Stream YouTube videos directly to your media player

YouTube is great, but the embedded flash player doesn't offer a lot in the way of customizing your viewing experience. There are quite a few options for downloading flv video files from YouTube, but adding the following function to your bashrc will let you stream them directly to your choice of media player.

function mtube {
  video_id=$(curl -s $1 | sed -n "/watch_fullscreen/s;.*\(video_id.\+\)&title.*;\1;p");
  mplayer -fs $(echo "http://youtube.com/get_video.php?$video_id");
}

This should work with any URL of the form http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=[video id here], for example:

mtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evQ0QNi2CzA