Ask HN: What's the big deal about YT-dl when streaming has replaced downloading? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the big deal about YT-dl when streaming has replaced downloading?

17 pointsbehnamoh58 comments

Back in the day, we had thumb drives, external hard drives, internet download managers, torrent websites, video player software, and ways to download yt videos for later use.

But now there's barely any need for those as streaming has pretty much replaced the old mediums of acquiring and consuming video. But having a look at youtube-dl's repo, there's more than 109k stars, which shows how popular the thing is. Even a DDG bug that would exclude youtube-dl from the search results received so much attention by HN.

Still though, I don't understand why downloading from yt is so important nowadays. To be clear, I'm not asking whether it's ethical or not. I'm asking why do people need to download stuff in the first place?

View on HN

"This video is no longer available because the account associated with it has been banned for violating our community standards/copyright infringement."

'Gone with the Wind' pulled from HBO Max until it can return with 'historical context' - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/media/gone-with-the-wind-hbo-...

Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles - https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/18/amazon_removes_1984_f...

Downloading is more alive than it was 5 or even 10 years ago. And it all started, as usual, because of mega-corp greed.

Netflix solved most of the problem, it was paradise (aside from licensing issues that may mean that you can't watch some stuff in your country)! But... Thus came greed.

And all of the sudden, you need 10 subscriptions to access it all. And not everyone has that money. Actually, most people don't. So you... Choose? You either watch Disney stuff or the other stuff... But Game Of Thrones? Oh now you're on HBO... But no, you need HBO MAX as well... Oh...

So that's the story of how I rediscovered Jellyfin, sonarr, radar, etc... I can have it all and it's free.

It's sad that piracy is the best and most reliable way to consume media, but here we are.

It’s not free. You’re stealing content.

Negatory, chief. The legal term “copyright infringement” was created precisely because bootlegging media could not meet the criteria for theft, (ie a pirate is not depriving someone else possession or ownership of the media that they copy). It all started with a man that was selling copied cassette tapes of an Elvis Presley concert through an ad in the back of a magazine.

Your getting content you didn’t pay for.

No matter how many times you want to call it theft, copyright infringement is simply not the same thing.

It isn’t for the initial copier but the consumer is certainly consuming content they did not pay for.

It's free, though.

I think the term stealing is a bit normative in this context. Copying is more descriptive.

They don’t have the original.

Are you not aware of dozens of streaming websites where you can watch any movie for free? Why would you want to download a pirated movie?

Because all those sites appear and disappear too quickly. I don't have the time to track them down, and avoid the malware ones. I have a setup made where everything downloads automatically, and once downloaded, is mine forever.

I don’t want to download movies. I want to watch Star Trek. You can’t do that on Netflix anymore. So paramount plus (aka “janky Netflix”) gets my $10/mo extortion fee.

If it wasn’t infeasible to download all of TNG, voy, and ds9 to my iPad, I would in a heartbeat.

Get a RaspberryPi, install Jellyfin, Sonarr and transmission and you won't have to move a finger anymore.

I mean, if your options were downloading a pirated movies from a shady website, or streaming a pirated movie from a shady website, why would choose the first one?

Once I have a local copy, I don't have to depend on the continued availability of the shady website. I can pass the copy along to friends who might also enjoy it, and I can watch the movie whether or not I happen to have high-speed internet access at the moment.

Torrent download sites are everything but shady, if you know how and where to look.

Maybe, but usually when I want to watch a movie I want to watch it right now, not in a few hours.

If you’re on a private BitTorrent tracker, the video quality and encoding is often significantly better (bitrates often double). The download speeds saturate your internet connection. Piracy is often the best, fastest and most ethical option (no DRM).

There are clients to stream torrents.

It's not straightforward, you never know which site is still available, how many will work, how many mirrors you'll have to try. Also, most don't have subtitles, at least not in my language. Also, if you don't have super high speed connection, it may stall.

