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Comment by yjgyhj | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the link, I always enjoy a good talk.

I use Pocket to save text to read later. Sadly, I don't know any similar program/service for video. I would love to have a service where I could send videos from youtube or a file or a torrent, and it would save the oldest one on my phone, so that I can watch it offline on my phone when going on the train.

If someone makes this, I'm def willing to pay you $5/month for it, and I'm sure many others are as well.

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You might look at youtube red, which is included with the google music streaming service. Will let you download videos to your mobile device for offline viewing. Combined with your youtube "to watch" list, it works pretty well. Unfortunately doesn't support an "add on desktop -> auto download mobile" workflow.

Download it using youtube-dl and copy it to your phone using ssh. Should be trivially automatable.

Been thinking about doing something like that exactly...

Effectively you want to turn arbitrary link submissions into a podcast feed of their multimedia (probably rehosted). Then you could reuse a normal podcast client to configure when items are automatically downloaded to your phone, do playback, maintain played-status, etc. Podcasts aren't necessarily audio-only - there are video podcasts and video-capable podcast clients out there.

See https://huffduffer.com/ for an (audio) example of the web service part.

Thats a very good idea! RSS is just nothing more than updating some xml. Super easy to make and can host on static website.

i think we only need offline availability because mobile data cost is still high

i really hope they mobile networks start providing unlimited data

its just better for everyone, we wont need to make redundant copies, and as the downvoted comment suggest we will only need a good bookmarking app

I think that we also need it in cases where the data is made unavailable at some future time or when a mobile connection isn't available.

Couldn't you just sync a folder with your phone (via dropbox or a thousand other apps) and just save whatever webpage the video is on to that folder. If you do it your way, you'd have to worry about text that's associated with the video that the user may or may not want.

I think that Instapaper (https://www.instapaper.com/) can handle videos, although I haven't tried it out much myself.

Oh! Didn't know about that. Should sign up and check out the features.

It doesn't download. It just has UI for video; so does Pocket.

Open up the link and look for "Add to". You can then create your own playlist and put any videos in there for later viewing.

I hope this helps.

I think the main problem is, for YouTube, it violates ToS so the app usually gets blocked.

Such technology already exists and is embedded in your browser. It's called bookmarks.

He means offline viewing of online videos in a convenient way, like iOS Safari "Reading List" (Saves pages for offline viewing), or Pocket, which does much of the same but for text.

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