The odd appeal of absurdly long YouTube videos | Hacker News Reader

The odd appeal of absurdly long YouTube videos

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Some of my favorite long ones. They are incredibly relaxing.

Washington DC - Seattle full trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizGoYFVdzQ

All PS2 games ever released https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixeRUJQ5yPc (and they have a video for every single major console too)

Switzerland to Italy through the Bernina pass train ride https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9qiV7XlFs

Tokyo subway Yamanote line full loop (even though it's only 1 hour long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khmuMY6fLaw

Tokyo highway trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-hrZKXM-k

10 hours of “They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard” surprisingly makes a good party background mix.

https://youtu.be/DKP16d_WdZM

Way back in the day working in an Apple Store Genius Bar, this is what we used in the workroom when we needed to keep a computer working continuously (say, to reproduce a problem)

Mine:

After having many spicy tacos in texas: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqrm-9Wy8iU#searching

I don't even know what is happening, that isn't the URL i wanted to share, no idea what that video is.

10 hours of "What is love" with a fantastic loop from "A Night at the Roxbury".

https://youtu.be/09m0B8RRiEE

Looks like a very long loop, but there a small breaks every few hours (for example at 6:02:20).

These look fun. Do you, like...actually watch them, though? Or just have them on in the background while doing something else?

I am also missing some context here

Thank you for these.

Still looking for long out-of-window rail videos. You know, so that once I finish building my rail compartment, I can simulate a proper ride.

You have to search for side window or cabinview.

Here is a Japanese playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddzMI-h8Wkw&list=PLzsxGmGx95...

Here is a 9 hour trainride through the Alps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADt_RisXY0U

I appreciate the VGL link. Very handy for building a list of games to emulate.

For your mobile phone based Fireplace... - https://youtu.be/L_LUpnjgPso

https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/gadget/fireplace-for-mobile-...

https://www.yeggi.com/q/phone+fireplace/

I really enjoyed this 8 hour solve of a 17×17×17 Rubik’s cube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4BrzJbtRZg

Also the ones of the Titanic sinking in real time, although they are “only” around 2 hours 45 minutes, they have the same feels as the absurdly long ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGKpT1oGAnQ

I always play this every Christmas.

https://youtu.be/6dHETOyiE6U

The BBC has quite a few of the "all aboard" series, if you want slow TV.

Yeah that Switzerland to Italy train ride video got me into them. They're really beautiful and calming.

But I've stopped because I can't find a way to use them anymore. They're not interesting enough to watch directly. Multitasking doesn't work unfortunately so I just end up listening to the sound of the train and not watching. It's kind of like having an air conditioning unit in your window plus occasionally squeaky distracting train horns when coming out of a tunnel.

"Across all these videos and many other silent blank ones, every viewer seems to have their own use case. The most common, by far, is to use these videos as a way to simply keep your device on. “I keep this playing overnight so that my laptop doesn’t shutdown while downloading games,” one commenter wrote. “I have to keep this open on my phone because it’s broken and will not turn back on if it turns off,” another said. "

I think the author is taking too many of those comments seriously when they're likely just Reddit style jokes trying to outmeme each other. I don't believe the explanation that someone would actually pay a video instead of changing the settings to disable turning off the screen. Serious platforms and software also prevent autosleep when downloading large games (or have an obvious switch for it)

I do seriously occasionally play videos to keep my device awake - local mkvs on repeat though, not the consuming internet bandwidth type. Usually when leaving some janky update apps (hi Garmin) that really need to keep working for hours and don't care about keeping the PC awake. When twiddling with sleep settings I sometimes don't set them up right and playing a video in VLC always works.

On Windows I've been using "Don't Sleep" [1] and have now switched to "PowerToys Awake" [2] for one-click sleep prevention. On macOS I've used Caffeine [3] for that purpose. KDE on the other hand already has a built-in check box to prohibit sleeping in the power/battery control applet.

There seems to be quite a market for this teeny tiny tools.

[1] https://www.softwareok.com/?seite=Microsoft/DontSleep [2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/awake [3] https://www.caffeine-app.net

On Windows, a VB script (so runnable with the default script runner) that toggles NumLock every so often is the classic.

Looks like PowerShell is the updated version: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9795442

Point being that it's runnable on any Windows machine, without additional binaries.

