

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.
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.