Vinegar: Safari extension that replaces YouTube embeds with HTML5 video tags
andadinosaur.com
andadinosaur.com
That said, it's embarrassing how many iOS extensions I have installed just to work around today's shitty websites. AdGuard to make the web usable, AMPlosion to avoid AMP nonsense, Open in Apollo to avoid mobile Reddit dark pattens, now this (which I installed because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...)
The user-hostile design of web sites in 2021 is appalling. Even simple text articles or blog posts have become horrible. I was just reading a blog post linked from HN which featured 3 different popups: two modals and a modeless sidebar popup that follows you as you scroll.
No, I don't want to subscribe to your email newsletter.
No, I don't want to sign up for a course or webinar or some service or whatever.
No, I don't want to know more about something other than what I'm trying to read on this page while you keep interrupting me and telling me I should be doing something else.
(And that was a site that lacked the typical annoying cookie popup – maybe it actually respected the "do not track" feature? That would be a first.)
Popups were despised by users to such an extent that web browsers built in an option to block them. The sensible response to such a clear user preference would have been to abandon popups, but instead web designers came up with a way to work around the popup blocking feature by using modal javascript panes and sliding overlays to obscure the page content.
Autoplaying video was similarly viewed as obnoxious and battery draining, so web browsers built in a feature to block it; web designers responded by doing their best to defeat that feature as well, and it seems to be an ongoing arms race.
Browser vendors have just given up and let mute videos autoplay because otherwise the websites would show even less efficient gif/apng/canvas animation/manual slideshows instead.
The website I live from counters all of these patterns. Nothing appears above or in the content, only below it. There are no popups, no calls to actions and no GDPR notices. It's just one page of uninterrupted text. Everything else appears under the article. This has worked really well for me.
The way I see it, if your business model involves adding friction, you're doing something wrong.
Obviously that was before 'Engagement is King', where content became second-class and Google Tag Manager empowered marketing teams to load up each page with whatever new widget or analytics or advertising system they could get their hands on.
I've been maintaining my own site and I actually enjoy building it in the most barebones way possible. It's just HTML and CSS. Any time I feel tempted to add any JS I spend the time on making a noscript equivalent as best as I can. I'd love to see a swing back to that style of web dev again (keeping it separate from web app dev).
1. Someone makes a good newsletter and reports high engagement
2. Anecdotes circulate in the pre-alchemy world of marketing
3. Everyone tells their boss they’ll get great engagement if they launch a newsletter, omitting the “if we do the hard part of producing good content”
4. Nobody remembers that if they’d put good content on their website people would have read it there, too.
In Defense Of The Popup https://cxl.com/blog/popup-defense/ (yes, page has a popup).
Can't recommend it enough. There's no extension for Safari on iOS yet but it's so worth it.
At some point, browsers will switch strategies from mitigations to scraping.
I'd LOVE for an RSS Reader (like NetNewsWire) to prefetch the "reader view" of linked web pages. Instead of malware blockers curating zillions of filters and patches, just create scripts to scrape the top 100 websites. And then allow sharing of user supplied scrapers.
Also, $2 feels just right for these medium effort apps. Unfortunately people still complain about it not being free. When I asked $2 for a macOS app [0] where I worked for a bit more than a month, people got offended by it.
Coding the app logic is just a small part of launching an app, there's also presentation websites, privacy policies, icons, graphics, instructing the user how to use your app if it's something more unique, and the most time consuming of all: handling edge cases.
Usually VLC lasts a week or two.
Fuck that noise.
Don't give money to App-Store-only software vendors.
If I watched YouTube on my phone or my iPad at all, I would definitely install this. Realistically I almost always use my TV to watch YouTube. So it doesn’t matter.
Purposefully breaking built in functionality (full screen, PIP, etc) to force people to use your app or to remove the functionality altogether is a dick move. Something that’s getting real common with Google.
I will say that I cannot use picture in picture while browsing another site in Chrome. That sucks, but I don't think that is YouTube's choice, that's just how the browser works (sadly)
No background play though.
Edit: it does work via browser if you navigate out of fullscreen. TIL :)
I think ad revenue models are unethical. Promotion of extremist content is unethical. Privacy-invading data collection is unethical. Honestly, I think shitty content, in general, is unethical too.
On the other hand, I think it is ethical for an entrepreneuring developer to charge users $5 to bypass bad faith actors, at the (questionable) expense of "content creators". And I'd feel pretty good about paying the $5 too.