One day I was scrolling through my Youtube Favorites playlist, and was devastated to discover 10-20% of the videos were deleted or unavailable. The worst part is it's nearly impossible to get any information about which videos were deleted, so I can't look for re-uploads or even know if they are worth looking for in the first place. Ever since then, I run a script to periodically backup my Favorites playlist with youtube-dl.

More generally, I've learned the hard way to never trust that any content on the internet will stay up forever. If something is important to you, back it up, sooner rather than later. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is great but it does not backup everything!

This has been my experience. What was deleted or made private? YT and other providers know but will just show a 404 or whatever instead of any metadata. The old idea that everything on the internet is there forever is now being fought because things can now just disappear if it fits with the host's priorities.

I tend to save something if I find it interesting and it is something that isn't exactly a copyrighted piece.

I have a music collection at YouTube. Because of this when I like something I just click like and it's added to my list.

The problem is, YouTube and others will remove music from time to time. All of a sudden a song you liked but didn't bother to check what it's called is gone and you don't even know it's gone. At some point you remember something about it but you can't find it anywhere.

It's like a piece of memory has been removed from your brain but you have some residue left, "was it real or was it a dream? I can't remember".

I disagree with the claim in the title that "streaming has replaced downloading" since disk space is incredibly cheap now relative to video size. It also depends on what kind of content we're talking about

Also I think that the streaming mentality treats content as something more disposable and constantly changing. Why would someone want to download something when it'll soon get old?

I think that disposable content is a waste of time. Downloading makes more sense when the content has higher value as a work and is more permanent

But of course, it makes more sense from a business standpoint to make people pay for access as opposed to ownership

The video is not guaranteed to stay up. I download videos I may want to watch again in the future.

It is good practice to store your media locally, espcially for something you'll consume more than once. It keeps the costs down on the remote server, which in the long run provides a better experience for the user.

I do not have constant internet access. Furthermore mobile internet is very expensive. I can just run a bash script on my terminal emulator that checks if I'm on a known wifi network and runs my downloads and copies them to proper folder.

This way I can listen to music without the internet and/or without requiring that i leave my screen open and on the youtube app.

I do it for convenience.

I have fast internet, but battery consumption of tabs and mobile is too high for my comfort with data/wifi turned on.

I download 4k/2k videos for anything super interesting and >= 30 minutes and watch them later.

Some episodes of some podcasts are super worth it to keep in your hard disk.

I also download and save Chopin and Bach playlist to device and then later play them for long hours.

Videos disappear a lot on YT. Interesting videos that I saved on "Watch Later" disappeared quite a few times.

Spotify keeps removing music I enjoy. Also the Shuffle function is fake and this shitty software keeps trying to guess what I want to listen to. Also last time I opened it there was a lot of bullshit about religion/self-help podcasts and I don't want to see that bs b4 my eyes... That's why I went 100% youtube-dl + winamp and cancelled spotify subscription..

I logged in for the first time in 4 years and it told me Christmas music was trending. In April. I lold, wondered if some Christmas music artist died or something, then closed it down.

You can't package up bandwidth and send it to someone deployed to a war zone (unless you have a spare StarLink laying around)

Save content from the woke memory hole.

Want to download music? yt-dl, convert to mp3. Want to archive a video for later watching? yt-dl it. Want to avoid using a bloated webpage to watch a single video on YouTube? yt-dl it. Want to keep the video in case you're worried about it being taken down? yt-dl it.

Want to watch, without an unskippable commercial or two in front, and without commercials in the middle interrupting the video?

yt-dl.

But you can uBlock it and not cause clutter on your disk.

ublocking the ads is not always effective - downloading the video is always effective unless the creator stuffed their own ad into the video before uploading.

You can also watch it in a proper player that gives you more control over playback than what the JS from google gives you.

You can watch it anytime, anywhere, even when you are somewhere without an internet connection.

You can watch it on any device capable of playing the content, whether or not those devices can access youtube directly and/or can stream from youtube.

You can transcode it for playback on another device that is unable to play the original file.