Caffeine is actually built into macs. You can just run ` caffeine` on the command line. I like to use hammerspoon to control it though, which adds the exact same icon to the taskbar, but I have one less thing to install.

so there is a separate management frontend for the hack that prevents the computer from shutting itself off?

It fits the level of computer expertise I expect from a general YouTube commenter, and I suspect there's a string of replies to the comment telling them there's a better way to do it and that subthread has reached Godwin's law.

> subthread has reached Godwin's law

Do you mean Poe's law? Although given the general quality of youtube comment sections, I wouldn't be surprised if Godwin's law[2] applies as well.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

I think it's a comment on the length of debate in the comments.

No, Godwin's. Whenever I end up reading YouTube comments I'm shocked at how quickly seemingly well intentioned replies end up in 50+ comment flame wars.

I use that on my work computer because it doesn't allow changing the lock duration.

Even if I spend too long in the bathroom it will go to sleep with the maximum lock time settings, and my amazing Mac crashes if it has external monitors plugged-in when it goes to sleep.

I'm also not at all surprised that people are tech illiterate to the point that they don't know how to change basic settings. My girlfriend sure as hell wouldn't for example.

> on my work computer because it doesn't allow changing the lock duration

Well, I did not expect that, but I found an actual explanation that really makes sense.

(For your own Mac, there's https://www.caffeine-app.net/ available though)

If they're using a Mac that doesn't allow changing the screen lock duration, that Mac likely has MDM software installed that controls which apps they can run. I don't know if Caffeine is on that list.

No, not really. The fast lock is to prevent a lackadaisical attitude toward security from enabling Evil Maid attacks; not to restrict what you can run on your device. (Source: I had this policy foisted on me on both desktop and mobile when I worked for IBM.)

I mean, being able to set the lock time in the first place means it's possible they could have software restrictions. Not guaranteed.

`caffeine` is built into Mac so they don’t even need to install anything.

caffeinate is the command-line utility that is included by default. Caffeine is a third-party macOS app for controlling this utility.

I didn't know caffeinate was a thing though, that's good to know.

Sorry I thought the app was just named after the command. Thanks for fact checking me!

They do block software and even specific websites, but I just checked and the website for Caffeine is not blocked actually.

They are really not restrictive overall, especially for software engineer's computers, but I would still have imagined that a tool which allows us to bypass some restriction specifically put in place would be blocked.

I guess since that security can be defeated by a long YouTube video they didn't see the point.

For corporate environments where such software is verboten, it should be possible to set a hot corner that prevents the screen from locking.

Well, stop disbelieving, I know in-the-flesh at least one person who does this more or less constantly.

She doesn't like how her aged macbook behaves when it screenlocks, and she refuses to adjust the auto-screen-lock settings, and refuses to let me change them for her. She streams, not black screen, but youtube videos, 24/7. Sometimes videos she once liked, sometimes videos she aspires to watch, sometimes videos she is watching, sometimes "soothing music". Sometimes she leaves them playing audio, but if there's a reason to stop the audio, she doesn't stop the video, she doesn't change to a silent video.... she presses the mute button on the keyboard. That way her computer won't sleep. If she doesn't want video AND doesn't want audio? (such as if I'm visiting and the videos are bothering me) No problem, press mute, and turn the laptop to face the wall.

She is using a shared internet connection with several other apartments, too, so she's actively degrading the experience of other people when she's doing this.

This irrationally bothers me, so I ask her to stop. She won't. I have learned to cope.

This is a person who gets annoyed if I leave a 15W light on, in one of the cheapest electricity markets in the world (well under 10c/kWh).

If I try to ask why she's doing this, she immediately gets confrontational. But, again, it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it, and I'm fairly confident she could do it herself anyway.

Thank you for listening. Apparently my learning-to-cope is not 100% effective.

https://xkcd.com/1172/

Find something you agree upon. You could appeal to her energy saving mindset.

For example mention how much power an always on computer is drawing and say that videos use CPU which ramps up the wattage and usage. Bright monitors use more energy than dim ones etc. Sleep mode vs always on.

If you want to go even further you could mention the carbon footprint of youtube and internet servers but this is pushing it a bit.

