Youtube-dl doesn't get the best quality

[stephen304]

This is due to youtube-dl outputting to stdout and being piped to vlc - it seems youtube-dl doesn't support streaming output while downloading if the audio/video are separate and need to be merged by ffmpeg (which is the case for the highest quality). Forcing youtube-dl to get the best quality causes it to block until the content is fully downloaded.

The best solution would probably be to use youtube-dl to fetch the stream URLs and separately set up a streaming conversion with ffmpeg.

Alternatively, it would be super sweet if youtube-dl could support simultaneously downloading audio & video to provide non-blocking streaming of the highest quality.