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Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).
I think
mplayer
has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believeyoutube-dl
can output to stdout.The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.