Not going to work

Sometimes we need to accept insanity in our friends and partners. My wife does stuff that I used to hate but now I just accept that’s how she does that particular thing. As a society I think we care too much about people doing certain things the right way.

a good example of this is having a massive number (50+) of tabs open in your browser ... I think that's completely unusable, but I've worked with other techies who do this, and also seems to be a common thing here on HN. Another example is having tons of stuff all over your desktop.

Ahaha, you think 50 is massive? I have over 20 browser windows open, and several of those windows have literally hundreds of tabs. At various times when I've done an actual census (usually before my every-few-years purge) I've had 700 to 1500 tabs. I'm not saying you should like it or emulate me or whatever, but I can't understand what you could possibly be thinking when you say it's "unusable".

Of course, many people use browsers that can't handle it. That would make it literally unusable.

Trying to come up with post-facto explanations which arent your true reasoning in order to manipulate your partner's behavior is a huge red flag. If you follow this sort of advice in your own relationship it is very likely going noticed and dissolving trust in your relationship.

Using a different then my own true reasoning is completely normal, and everybody does this. One adjust your reasing to the understanding of the other person for example. Moreover, there is like a miles wide gab between rhetoric and manipulation.

utilizing deceit to change someone's behavior for your own personal reasons is, by definition, manipulation.

communicating your true feelings and intentions is the only way to grow trust. what you are describing is needlessly eroding trust.

It is perfectly fine to present alternative reasonings to convince someone of something as long as you don't pretend that reasoning is the basis of your own position.

I've just tested letting a Youtube video play on my M2 Macbook Air.

At 25% screen brightness, it uses around 4 Watt.

At 50%, around 6 Watt.

At 100%, around 11 Watt.

The person in question is unlikely to have a modern computer, but letting a video play all the time could technically still be using less power than the light.

That's insane to think about. Extrapolating down to 0% brightness means the actual compute required to manage the network connection and decrypt and render the video, plus anything the OS is doing in the background happens in maybe 2 watts?! With 2 watts you could power a fairly dim LED lightbulb or perform the equivalent of thousands(?) of man hours of hand computations.

https://xkcd.com/676/

The computer idles at 3.5 Watt.

A 1440p video is played at 4.0-4.5 Watt at 0% internal screen brightness.

The same video at 4k uses 4.5-5.0 Watt.

And at 8k, it's 15-17 Watt.

The xkcd is apt, as usual. The last time I felt with Intel as I feel with Apple since the M1 was with Haswell.

> it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it

That is still a big sign of tech illiteracy imho. It can be uncertainty about the outcome of changing the settings combined with the fact playing YT videos all day is not too inconvenient for her. You know changing the settings is not a big deal, but someone who sees it as a semi-magical box that sometimes throws random error messages?

I also knew a person who refused to reboot her smartphone in order to fix the problem that it couldn't reliably receive SMS anymore. It had an uptime well over 6 months. The reason? She didn't know the PIN code anymore and didn't want to bother trying to find out. Well, until she bought a shiny new phone that is.

Just for those reading, you can turn this on in Mac by just running the `caffeine` command in the terminal, or using hammerspoon, which will add a nice little button for it to your taskbar.

I do this when I need to take a break from work but don't want it to lock the screen.

> I don't believe the explanation that someone would actually pay a video instead of changing the settings to disable turning off the screen.

Corporate managed device. 24 hour ML prototype model training on a MBP. Lock killed training.

YouTube cat videos to the rescue.

(Was not involved, but saw this happen)

I was at a hotel once and the TV remote died at night. There was no way to turn it off and it was really bright. I streamed a video of just black with no audio till morning.

I have taken to unplugging TVs in hotel rooms as it has become more difficult to figure out how to shut them off entirely. Some will leave a blue or red LED on all night when I would prefer darkness. Also, it is really hard to tell what the TV or any boxes attached to it might be doing as far as listening or watching.

For me, it’s alarm clocks. Simpler to just unplug than to make certain someone didn’t set an alarm that’ll wake me at 3 in the morning (plus I no longer have the annoying light in the room).

It's just easier to play the video than change settings. I've never managed to change settings on Windows in a way that KEEPS THE THING ALWAYS ON. now I have a fake USB mouse jiggler.

