Thus even if using an older version, smplayer should still play youtube videos as long as youtube-dl is installed on your system and kept updated: In it’s preferences menu under network settings smplayer allows the user to specify when loading youtube videos either to use smplayer’s own internal youtube code or instead to use the mpv + youtube-dl utility which is a bit slower (or alternatively still, auto-choose to allow smplayer to use the quickest available method. Smplayer incorporates it’s own lightning-fast built-in code to load youtube videos quickly, otherwise it uses the somewhat slower youtube-dl utility The version of smplayer in the repositiory is slightly behind the changes youtube periodically makes to it’s code and therefore if one wishes to benefit from this faster loading of youtube videos it is necessary from time either to compile smplayer from source or if we are lucky to download an up to date precompiled version for the armhf architecture. Therefore Raspbian’s Buster version is lacking at least one very useful feature. While a fairly recent smplayer version is found in Raspbian’s Buster repository and works well, it is older than the latest stable version of smplayer. As I have mentioned in previous posts on raspberry forums I believe smplayer as a gui for mpv media player enhances it’s utilty, efficiency and pleasure not only for the new raspberry pi 4 ( but also and particularly for Pi 2 and Pi 3 where to achieve hardware acceleration requires displaying video output as an mmal overlay and therefore when in full screen relies solely on keyboard control and also loses the ability to easily multitask while watching a video )