Nowadays the market for buying or streaming digital music has made paying for digital music viable.
With a lot of YouTube content, the situation is very similar today; there isn’t a way to pay for content without simultaneously being exposed to ads and the associated tracking/profiling/stalking. Maybe as adblocking becomes more common, creators and platforms will be forced to accommodate for the change in demand.
When digital music was getting big, it was mostly experienced through DJs at parties. They got their records from distributors and there were ways of pressing small amounts of vinyl cheaply.
Artists who didn't have a record deal had to hustle, selling their tunes directly from the trunk of their car or any means necessary.
Lots of musicians didn't make their money from these routes, instead they gave their music out for free as promotional material for live shows where they charged tickets.
Even if we jump forward to now, there's a few listener-supported models like soma.fm which may not last forever but have survived without resorting to ads or piracy.
Piracy is fun for the consumer, while it lasts, but it suffocates the artists and was never a viable solution.
For anyone willing to pay, there is always a way to get your wares if you know what you're looking for.
Likewise MP3 players and similar portable music devices (like the iPod) were technically advocating breaking copyright laws in some countries. Like here in the UK where it was illegal to rip a CD you owned. That law was clearly idiotic but the only reason it changed was because everyone was already doing it.
I'm not trying to argue that piracy is good. However it's not as black and white as some make out.
It's a nitpick because I agree large swaths of the dance and hip-hop music we have today wouldn't exist if not for copyright violation, no denying that.
However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."
Tiny anecdote fwiw, I once worked a summer gig for a wedding/bar-mitzvah DJ who had a legal license to rip and play mp3s. Iirc part of the deal was they had to be a certain quality, e.g. 320kbps straight from the source.
Or at least that's what he told me (this was AJ the DJ in Houston, Tx circa 2000 if anyone wants to do the fact-check legwork)
Yup, exactly. See, for instance, the 1937 ondes Martenot composition Oraison as an example.[0] Other electronic progenitor genres, e.g musique concrete, did use samples but they were widely not copyrighted sounds.[1][2]
Hip-hop, however, would not exist without illegal sampling.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EU0ISo996A
Depends on the genre to some extent but it's worth noting that Amiga trackers could double as samplers and even the Atari ST could trigger hardware samplers. A lot of electronic producers would swap samples even for percussion (eg the Amen break which is used massively in jungle and early DnB and was ripped from a B-side on a Winstons record). Even some riffs that sound like synths are actually samples layered over a piano roll. But you're absolutely right that synths and drum machines were also pivotal too. I wasn't trying to suggest that the entire scene existed only for sampling but instead stating that sampling was one of the cornerstones that lead to the creation of many of the genres we still listen to now.
> However, if we can put aside the legal angle, there's an understood difference between copyright violation for the purpose of sampling and remixing vs. outright "gonna steal your stuff because I don't want to pay for it."
If we're putting aside the legal angle, then it really depends on who you ask. Electronic (house, techno, trance, hardcore, etc) producers had no issue with their records being copied and shared on DJ mix tapes because that was a way for smaller artists and DJs in the scene to breakthrough. But as a DJ you'd sometimes avoid including tracks from big commercial labels -- particularly if you were a headliner DJ and thus your mix tape would been heard by more people -- because mainstream artists wouldn't turn the same kind of blind eye to their tracks being on mix tapes (source: I'm an ex-DJ)
So it really depends on the scene and sometimes even the individual.
I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.
Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene
I was talking about copyrighted samples. eg
Fatboy Slim - Rockafella Skank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLjgXPDzeZo
Daft Punk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MhmnKUOxB4
Prodigy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMQtMSnpBA
...and these are just 3 headline artists. Sampling was common place in the underground scene too. eg The Amen break is a percussion loop that basically invented Jungle and early Drum and Bass, and that was a copyrighted loop too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFKMtv8tU0U
> I do agree the waters get muddy once it's multiple seconds long.. IANAL but there's the famous vanilla ice lawsuit, and I think there was some fair use wiggle room if it's under some amount of time (forgot the exact limit), it is fine to use.
Fair use doesn't cover sampling. Artists need to clear any samples used. If a sample is used creatively enough then there is a chance it might sound different enough that it goes unnoticed with anyone accosiated with the original artists estate. But that's a calculated risk the sampling artist chooses to take rather than their automatic right under copyright law.