I've tried changing the settings, but it's confusing. Am I trying to stop my laptop from "locking", "sleeping" or "hibernating"? It's not clear to me which thing it's doing. Maybe it's doing one thing some of the time, and the other thing the rest of the time. And even now that I think I've set it to do none of these things, the screen still disappears and I have to re-enter my password within 5 minutes. So either the settings don't work, or the UI is too confusing for me to figure out what's the right thing to do. Either way, putting a YouTube video on is much easier.

I was in a cafe the other day that had some sort of "HD views of Italy" on a big TV on a loop. Except they didn't quite have enough bandwidth, so every now and again it would visibly buffer.

Yes! I just realized I can queue up a silent track so it won't matter (much) anymore that my car ignores auto-play settings! I can't tell you how frustrating it is that I just want silence in my car sometimes but invariably a stupid podcast starts playing every time.

I've taken to turning off Bluetooth on my phone before getting into the car.

I often need Android Auto for navigation, and my watch is connected via Bluetooth as well.

If you're wondering like I did how to do this easily on a Mac: you can set a hot corner to 'Disable Screen Saver'.

If on a mac you can always type ‘caffeinate’ in Terminal and it will keep your laptop on when you close the lid.

Someone I know wanted to have a movable white rectangle on the screen to cover up things (for a presentation). They had a creative solution: open a “10h white background” video and used Firefox's picture-in-picture feature. Unfortunately, the recommendation algorithm picked up on this, and started recommending a bunch of similar videos...

This is my favourite 10+ hour video on youtube! Quite a hit with others, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm3YgoEiEDc

I've seen at least 10 hours of it at this point

Gotta learn this URL. The other one I can spot immediately by now.

Fortunately the ad gave me enough time to read the title.

Having to see an ad is a worse fate, to be honest.

I realized what it was because of the reply comment but I clicked it anyways because I am on Mozilla Firefox and by default YouTube videos don't autoplay.

iirc Google Chrome has some bizzare byzantine(?) rule engine that determines whether a website is allowed to autoplay and I suspect (with no evidence) that the rules are set up so YouTube can autoplay videos without prompting the user.

The HN username made me think twice.

I'll share one of my favorites: Sigur Rōs Route 1. It's a road trip around the Iceland ring road, and over 3 videos is ~24 hours long.

Part 1 https://youtu.be/G54tllj-SKI (9 hrs)

Part 2 https://youtu.be/szbGc7ymFhQ (9 hrs)

Part 3 https://youtu.be/aV7YutDr5Nw (6.5 hrs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95mL3us0HSQ

The begining of a Star Wars The Force Awakens review - it'a not done yet, but I believe it lasts about 12-13h at this time.

He also has a response to a hbomberguy video (that's also an analysis of Dark Souls 2) that lasts something like 10h, and multiple 3+ hours reviews of games and movies.

Pretty crazy that it's entirely scripted and is carefully edited - for 10+ hours!

And I'd argue he has solid analysis in general!

I knew whom you were talking about before even clicking the link. It’s excellent. But I’ve lost all hope we’re going to see another episode of this. :)

I really thought this going to be about the folk, making 8-24 hour long video game reviews and retrospectives, ie. the likes of Noah Caldwell Gervais, Joseph Anderson, PatricianTV, Private Sessions, Whitelight, Liam Triforce, Chris Davis, i am error, and NeverKnowsBest

Other comments appear to consider anything over a single hour unrelateably long, nevermind for scripted content...

I'm a fan of NCG & NKB; will look at those other channels when I get home - you might appreciate https://www.youtube.com/@Raycevick

To throw another hat in the ring I'd recommend Sean Seanson for long form calm gaming content

Here he is looking at EVERY SquareSoft PS1 game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh9tc-UMnT0

I've come across across him, yeah-- I might have a problem :p Was just focused on folks making content in that 8-22hr range (with one exception :p), otherwise I could include:

KingK, Mandalore, Daryl Talks Games, RagnarRox, Adam Millard, Chariot Rider, HBomberGuy, SuperBunnyHop, Lambhoot, GManLives, GrimBeard, ThorHighHeels, Nerrel, MathewMatosis, WillLovesVideoGames, Writing on Games, Game Makers Toolkit, and (duh) Jacob Geller

Into this ring I throw Kevin AKA Purge's ridiculously long patch analysis notes for Dota https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tK8OjcRmERQ

>"Across all these videos and many other silent blank ones, every viewer seems to have their own use case. The most common, by far, is to use these videos as a way to simply keep your device on. “I keep this playing overnight so that my laptop doesn’t shutdown while downloading games,” one commenter wrote. “I have to keep this open on my phone because it’s broken and will not turn back on if it turns off,” another said.

