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Comment by Vvector | Hacker News Reader

As a last resort, you could subscribe to YouTube Premium, which allows you to download the content.

I don't mind paying for ad-free content.

Where you “download” videos and they reach into your device and wipe them from your phone’s file system when they’re removed from YT.

it isn't a real download, because you don't have access to the raw file.

It solves OP's problem. Why is that bad?

This is going to sound mean, but I don't intend it that way. But a clear question calls for a clear answer.

The reason why your solution is bad is because your solution only solves the problem for certain imagined values of 'problem'.

We don't know what the playback user story is for OP -- is it a raspberry pi? is it a librem 5? -- and there's no way to know that the user's problem is in fact solved, as you claim.

Your solution makes assumptions, and there's no way to know if they're reasonable, because this is HN, not Best Buy, and some of us are on some pretty interesting (and DRM-free) hardware. That's why it's bad.

My comment started with "As a last resort...", meaning if none of the DL scripts worked for him/her. I didn't advocate Premium as the primary solution.

Does YT Premium work offline? The OP says they will be going without internet which is why they need to download them.

Yeah with Premium downloaded videos can be watched offline, but you need to connect to the internet every 30 days.

It’s a nice no-fuss solution if you just want to watch some videos offline (as mentioned, it’s not suitable for archival) and the device is iOS/Android.

I think I'd prefer to have the plain video file.

Can you confirm if the end cards overlays that ruin music videos and other short films go away if you pay for premium? Are there any of the other annoying overlays still active?

I prefer yt-dlp downloaded videos mainly because you get to actually see the complete videos without overlays…

I can confirm I don't get any overlays on the two videos I downloaded.

I use yt-dlp primarily not for download, but for playing/streaming Youtube videos directly in media player (mpv) instead of browser.

Does YouTube Premium help with that?

Out of interest why do you do this? Because your computer struggles to play them in browser? I was doing something similar with vlc in the Flash era because I couldn’t run Flash on my PowerPC Mac running Linux

I do this because it lets me have each video in its own resizeable window, scrub around much more quickly using keyboard/mouse shortcuts, customize many aspects of playback like subtitle styling ,brightness, hue, even flip or rotate the video if I want, set the volume on a per-video basis even >100%, save exactly where I was in a video and how it was set up, not have every video I see a part of show up in my history (even hovering for preview does that now, annoyingly), and install a multitude of plugins to augment the player even further.

Though, I initially did start using mpv for watching videos back in 2014 when I was stuck with a core2duo laptop, and it was the only way of watching 720p or higher video without slowing the machine to a crawl. I'm so used to this setup now that I wouldn't want to go back to having my videos trapped a browser tab. (or an always-on-top firefox popout window)

Several reasons:

- Until recently, Firefox did not support VA-API video acceleration on Linux, while mpv supported it for a long time. My last computer struggled to play 1080p videos without hardware acceleration.

- I am used to mpv keybindings, i do not want to use two completely different sets of keybindings for playing local videos and Youtube.

- I like videos in a separate window (this feature Firefox started to support recently as PiP mode).

I doubt it. The videos are downloaded, but not readily accessible to other applications. But I don't have your workflow, so I've never investigated.

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