> Good point about the DJ mixtape thing. I am guessing a lot of composers/producers got the raw end of that deal, but you are right, it helped a lot for promotion and growing the scene
Producers (nobody calls those kinds of artists "composers") didn't get the raw end because it wouldn't have affected their sales; if anything, it helped promote them). Bare in mind that mixed records on a cassette mix tape cannot be used for anything other than home listening (DJs didn't work of cassette players) and dance tracks didn't typically make for good home listening because they'd have long intro and outro sequences purposely designed for beat mixing. So mix tapes served an important role.
The only caveat some artists would have placed was any unreleased promos stayed off mix tapes (unless specified otherwise) because those promos were often secret weapons for headliner DJs.
Not unfamiliar with how the sausage was made. Long time ago though.
Not a musician myself.. I dabbled a bit in Max/MSP, Acid (the program), Fruity Loops, and used to go wild with Rebirth or whatever it was called, but it was all just messing around.
Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody". How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.
Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions. Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture. Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.
Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing. And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right. (Not dismissing the skill of a DJ, I liken it more to a conductor than a composer or the orchestra. Hard and important skill, just different)
Re: fair use, I believe you're wrong. It isn't a hard law but in general the length of the sample is one of the major factors taken into account to determine whether a judge will lean one way or another.
P.L.U.R.
Because you believed I wasn't talking about copyrighted samples and yet that break is copyrighted. Hence why I reminded you of that break.
> Did have had plenty of conversations with musicians who called themselves composers, esp. as they would make their living composing tunes for video games and film etc. Sure "producers" is the more common term, but it's a bit reductive for you to say "nobody".
That's because they're a different scene entirely from what we were originally discussing. I didn't say "nobody in music calls themselves composers". I believe the term "producer" originates from "record producer", which film and game composers are not.
> How about Squarepusher, Simon Posford, and folks like that? Guarantee you they have been called all kinds of things, hehe.
From wikipedia:
Squarepusher: Musician record producer DJ
Hallucinogen: DJ, record producer, sound engineer
Yeah I'm sure they have been called other things too but that doesn't mean it is the common vocabulary nor even what they identify themselves as.
As an aside, Squarepusher is one of my all time favourite artists. Seen both live but I have a special love for IDM
> Anyway, when it comes to actually creating original tunes, my experience and recollection tells me it's by far mostly about synthetic instruments and laying out tracks, e.g. actual original compositions.
You keep saying that and I keep saying that it depends on the genre and artist. However that doesn't mean that sampling wasn't a massive part of the scene. I've cited examples to that end too.
> Significantly large samples of copyrighted material play a very small part, in the big picture.
Shall we just overlook the examples I've cited then....
> Of course there's some notable exceptions, but it's a drop in the ocean compared to original material.
That really wasn't the case when I was active in the scene as a DJ and producer. However lets avoid the anecdotes:
From Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Impact)
"Sampling has influenced all genres of music.[5] It is a particularly important part of pop, hip hop, and electronic music,[14] equivalent to the importance of the guitar in rock.[5] It is a fundamental element of remix culture."
If one compares the sampler to dance music as the guitar of rock, then it's hard to argue that sampling isn't a significant influence on dance music.
Also since you seem to be a fan of Goa, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_trance#Sound)
"A popular element of Goa trance is the use of vocal samples, often from science fiction movies."
However I'm not disputing that synths are also used heavily too.
> Not talking about DJing. By definition that is literally just sampling/remixing.
DJing is not remixing. Some techno DJs will argue otherwise but as one of those multi-turntable techno jocks I found the arguments about DJing being "live remixing" to be overstated. That doesn't mean it isn't still a creative process though.
> And of course you have famous DJ's who put out mixes and nobody knows how hard the original music synthesis freak worked to get that fat bass line sounding just right.
I really don't understand your point here. DJs can't "fatten" up a bassline of an existing track live. They can layer other basslines over an existing track (a trick I'd do regularly) but that's very different to remixing and sampling.
> Re: fair use, I believe you're wrong.
I'm not. To quote Wikipedia again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...)
"To legally use a sample, an artist must acquire legal permission from the copyright holder, a potentially lengthy and complex process known as clearance"
I guess that's not a super nice thing, so I'll share my reasoning, but I'm not really interested in taking this further unless you have something new to add:
1. your quote on fair use literally stops a few lines before citing the opposite of your point. any basic search on fair use will tell you that the length of the sample is one of the fundamental factors.