>There are also a surprisingly large number of times when you might want your device on but the screen off. “I use this so I can have music open on another tab at night and have this open so the screen with the music on it wont shine so bright in my room,” one commenter wrote on a two-day-long video of a blank black screen. “I use this every night, put on a podcast and q this to come on next,” said another. “Unironically useful for avoiding screen burn in,” another wrote. “Big thanks <3.”"

This is a very interesting situation. Like the video of someone recording the MAX captchas with their phone instead of using the built in screen recording, my first reaction to these is "thee tech illiterate people! There is a _right_ way to do these things built into the OS!" But on reflection, if it works for them then it seems fine (I guess you could argue that it was using electricity or bandwidth). If anything it seems like a failure of the OS companies to make it clear that the OS can already do all these things.

If only there was proper UI for these things. These days, even simple things like copy paste are being made harder and harder to discover, rather than have 1 standard way of doing it that works anywhere.

If people are able to figure out how to use youtube videos to achieve what they want, they for sure would be able to do things if only the options were actually there in UI's, but options are being left out more and more to make things "slick".

Regarding audio/video/brightness: this used to be super easy with analog volume dials, and screens with on/off button where your computer wouldn't (and shouldn't imho!) know that your monitor is off. I also really wish monitors with analog brightness adjust would make a return, these types of monitors don't exist for 20 years now, but I rarely adjust brightness on monitors due to the lack of that since brightness is usually deeply hidden in the menu now (somehow monitors with extremely bad quality built-in speakers that you'd never want to actually use, have easier shortcuts for audio volume than brightness)

Largely irrelevant, but that volume control works on connected devices as well. I plug my speakers into my monitor rather than directly into my computer so that the sound goes through the HDMI port. Much handier for my laptop, I only need to plug in one thing instead of 2.

> Like the video of someone recording the MAX captchas with their phone instead of using the built in screen recording, my first reaction to these is "thee tech illiterate people

Take phone out, record button, stop button, share button, select twitter/youtube/instagram/..., enter title/text, done.

Now count the steps on a PC. Especially if it's some other persons PC, not logged into your youtube account.

Windows doesn't have a quick way to do this. You have to either dig into Settings, or install Powertoys and activate Powertoys Awake.

12 hours of Enterprise-D engine idle noise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRk-DQUUlz8

10 hours of American Airlines hold music (as one commenter there said - likely recorded from a real call):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6V9m98pv0I

The deep frequency of large prop-driven planes is my favorite brown noise https://youtu.be/TAJqoJHRkpY

There was a Trans-Siberian railway video, of the full journey, from Moscow to Peking I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504271 Unfortunately it is not online anymore?

There are also quite a few railway videos from Norway, e.g. Bergen to Oslo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xisVS_DKpJg

And many more long railway videos.

Or the the great moose migration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31150996

More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_television

Also related:

Apollo 11 in Real Time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20193118

Tip for those who are doing this (and wasting internet bandwidth) just to prevent their locked-down work machine from going to lock/sleep:

Open a PPT, F5 to enter slideshow mode, optionally press B to blackout the screen to prevent burn-in.

I made a small "screensaver" PPT that consumes very minimal resources (black screen with a small bouncing logotext), saved it a as a PPSX (so it launches in slideshow automatically and exits PPT when done), and added a shortcut to the PPSX file on my Win10 taskbar. One-click screensaver whenever I want to step away and an equally simple exit.

Many times I actually leave this running in background while I work on the laptop. This way even if I step away without doing my one-click routine (or get pulled into a phone call or start working on my other laptop), it still prevents lock/sleep.

Obviously this would be bad infosec practice at office or public place. But with WFH this keeps me healthy and sane.

PowerPoint seems overkill - I just "play" a picture in windows media player.

When my partner used a 10+ hour pure white video as a desklight it felt like blaspheme to me. Same as turning to gpt4 to sort a small list of words. It is unholy.

