlp) $HOME/bin/youtube-dl

Finally, go to your IINA preference -> network -> set `custom youtube-dl path` to /Users/<YOUR_USER_NAME>/bin/
 
Last edited:
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.