2. it's trivially easy to find music industry sites that call Posford and others "composer", such as discogs
3. Your distinction of exactly which types of music we are talking about appeared out of nowhere and doesn't seem to have any rules, feels like changing the goalposts to me.
4. I literally said that the original music synthesis person makes the bass line fatter. This is the work that goes into producing electronic music. It's original and not an issue of sampling.
5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition. I don't want to guess an exact number, but I would be shocked if it came anywhere even close to as high as 1%. You seem to think it's somewhere like 50% or more. My takeaway is you are only accounting for very specific sub-genres (e.g. if you think Goa trance is mostly composed of vocal samples, waaaayyy off, but vocal trance, certain kinds of hip hop.. yeah, of course).
Whatever, man, to be honest I am just not enjoying this convo anymore. Forgive me but I'm gonna bow out.
Take Posford for example. Discords says he is a composer and record producer. This suggests that Simon has released other creative works outside of dance music; and given Goa's roots I'd say that was more likely than your argument that they're both listed as synonyms. The fact that Discogs also describes him as a sound engineer further illustrates that it's a list of his achievements rather than a thesaurus of related terms.
> 5. You're ignoring the most fundamental fact: if we take the sum total of modern music, the amount of it which is composed of definitely copyrightable samples is extremely small relative to the amount of synthesis and traditional composition.
I agree but I also never once said "the sum total of modern music". I was talking specifically about the evolution of electronic dance music. I said:
"Electronic music wouldn't exist if it wasn't for ignoring copyright laws. The entire scene is built off the back of sampling and mix tapes."
Quite why you decided to bring film scores into the equation and then blame me for moving the goal posts I don't know.
Lastly I'm not denying fair use exists. I'm saying selling records doesn't fall under fair use. There are a thousand other ways to use samples outside of that and some of those will constitute as fair use.
Spotify is ok. Ads. Bunch of uninterrupted songs. Ads. Like radio. Many Anime streaming services are similar. Ads bookend the content.
YouTube could have spent time curating good content and building a platform worth a damn. Instead the vast vast majority is trash. There are really only a handful of content creators that make anything good. And it seems like more and more of them have patreons or their own sponsorships. I again don’t mind these. But I have direct ways of paying the creators. And if they moved somewhere else I’d follow them.
Also, "then don't use" is not an option either as almost all the content out there is uploaded to YouTube, so it isn't like same content is available on Vimeo/Facebook etc.
No ads on that product, sure, but very much not coincidentally you cannot opt out of all ads across Alphabet, and the flag is a very strong signal for elsewhere you will be shown ads (even if it’s not made directly available to advertisers in targeting settings).
Your points are highly subjective dear sir.
Yes, I would take quality content with unskippable ads that bookend what I want to watch or listen to, vs what appears to be random sometimes. Or just companies sponsoring the creators. I suppose I’m used to the old TV and radio model.
YouTube as it stands just recommends garbage. And everything has garbage click bait titles. The fact that the quality is so poor doesn’t make me want to pay for anything.
I don't think that what you said is internally consistent. Now, we may disagree about exactly what you mean, but it sounds like you are putting forth some form of moral relativism, which has appeared in various forms over the millennia. Many ways of phrasing moral relativism have logical inconsistencies in them.
I think the "anything goes as long as we're internally consistent" is a statement that any ethical system, E, is correct if and only if E is internally consistent.
And "there is no truth of the matter" is saying that "no ethical statement is true in all systems of ethics".
Now, is the "anything goes" statement an ethical statement? Is it true in all systems of ethics? If both, then this is a contradiction. If it is not an ethical statement, then what does "anything goes" even mean? If it is not true in all systems of ethics, then how can you defend it without begging the question? I'm not trying to enumerate all the possibilities, but just illustrate my skepticism... I don't see an easy way out here. It's not impossible, just really quite tricky, and if you value being internally consistent, maybe you should dig deeper.
Morals can come from culture, they can come from religion, or they can come from individual contemplation. Morals are axioms.
The one thing we can say for sure about them is that nobody agrees on what they should be.
Saying that advertising is a pest that should be actively removed is not even an uncommon viewpoint. The city of Sao Paolo famously banned all advertising.
Basically, I want to know what "relativism" actually means to you since your quote seems to imply that anything you think about is "relative". Thank you, I'm excited to hear your response.
Moral absolutism is the belief that certain actions are intrinsically moral or immoral.
