I have a cute setup for playing YouTube videos (mostly music) via SSH from my phone when I'm lying on my bed and too lazy to get up. There's a small CL script which searches YouTube based on a query, then fires up youtube-dl and dumps the raw file to a named pipe. Then, when the header and everything needed for VLC to start streaming is ready, it starts up VLC via its ncurses interface, so I can volume up/down, pause/play and seek if needed from my phone. VLC is nice enough to fire up an X11 window if you give it the right DISPLAY environment variable over SSH, so you can watch the video (even make it fullscreen via the ncurses interface). Once the video finishes playing, obviously, the named pipe and the data is gone---everything's in memory anyways.

These days I'll get to uploading it to GitHub, maybe even turn it into a Firefox extension/Android app. Though it's a little specific to my use case: I have a quality sound system attached to my desktop computer so it doesn't feel right to listen to stuff on my laptop/phone when there is such a great setup lying around. And setting up SBCL and Shelly just to run Common Lisp scripts is a little bit of an overkill.

Sorry for the off-topic, just felt like sharing this bit of my computer-aided laziness :)

That is in fact my working solution. The disadvantage over VLC is that you've got the videos sitting on disk, sucking space, while VLC will queue and buffer videos.

Depending on what you're watching, youtube-dl can suck up a lot of space.

Mind the -F and -f options -- these list and select video quality. I find '43' for YouTube (640x360) is usually sufficient for instructional materials (lectures/presentations).