How to Watch YouTube on Your Dumb Phone: Easy Method

Here’s a simple guide to watching YouTube videos on your dumb phone that can play videos. I tried this on a very cheap Chinese phone, so it should work on most similar devices.

You’ll need two things: ffmpeg and yt-dlp. If you only want to watch your own videos, you can skip installing yt-dlp. Let’s get started.

First, download the video you want to watch using yt-dlp. If you’re not sure how, check out the yt-dlp documentation on GitHub. Make sure to download the video in MP4 format.

To watch the downloaded video on your phone, you need to convert it to AVI format. You can do this easily by using the ffmpeg command below. It’ll change the video from MP4 to AVI format.

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c:v mpeg4 -vtag xvid -qscale:v 5 -c:a libmp3lame -qscale:a 5 output.avi

I hope this guide helps you watch videos on your dumb phone. Most people don’t usually watch things on such small screens, but I wanted to see if we could watch modern videos on old hardware.