For example, cannibalism. Say there is some tribe that eats their dead. A moral absolutist would say that "cannibalism is immoral", and therefore conclude that the tribe is immoral[1].
Whereas a moral relativist would say that, if you had grown up in a tribe of cannibals, then eating people would be a perfectly normal thing to do, it would be moral from the tribe's reference frame, and immoral from our reference frame.
Yes, different moral systems can be compared along certain objective dimensions. Objectively, cannibalism causes certain diseases such as kuru.
However, choosing which dimensions to optimise for is itself a subjective process. Objectively, cannibalism prevents food waste :)
Relativism is precisely what allows for meaningful disagreements to occur. Otherwise a disagreement would simply degenerate into a loud exchange of axioms (this often happens).
My problem with moral absolutism is that it requires a healthy dose of chronocentrism to buy into it without reference to some codified set of morals such as a religion. What is considered moral or immoral has changed dramatically in the last century alone. At some point in the future, our morality will be as unrecognisable to future generations as Ancient Greek morality is to us.
[1] Historically, this sort of moral absolutism was the impetus for certain missionary activity. No not that kind.
That’s not relativism.
What I mean by "anything goes" is that ethical discourse is not concerned with truth per se, since its "propositions" do not map to the world. But if we want to talk about ethics sensibly, we could hold any ethical views really, so long as they are internally consistent.
In the meantime, I support people I watch regularly on Patreon, imperfect as that is.
This can have consequences bordering on the absurd, e.g. if someone uses a YouTube video in their presentation and is forced to interrupt the presentation to wait for the ad.
It might be unethical if they were marketing it solely as a way to avoid ads but there are a wealth of benefits to using it. YouTube in a browser on iOS is a nightmare to use and I suspect that they don't fix the many issues because they want you to use their app. This extension removes those issues.
const video = document.getElementById("video");
const skipSecs = 5;
video.onkeydown = (e) => {
if (e.keyCode !== 37 && e.keyCode !== 39)
return;
e.preventDefault();
const time = video.currentTime;
video.currentTime =
e.keyCode === 37
? time - skipSecs
: time + skipSecs;
};> because YouTube's new embed widget starts playing on touch-start instead of touch-release, so it triggers while scrolling...
I've done this. One of the best decisions of my november 2021. I do not miss it one bit.
Looks like Vinegar fixes this (even in apps other than Safari). $2 very well spent.
I also don't like that ads are spliced in at inopportune times, breaking the flow of many videos.
There’s this constant onslaught of suggestions. An icon in the top right of the player during playback, a modal that appears when you hit pause showing other videos, the sidebar full of clickbait, and other incessant recommendations. I don’t know how the average user puts up with it.
||youtube.com^$3p,frame,redirect=click2load.html
||youtube-nocookie.com^$3p,frame,redirect=click2load.html
> The removal of in-video ads.
You can pay YouTube for ad-free viewing... not doing so and stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
> Prevent YouTube from tracking your play/pause/seek activities.
A little bit of a tinfoil hat issue here, but it's fair if this sort of analytics bother you (it doesn't bother me).
> Restore picture-in-picture functionality.
Picture in picture works just fine on Windows and Android without a YouTube Premium account. Is this something specific to iPhone?
> The videos don’t stop playing if you switch to another browser tab.
On mobile, web videos are paused when you switch tabs or apps regardless of the website. Not something YouTube can control, and certainly not something YouTube is intentionally doing (unless you count Google and the decisions Chrome makes, and there is definitely something to that). What YouTube is doing, as I'll elaborate on in the next point, is stopping you from resuming the content after you have switched away from that tab. On all other websites, as long as they do nothing to prevent it, you can resume your video in the background by going to your media controls and hitting the Play button.
On desktop, this is not an issue, whether you have YouTube Premium or not. YouTube does not pause or stop videos when you switch tabs.
> You can choose the audio-only stream to keep the music playing when Safari is in the background.
As I hinted above, the crux of this one is that YouTube has deemed that background playback is a paid feature of YouTube Premium. I think this is silly, but it is their policy. Feel free to work around YouTube's technical restrictions on this topic if you want, but I return to exhibit A, that you can skip the ads and the restrictions if you sign up for YouTube Premium.
In the Flash days, making it use HTML 5 was (afaict) a quality of life change. This extension seems a bit sketchy at best. On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem only probably says more about the Apple ecosystem than anything else (as I've said, this is mostly unnecessary on other platforms).
