Hacker News Reader

Comment by nsgi | Hacker News Reader

Do you have some sort of RMS-style setup? If so, I'm curious about your reasons for that and why mainstream browsers aren't an option for you

View on HN

Not the OP but I’m a heavy youtube-dl user. I live in a rural area where my only internet option is satellite (HughesNet) which is basically unusable for any kind of streaming media. I rent an office in town to do software work and use youtube-dl to download videos for later viewing at home.

This is similar to my use case as well. I just cannot watch a video from Youtube itself, the connection would be lost so many times it'd stop trying after 1% or less. The only solution is to painfully and slowly download it to my system, over time, and hope there aren't cases that destroy the 60% you downloaded over the last 2 days.

If nothing happens to replace or reinstate youtube-dl, a lot of people like you and me are simply cut off from video content. This is pretty much terrible.

Or you guys can just pay for a youtube premium subscription, which lets you download videos to view offline

Compared to youtube-dl and an offline media player like mpv, youtube's web interface is absolute garbage for consuming content. The only thing it's half-good for is discovery because it shows thumbnails of the videos and links to related videos.

Useful things that I can't do on through youtube's web interface:

1 - archive videos (so many videos have been taken down and would be lost forever to me had I not had an offline archive of them)

2 - quickly play through a ton of videos on demand, offline, without waiting to load the video (and the ads) -- skimming through dozens of offline videos takes seconds, but I'd have to stare at my browser loading forever to accomplish the same thing through a web browser

3 - make use of many useful features of powerful media players like mpv... just yesterday I needed to invert the colors on a screencast because I was watching it at night and the video's white window background was blinding me.. I could do this instantly in mpv, but absolutely impossible on youtube

4 - remix the video or otherwise alter it to my needs using powerful offline video editors.. youtube's offerings here are again a sad joke in comparison (as are most web tools compared to offline tools)

5 - not have to sit through a single stinking ad

If youtube could have just offered simple download links for their videos this would not be a problem.

But, no, they need you to be glued to their website and bound hand and foot to their service for as many hours of the day as they can bleed out of you.

I'd like to add the one that bothers me most:

6 - listen to public talks, presentations and soundscapes while doing something else with my mobile device, or letting the screen sleep in my pocket. YouTube requires the video to be on-screen or it stops playing, which makes it completely useless for listening to things. Other video sites are much better for this.

(I don't need advice on how to get around this thanks, I already know how to. But that's another of YouTube's crappy standard behaviours.)

You have a point to some extent, it could be valuable to offer download buttons on a lot of videos. However, YouTube is only as valuable as the content it serves, and the content creators are the ones putting ads in their videos and who would be unhappy if there were download buttons on everything

I'm a content creator myself, and I'd rather my content be available 110% ad-free

Not OP, but I personally use youtube-dl to retrieve videos on a remote server accessed via ssh, which then get downloaded slowly over a low bandwidth link for offline viewing at a later time. They may or may not get reencoded using the ffmpeg integration before retrieving as well.

YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a slow link, not to mention it's incredibly obnoxious with all its recommendations and other unmanagable propaganda delivery.

Youtube-dl's ability to retrieve titles and descriptions without showing me anything else and before retrieving any video content alone make youtube's opaque hashed URLs usable for me.

> YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a slow link

I've never used youtube-dl. How do you find the videos to download?

Youtube links are shared everywhere, including here on HN.

I also have a small collection of youtube channels bookmarked at their /videos URL, which at least doesn't try play any video and just gives a grid of thumbnails. Occasionally I'll visit those to discover new videos from the creators I'm interested in.

This already consumes more time watching youtube content than I care to admit.

You could look into newpipe, an alternate youtube player for Android. Or look at RSS feeds for the channels you want to follow.

On top of what others said, I also like youtube-dl + mpv because it consumes a fraction of the memory Firefox + one YT tab consumes. My main browser is Qutebrowser where I don't login to Google stuff, for which I use a Firefox profile. So when I'm watching something long like a lecture from any of my playlists, I download it first, quit Firefox, and watch with mpv. If I watch on FF on a large screen the computer starts swapping and I have to go kill some apps.

When I had high packet loss wireless internet, downloading videos was effectively the only way to watch them. Browsers don't buffer a whole video worth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com