Hypothetically it could compress down to a few bytes. Just color and duration.

Given the number of videos that are a single static image plus audio surely YouTube has built in a special case for them.

This is true. I wonder how well the white noise videos on yt compress though.

Edit: Tried using yt-dl on a 24 hour white screen video, it is 130 MB for the 'highest quality'. 10 hours of white noise it 1.55GB.

(un?)fortunately h264 is doing far more than mpeg iframes. Each frame contains look back data to up to 16 other frames, and each frame is also divided into variable size blocks 4-16 pixels in dimension. This arbitrary blocking of the white frames likely what is consuming so much space.

If you encoded in mpeg I'm sure you would dramatically reduce the file size, but not as magically as you would think. It will still store a new white iframe every 16 frames by default, though many encoders will let you specify an alternative.

In theory I guess YouTube could spend n-times as much processing to encode each video in n formats to find the smallest for that particular video and serve that encoding, even doing so after a video reaches x views to cut out yy% of wasted computation, but then they would have to support n codecs on m devices instead of just 1.

We can assume the YouTube video encoders are descent, and they could likely encode such videos with one I-Frame only. Though they may use more I-Frame to make seeking faster.

I’m on mobile but I will check that later using yt-dlp and ffmpeg to list the I-frames.

>Same as turning to gpt4 to sort a small list of words.

Perhaps 4 is better, but my experience sorting and making list with its immediate ancestor has been profoundly counterproductive.

That's their point.

Well then its not really overkill so much as it is wrong-target-kill.

Summary: these videos are used to keep devices on, queue silent content after podcast to fall asleep, provide background ambiance like fire crackling or soothing music, entertain pets, or avoid screen burn-in.

thanks ChatGPT

I don't think so. GP post contains no articles. I don't recall ever seeing ChatGPT write like that.

Those seem like jokes or tricks, but there are "real videos" absurdly long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeH7qKZr0WI

I've only watched one video longer than two hours and it took me two weeks. But I'm watching videos of more than one more often in just three sessions, as my English listening gets better and better.

Not sure if it was Rogan that created the fad, but it's getting very extended. Unfortunately, people appearing in those tend to think that it's OK to fill hours with "umm", "you know" and unintelligible ultrafast and inaudible circumlocution.

The genre of discussion videos that the likes of hbomberguy, Folding Ideas or ContraPoints produce are also often very long. Then there's stream archives, conference uploads, etc. So there's certainly been a few multi-hour videos I've watched.

I have seen more hour+ lore videos for various games than I'd like to admit...

Action Button’s 3.5 hour review of Doom is a classic in this space. https://youtu.be/38zduHkwGcc

RailCowGirl is one of the train drivers serving the cool rail video subset of this trend:

https://www.youtube.com/@RailCowGirl/videos

In a similar theme, I was recently exposed to the masterpiece which is starwarswars.com the complete original extended trilogy of 6 films superimposed upon each other in simulcast.

It is at the same time an illustrative piece about modern cinematography, a nostalgia-inducing slideshow, and digital ADHD medication.

Not recommended for those who suffer epilepsy.

I tried to watch it and it has been taken down for copyright violation.

interesting... it still plays for me at starwarswars.com

I was a bit mistaken - I didn't realize that there was an embedded video on that page so I clicked the link to "New YouTube Link" and that one was taken down. The embedded one still plays.

Here are my long-running background favorites:

Vibing through 30 years of computer graphics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAHJVa4Gkm4

This ridiculous Dark Souls challenge run https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUbBsMTgkTRmab1L3snCQ...

Abelson & Sussman's SICP class lectures https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE18841CABEA24090

And a shorter one I just want more people to see. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFog6dTid0Y

Sweet dreams!

This channel is a treasure trove of long videos showing railway journeys in Europe, with an emphasis on the Balkans. https://www.youtube.com/@dulevoz/videos

Some examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sqrL8KZki8 Bijelo Polje - Beograd 7h

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY4ghSBQL4U Ljubljana - Koper (freight) 2:45

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0oevqWL_34 Čapljina - Mostar - Bradina -- The Neretva river canyon and Mountain pass Bradina 2h

The YouTube channel (PatricianTV) who did a 5 hour video on Morrowind and a 12 hour video on Oblivion has recently released a 20 hour video on Skyrim.

