smtube not passing URL (%u) parameter

[CrustyCurmudgeon]

I'm using smtube 16.7.2 under an up-to-date Linux Mint 18. Seeing several quirky issues as follows:

I'm trying to get smtube to open a download a youtube video URL using "youtube-dl-gui". I've entered the proper commands and parameters in the smtube player settings. When I right-click a video and select the youtube-dl-gui command, youtube-dl-gui opens up as expected. However, smtube fails to pass the URL of the video to the gui. There is no error re: could not get url. %u is entered in the parameter field.

If I right-click and copy the video URL from smtube, then paste it into the opened youtube-dl-gui, it downloads just fine. It seems that youtube-dl-gui either isn't getting the parameter or doesn't understand it.

Second issue - I also can't download from smtube using wget (no response at all) nor can I get it to work with just youtube-dl command-line (again, no response at all). Is there a trick to calling a terminal command from smtube?

[rvm]

[CrustyCurmudgeon]