Rick Astley
20 HN mentions · mentioned in 17 months, 2013–2023
3:34 · 1.8B views · Oct 25, 2009
The official music video for Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up, the song behind the Rickroll internet prank.
HN mostly uses it as a Rickroll joke or as a stand-in test URL for tools handling YouTube links.
20 comments from Hacker News
I'm gonna be trying it out, since another commenter mentioned it's powered by mpv. Although, as I have very basic requirements, I'm already perfectly content with starting up mpv from the cli or by using mpv.app. If you try this out and feel like it's not what you're looking for, I'd suggest trying out mpv [0] directly. It integrates youtube-dl [1], so you can easily watch YouTube, as well as from the other hundreds of sources they support, very easily. For example: mpv this video The most recent macOS update brought a picture-in-picture feature, where you could keep videos playing on top of everything else in one side of the screen. With mpv you can get a close approximation by using the "--ontop" flag. Although admittedly it's not quite as nice as the new built-in feature. And a bit tangential to the whole thing, I found mpv's C API [2] to be very approachable and well documented. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK]
I believe this is about allowing this kind of markup (that exists on old web pages that haven’t been updated for a long time) to still work: <embed this video … by roughly translating it into <iframe this video Probably also the <object> equivalent, maybe only that and not <embed>, I’m not sure. I never had a great deal to do with those two tags. I don’t know why it has to be done this way. I’d have thought that without this extra code it’d roughly fall back to being an iframe on the original URL, and then YouTube could just check if it’s in a frame and behave as an embed instead of the main UI. But there’s probably a reason why they’ve all done it this kind of way.
Yes, he's at the mercy of YouTube since he's building on the platform in violation of its ToS. But as a consumer, you can use the youtube-dl script ( [LINK] ) along with mpv ( [LINK] ) to play YouTube videos as you wish. Example: mpv this video mpv --no-video this video mpv <pretty much any video / streaming site in existence> Both packages are available in your nearest package manager, i.e. brew for MacOS, MSYS2 for Windows, etc.
I tried linking to the rick roll video (just as a test url) and it breaks because it seems to lowercase everything. Original url : this video Linkmoji url : [LINK] After following the link : [LINK] And then you get a 404 not found
My current work-around is [LINK] and then click 'clean viewer'. Changing a video URL from www.youtube.com to www.pwnyoutube.com redirects there. Example this video