My current flow is copy the video URL, use terminal on my laptop to download the video/audio with youtube-dl, open iphone.local in my browser while VLC is open on my phone and upload the file there. This could be simplified a lot specially for playlists.
Maybe a more generic question is why aren't there more integrations of the form x in y while both are open source and would clearly improve the user experience?
It's a valid argument to perhaps modify the script to use youtube-dl when available, since it might be more reliable. Merging the 2 projects doesn't make sense when one can just optionally depend on the other.
If you're looking for a video player that uses youtube-dl to support Youtube URLs, mpv[2] does that. Just feed it Youtube URLs as arguments to make your playlist. You can also pass in the option --no-video to just play the sound of the youtube video. You can probably pass in options to mpv to play all the videos of a Youtube playlist URL, too.
> Maybe a more generic question is why aren't there more integrations of the form x in y while both are open source and would clearly improve the user experience?
Because it's work. If you see something is lacking in open source, it's because nobody has wanted it badly enough to do the work themselves. And even if somebody did, choosing to share their work is another matter.
[1] https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc-3.0/-/blob/d590d61de4...
[2] https://mpv.io/