You can watch as much as you like, pause, take breaks, jump backwards, forwards, go into slow-motion, do frame steps, all without google recording your every interaction with the video.

So add Sponsorblock on top for the first one?

Except you can’t on mobile, and people only watch YouTube on mobile

Or newpipe (when it works)

You can also archive pages that you're worried will be taken down.

As with downloading music: that's exactly my question. Why would people download and play music like 10 years ago while there are numerous streaming services out there?

I tend to listen to the same music. Why download the same song every time I want to hear it, rather than once? Also, most modern websites are horrible and media players lack basic features that desktop players have.

If I download my music, I don't need to pay for a subscription service that might remove music in 6-12 months. I can also sync it between my devices with Syncthing and bam! Free Spotify Premium replacement. If I want to stream something, I can always use NewPipe on mobile. Normally I just download it.

Several of my favorite songs have been removed from Spotify, which is extremely irritating. That's one of the biggest reasons I'll start storing my music myself, and then streaming it on my own.

I don't take streaming for granted. I don't take huge storage space for granted either, though the price per unit is more affordable. I like to save helpful audio in .opus format for future reference, though I try now to take notes in the moment, understanding that I seldom follow up with re-listening. I know now I have a tendency to collect, hoard, amass things for their potential, and so I practice relaxing and missing out.

I prefer written material for the ease of searching, but there are some things video is really good at, like showing how to make a fire.

I don't need to download. I prefer it to subscribing (with money and/or data) to a streaming service.

Things disappear all the time, as others have stated. Have you been to a video site recently? 75% of window is engagement garbage. Commercials are aggressive and repetitive.

Most of the time I use to be free from distraction.

The more interesting or sensitive stuff seems to be getting taken down increasingly quickly. At this point, I'd prefer not to watch something in the first place than to watch it and be unable to refer back to it later when I'm reminded of it by something else. I'm also motivated by the more general issue of cultural vandalism and activist agendas being pursued by tech and media companies, and I think that a system of decentralised offline backups provides the basis for a longer-term solution to this problem. Also, storage is incredibly cheap.

> Still though, I don't understand why downloading from yt is so important nowadays. --- In my personal case, almost all of my "quality Youtube time" is spent in areas where there's no wired internet or cellular signal. So I download what looks interesting and watch it when I have time.

Before that, when streaming was a practical option, I tried revisiting some videos I had already watched, only to be find they had been taken down. This happened often enough to be annoying.

So, everything gets saved to local storage, and eventually to on-site and off-site backups.

It’s not so important. It’s all the edge cases, like when the video isn’t available in your region or on your device, or when you need to use it in some other workflow. In other words, “fair use” (that is, as opposed to just “use”). And how those edge cases aren’t addressed by any part of most current systems. That’s also why the DDG issue was only a big deal on HN, rather than an actual news story.

One word: availability

With downloaded audio you can analyze it, slow it down (with better algorithms than youtube has), loop it, run an FFT for pitch detection, remix, etc.

With downloaded video you can play back with better control, look at individual frames, edit, remix, etc.

Low bandwidth. "streaming" just doesn't happen, an actual successful transfer of a movie's worth of (small) video might take a full 12hr or more.

“It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.” — John Andrew Holmes

Some content is not available on streaming platforms (live performances, mixes/compilations, for example).

Takedowns. If certain videos are important to you, make copies and store in your local drives, make encrypted backups and store in the cloud.

Too many forces want to change history, gaslight the masses and disinform them.

For example, how long do you think this video will be around: https://youtu.be/jiBXmbkwiSw

Not for long, that's for sure.

I am curious though. Can't Google just block all access from YouTube dl?

I'd imagine if they could they would have done it by now

Streaming hasn't replaced downloading.

Evidence: Myself, who downloads things.

I feel a lot more people started using their usenet and torrent tracker accounts again. Especially if you are in Europe or the East you sometimes have no chance to even pay for the content you want to watch.

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