It would be nice if they have a 0 pixel option. I use YouTube mostly for the music and I let it play in the background
If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!
youtube-dl -k gave me two files, one webm/opus audio file and one mp4/av1 video file.
The files had roughly same sizes, the audio being 9728k large, the video 9476k.
The video had 127 keyframes, out of 17030 frames total, distributed over 567 seconds of video (one keyframe every 4.5 seconds). I don't have a method at hand to measure the encoded size of the keyframes but if I extract the first 90k of the file using dd (bs=90k count=1), I get 21 frames, so that's a lower bound for the size that's actually needed to encode one single keyframe, more shouldn't actually be neccessary.
So of the 9.4M video file, > 99% is waste. Quite literally as 1% of 9476k is 95k. With the addition of audio, the amount of waste has to be adjusted to roughly half of the total audio+video data. Still a large amount of data that can be saved, especially at youtube scale where reductions of traffic in the sub-percent range are material for promotions.
The 480p video-only file sizes for this video as reported by youtube-dl have VP9 at 9.70MiB, AV1 at 9.25MiB, and H.264 at 3.55MiB.
If your content is audio only then use an audio encoding site like SoundCloud. Or, if you really want to use YouTube, then you need to get them to develop an audio specific option.
And then additionally, there should be better recognition of the "picture not changing" conditions, to allow better use of such a feature.
I was trying to distribute a 3 hour lecture with a single slide. I suppose seeing the speaker for a few seconds would be nice too. haha, I'm asking a lot? The slide had a lot of detail so the video uhhh I mean the jpg got enormous and few keyframes so no seeking? No thanks, ill do the "compression" in javascript. (eeewww!)
A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.
Hilarious hack, love this idea
Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.
it's not like we don't have ads on radio
It is not impossible to go over all music videos, automatically fetch lyrics and replace video with static album cover or something, but who would do it? If YouTube does this then they are responsible for any copyright infringement, and they become huge competition to user-created content on their own platform.
youtube-dl -f bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5I
mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5Iyoutube-dl can directly stream as well, e.g.,
youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc -
And there's mps-youtube as well.
mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio 'ytdl://ytsearch1:John Butler Trio Ocean'
!#/bin/bash
yt(){
mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio "ytdl://ytsearch1:$*"
}
Shall amend my scripts immediately.
This does what you want.
For a specific example, it has a nice toggle above every track, where you can flip between video and audio-only. It works great, except that I cannot find a way to force it to stay on audio-only. As soon as the current track ends, the toggle resets back to "video".
And this kind of stuff is all over the app.
youtube-dl -F https://youtube.com/video-url
As others have said, if the "video" is a static image, the bandwidth usage should be negligible in practice. But I've seen lots of promotional album streams that intentionally add busy graphics, motion lyrics, etc; while they're sometimes cool, they're wastes of bandwidth and processing if I just want it play audio in a background tab.
Many times I've listened to a YouTube video or stream without watching it by just starting the video and then pocketing my phone and being careful not to touch it. I hear the audio and continue my shopping or cleaning or whatever while battery and bandwidth is wasted displaying the video to the debris inside my pocket.
I can only assume Google has run the numbers and decided it's actually more profitable for them to make something so silly and wasteful on both sides of the connection necessary, but that's what it is.
I've never seen it be active outside of a phone call.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-only-youtube...
mpv --no-video [youtube url]