How to resume YouTube videos in VLC

You can run mpv with the --save-position-on-quit option. e.g.

mpv --save-position-on-quit /path/to/video.mkv

Alternatively, if you want mpv to do that by default, you can add that option to its config file. For example:

echo "save-position-on-quit" >> ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf

Or use your favourite text editor to add the same line. The -- option prefix is not needed in the config file.

If you want this option to be the default for all users on the system rather than just your own user, the config file to edit (as root) is /etc/mpv/mpv.conf if mpv was installed as a package. And probably /usr/local/etc/mpv/mpv.conf if installed by compiling the source.

Parsing JSON in the shell is generally not a great idea. You can easily find that, on U&L, almost all the answers to questions along the lines of "how can I parse this JSON in the shell?" end up using specialized tools (e.g. jq or jshon).

This is why I suggest to leverage the ability of youtube-dl to select one video version when more than one is available and to print its URL on standard output instead of downloading it:

• --format or -f: lets you... specify a format. To have the highest quality, just specify best. Actually, in your case this is probably not required, because (see manual page youtube-dl(1)):

  By default youtube-dl tries to download the best available quality

• --get-url, or -g, avoids downloading any video and only prints the URL of the selected one to standard output.

Then, leverage the ability of vlc to play (and seek) a video from URL. You can either pipe the URL to vlc:

youtube-dl --get-url --format best 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=video_id' | vlc -

or use command substitution to invoke vlc with the URL as argument:

vlc "$(youtube-dl --get-url --format best 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=video_id')"