Mplayer is the default Linux video player, and forms the base for many other player. It is pretty much like the windows Media Player Classic. The only difference here is that, Mplayer is for Linux, so there is an array of hacks and tweaks you can do with Mplayer.

MPlayer

One cool hack is playing Youtbe videos directly into your Mplayer. Yes, you can play youtube videos as live streams directly into Mplayer, without downloading them.

Go to your terminal and type this.

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

Replace the text “youtube_url” with the URL of the video you intend to watch.

This command queries youtube for an flv link to the video. The same command works for VLC as well with the proper switch for initializing from command line.

As simple as that, do let me know if there is any way to do this on Windows Media Player Classic.