It's only an hour, but I love this deep absurd analysis of a single Garfield comic. An hour long, set to the music of Kundun by Philip Glass. https://youtu.be/NAh9oLs67Cw

Might I recommend Mort Theory by "The Theorizer"? It is 2+ hours and is about the idea that Mort from the movie Madagascar is evil. Enjoy. :D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REymyiNElA8

Well, if we are sharing favorites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKP16d_WdZM

I do see the value of music to set up an environment for working, sleeping, or whatever you are doing. I'm not sure a single video is the best answer, but it at least is a plausible use case.

For all the videos that exist just as a joke, even though I have a few I truly laugh at, I find it difficult to believe anyone would actually watch the entire video. It counts as a view if you watched 30? seconds of it. So a 24 hour video with 40 million views likely just means that many people turned it on for a fraction of the time, laughed a bit, and turned it off.

> Thirty-five hours, 2.2 million views. Thirty-two hours, 2.4 million.

Maybe the author should point out that a view is not a start->end viewing. I can't tell if they have this misconception but this article may certainly imply start->end viewing to the reader.

I don't think YouTube has ever officially publicized what they consider a "view." We can only guess.

I wonder when it first started because I remember https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhk7lDnTjAg from nine years ago.

Star Trek engine sounds, anyone?

On April Fools day, one of the woodworking channels I follow tried a "longs" format (3+ hours [1]) of unedited workshop time, including mistakes, failures, and frustrations. It's surprisingly refreshing to see that behind the otherwise abundant videos showing perfect projects, reality is the same for everyone, with its ups and downs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsnM4H9C_vI

Oldest one that comes to mind is the epic sax guy on repeat. There was also Fukkireta x9, which someone managed to preserve a snippet with annotations hardcoded in the image.

Oh my! Just dicovered Fukkireta - blows my mind

I was expecting this the mention lindybeige "a point about...." Videos.

Funny enough, I thought the same. His 1 hour single take videos are impressive.

Also, niche and random topics.

I remember a comment about his videos: “I always thought school was boring, but just watched a 1 hour video about ancient ladders”

Similar thought, I expected the hbomberguy videos like the 2h investigation into the Roblox Oof sound. Or the 3.5h Deus Ex review.

This is only 1 hour 42 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAA_yWX8ycQ, but I could watch it all day. It was released as marketing for the Detective Pikachu movie and is a "Leak of the full movie by R Reynolds".

Please watch at least the first 2 minutes.

I watched this for a bit and then scrubbed around to try to understand what is going on. Now I have more questions.

Its terrifying to see two of the main reasons are from people who do not know how to adjust their lock times & sleep mode on Windows / iOS. We're going to be teaching kids how to use a computer the same way we taught the elderly in the early 00's.

Going? This is already a thing; a lot of kids aren't tech savvy at all, except when it comes to hacking Minecraft or running a VPN on their phones to try and evade their home internet's content filters.

Anyway, it reminds me of the very popular Caffeine app for MacOS, which prevents the device from going to sleep. Used by a lot of developers (at the time) as well, so it's not just kids.

Microsoft has an "Awake" module in their PowerToys app which is inspired by Caffeine

I do have to say, since I’ve been to macOS Ventura, and having to deal with the new Settings UI, I cannot for the life of me remember exactly how to find sleep settings. I have to desperately hunt for it every time. Is it under battery? Is it under screensaver? Is it under general? I honestly can’t even tell you.

your MacOS doesn't come with a search box in the settings window?

I’m making an absurdly large generalization here, but I’m feeling like kids are having less curiosity for specifically the devices they own. As things get more integrated into their lives, it’s become a lot of more a utilitarian tool, rather than something worth digging into to see how it does those things.

Not to say that setting a single screen lock time setting is the pinnacle of curiosity, but it’s reflection of the banal utilitarian way they look at devices. “It does what it does”

I know my way around my devices and I still open 24 hour timers all the time. It's 100% reliable and a temporary solution. I can't really say the same for various 'caffeinate' programs I've tried over the years.

> people who do not know how to adjust their lock times

I've seen developers at FAANG companies using the background video trick - because corporate managed devices came with an unmodifiable lock/sleep time.

And if school-issued laptops were even more locked down, with even more boneheaded defaults - that would hardly surprise me.

