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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

I've been consuming my YouTube videos via RSS and youtube-dl these days. I have a little python script that collects the video urls from the feed, downloads them, and then NewsBlur notifies me of the new videos.

NewsBlur has become the way I find new academic papers (arXiv/journal RSS feeds), consume the news, webcomics, and YouTube videos.

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Youtube-dl is an incredible tool, and supports far more than YouTube. I was pleased as punch yesterday to discover that Shoshana Zuboff's talk (shared to HN) on a video site I'd never previously heard of was supported.

There are other related tools.

VLC, both the desktop client (Linux, MacOS, Windows), and to a somewhat lesser extent, the Android client, can also stream video, most certainly from YouTube. Given the superiority of playback controls and for Picture-in-a-picture / pop-up view, this is my preferred option for Android when I want video, generally.

mps-youtube is an absolutely amazeballs console-based YouTube client. It offers search (text, title, channel), playlists, preferred search context (music or all), playback (audio only, video, resolution), and local client(s).

My preferred mode is to curate a playlist off of various searches, and to play that back, either through mps-youtube, or another player capable of using a local file. A disadvantage of mps-youtube is an application-based API cap which doesn't seem to apply to other options.

mpv is a console multimedia player, successor to mplayer, which can integrate with youtube-dl via the '--ytdl' switch. This means you can stream any youtube-dl supported streaming service or target, from raw MP3s or Oggs, to YouTube, Vimeo, and numerous other online media platforms.

I've been making (slightly) increased use of RSS, but have yet to wire that into my media player(s).

All of the console options work in Android under Termux, a Linux-like console userland that's one of the very few things on Android which Does Not Manifestly Suck.

> "mpv is a console multimedia player, successor to mplayer, which can integrate with youtube-dl via the '--ytdl' switch."

No switch is needed anymore, mpv has built in support for youtube-dl now through the ytdl.lua extension which automatically uses youtube-dl when necessary. Simply run `mpv [URL]`

TIL, thanks!

Pssh be quiet. The normally quiet Google employees will arrive, calling for stronger attacks on the ytdl.

FWIW youtube-dl supports downloading from a channel directly, and with a flag can spit out a file with every previously downloaded video. So the next time you run youtube-dl itll just grab new stuff.

That reminds me of Stallman browsing the web with wget and cat hahaha.

This solution offers total automation, filtering and allowing perusal of the content in the same way it was presented in the first place

Could you elaborate on how you find new papers that you are interested in? Do you just subscribe to RSS sources and going through all of them? Or do you have some way of filtering?

I didn't know arxiv had an rss feed, I usually find interesting papers through reddit, twitter and paperscape. Do you do any filtering on the feed to find the good stuff?

No, but I've definitely thought of using sklearn's Naive Baye's implementation to give me paper highlights (a la Mendeley, minus Elsevier). You can train on paper abstracts you've previously found interesting/uninteresting.

Luckily arXiv RSS feeds are by category, so I scan the titles of all e.g. qbio papers for a day and add the interesting ones to my reading list.

ArXiv feeds are organized by category (more like tags in that papers could be cross-listed, but need a primary category). Daily traffic in different categories is very different. Eg, at some point I used to subscribe to hep-ph/hep-th/gr-qc and they combined to something between 50-100 papers a day. I’d mostly just scan the titles/abstracts, to pull out particularly interesting papers.

Care to share the script?

Sure :) Although it's not much more use than my description if I don't clean it up and write docs, so will have to do that first. Will let you know when/if I do :)

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