EDIT: PS: I would love if Chrome and the other browsers reversed their decision to auto-pause HTML5 video when you switch tabs or apps on mobile. It just feels like a way to push native mobile apps over web apps for no reason. I understand the risk potential of allowing this on the open web, but I think a permissioning model can work here to reduce the risks.
Perhaps a better analogy is DVRs and their fast forwarding (or completely automatic) removal of ads. This kind of tech will always be possible and I kind of doubt YouTube will make a loud fuss about it.
I don’t understand this sentiment AT ALL. Google has built an entire business out of scraping and selling other peoples content. YouTube has become the defacto host of virtually ALL VIDEO. So yeah, I would watch a video without ads.
This is the internet. If they send the ad and the video and I use a program to hide the ad but watch the video thats my choice. Its MY computer. If they want to take steps to stop this thats up to them.
Advertising is disgusting honestly and your statement in my opinion is an ice cold take
Maybe Google makes money by selling other people content but they provide all the infrastructure to allow content creators to have their business first.
Bypassing the ads is hurting mainly content creators, not Google...
No, it hurts Google too. Google isn’t some benevolent actor operating youtube at a loss. It’s a cash cow now.
I'm also a content creator myself, guess what, most of my revenues come form ads, not Patreon.
Again, they give you the options: subscription model or ad-based model.
This covers the cost of infrastructure, paying creators, and paying developers.
It doesn’t make sense that they or any other company will host and send you video for free at a financial loss to themselves because you’re watching it on “your computer.”
Then again, we live in a world where drugstore makeup needs to be kept behind lock and key, so this shouldn’t be surprising.
They offer those options, but the fact remains that there is a third option: ad-free no-subscription model.
As a user of the ad-free no-subscription model, I give them two options: internalise the costs of people taking the third option, or spend time and resources trying to make the third option technically impossible.
You can’t buy a word processor without non-English dictionaries, buy a fivepack of beer, buy half an apple, etc.
That’s no reason to then find it reasonable to take that, let alone take that for free.
Google decided that in YouTube for iOS the feature would be premium only, at least for now. Maybe they feel iOS users are more easily monetized. Who knows. It most certainly isn't a limitation of the platform.
> stripping out the ads is dangerously close to "I just want this for free, so I'll steal it"
I never use YouTube intentionally. The service is a bit of the perfect example of boiling a frog, with one short skippable ad becoming multiple skippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads becoming multiple unskippable ads plus interstitial ads, on top of the content itself almost always having sleezy "sponsored by" advertising content. It's simply remarkable how what was supposedly the new world that would break us free from the classic television model has somehow gotten so much worse.
That doesn't really address your point, but it is kind of tough to feel too sympathetic. The morality becomes...clouded.
> On the other hand the fact that the entire thing seems to be Apple ecosystem
Google decided to be extra greedy towards iOS users, so users helped solve it. Sounds like you're giving it a thumbs up.
I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure. Just seems like there may be problems on Safari/iOS (and the underlying WebKit framework that all or most third party iOS browsers use) more than on other platforms/browsers
It does not. I just re-tried (iPhone XR on the latest version of iOS). If I jump out of Safari I get the PiP video for about half a second and it disappears. It works great with Vinegar, as advertised. Websites that use the standard video tag work as they should as well, from what I have seen.
> I don't use iOS, if you say YouTube is treating it differently than Android and blocking said feature, that sucks and they should change that for sure.
Indeed. And in the meantime I will work around them. And if they block it, I’ll just YouTube-dl stuff ahead of time. And keep laughing when Google devs whine about Safari not supporting Chrome’s HTML extension du jour.
Set “all websites” to “deny”
Visit YouTube.com. Run the extension from the puzzle icon in the address bar, give it permission for “allow on this website”
Also, not sure if related but my phone seems to heat up quite a lot when using this. I am on an old iPhone 6S.
On second thought, muxing mpeg2ts to mp4 containers would make it possible to play the same HLS stream on Chrome.
It blocks ads, allows playing music in the background, supports making offline YouTube playlists, etc.
Pretty neat, and I don't have to trust other vendors apart from the Brave team, who I already trust.
This app is pretty great too and the price is very reasonable. But still infinite% costlier than free!
how? looking at YT code all it returns is 2 combined audio/video formats in ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.formats and the rest is separate ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.adaptiveFormats
HLS/DASH is no longer being send, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.streamingData.hlsManifestUrl is missing