I was working at Microsoft when Windows Phones were a thing. They gave everyone on the team a very cheap phone with the expectation that we were to dogfood the latest phone OS on it. They tracked our usage hours to make sure we were using them.

One of my teammates just put on (IIRC) a 72 hour long black screen video and reset the video back to the beginning when he left in the evenings.

It needed to be 72 hours long because he didn't want to come in on the weekends to reset it.

Sharing some favorites ...

Deep Focus - Music For Studying, Concentration and Work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPVte6aMprI

(will add as I locate more from history)

2 hours and half of sweating in MTB. No ads. No talking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrSsn1x_mmY

He's got all the gear, full face helmet, elbow pads, arm pads, knee pads, gloves, full suspension, disc brakes, and he's carrying his bike over terrain like this??

https://youtu.be/CrSsn1x_mmY?t=5472

and this https://youtu.be/CrSsn1x_mmY?t=6851

Whyy, he's even gone over rougher terrain and up steeper hills earlier in this video. A frustrating watch.

A personal favorite of mine is 10 hours of procedurally generated Djent [0], a style of progressive heavy metal. It makes excellent background music.

As an anecdote, I've used several of these white-noise-black-screen videos as a sleep aid while I needed my phone's screen "off" and I didn't have other options.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52SRWJ2pMXI

Hmm that would appear to be "They‘re taking the Hobbits to Isengard 10 Hours" :D

DOH! Fixed! Clearly I need another cup of coffee.

Is it just the video that's generated or even the music? I think the music as well but wanted to double check.

The music is the generated part. The video is visualizations on the music. The channel author describes the process [0], but the whole channel is worth checking out.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQqEFNVPD1s

It is different than the others mentioned, but I am fascinated by "Sitting And Smiling".

https://www.youtube.com/@BenjaminBennetttt/featured

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitting_and_Smiling

My favourite are the Eric Rosen "Marathon" chess videos

eg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiU2tBfTyFU&t=7866s&pp=ygUTZ...

11:30 of blitz chess. You see how tiredness affects him at various points yet he maintains an unbelievably chill disposition throughout.

One of my all time favorites, and one I often use to sleep is this one that uses Blade Runner samples and sounds: ASMR Cyberpunk Future City Aerial Sound Music Ambience 7 Hours 4K - Sleep Relax Focus Chill Dream -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yttvb9ByOtY

I read this article and wanted to weep.

When I'm traveling and in apartments that don't have cable television, I use these super long videos to keep the TV on and make it look like I'm home. I wonder how many other people doing the same and driving up views.

One use case I haven't seen mention of yet is sneaky children attempting to convince their parents that a device is asleep.

My eldest has tried this numerous times to no avail, their Eero profile disables Internet access at bedtime.

FTA: "to trick your parents into thinking the computer’s off so you can play games without having to reenter the password" -- seems to cover it to me, no?

> Hit play, and you get more than 24 hours — 24 hours, one minute, 27 seconds, to be exact

That's 24*3600/(30/29.97)+1 and I think that's beautiful in itself (though probably not on purpose)

It's not on YouTube (yet) but this springs to mind: https://logisticsartproject.com/

Running time 857 hours.

The 10 hour black video at least wouldn't use much bandwidth, assuming it's encoded well. Hopefully not too much power to decode it on the computer side for playback either.

There's 10 hours of Ron Swanson drinking whisky: https://youtu.be/MPY_EuvimH0

Techno Union 1 Hour Version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DZhQTLdUaM

The YouTube algorithm actually values videos higher that people watch for a longer time, so there is an incentive for the creation of this kind of content

Those endless rain videos really help me to sleep.

Philosophy videos and walkabouts (when there's no narration) also help, but they are rarely very long.

In the age of shorts, anything with 4h on it immediately attracts curiosity.

You say this as if shorts represent some systemic shift in attention spans or even anything more than a binning of the existing short-long distribution. But is there evidence for it? Has the distribution of video lengths ever been anything other than a possion random variable?

There are some long videos which are insanely useful. Example: This runs for twentyfour hours - a full day - and has changed many lives forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAITcNt710 [1]

[1] tl;dr/spoiler: Harvard CS50 – Full Computer Science University Course (uploaded by freecodecamp)

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