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Comment by ladams | Hacker News Reader

This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

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I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users.

All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know.

Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

> Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

aka, buy youtube premium?

And get ads served some years later?

So cancel your premium subscription said some years later? At this hypothetical future time you’d be a lot more justified in piracy IMO, but today you don’t have much of a leg to stand on.

...which just got a 40+% price bump. And has zero guarantee that it won't have ads, doesn't remove sponsored segments, and sends a pittance to the actual creators.

It already has ads, promoted videos are still in your feed and still promoted over your own preferences, whether you pay or not. And of course it doesn't stop creators from having sponsored content.

So it already doesn't stop the ads. It just stops pre-roll ads.

Yes, but actually no.

The price has gone up while the Ads have gotten worse. I'll not support that financially. I'd rather just download it and move on.

To be clear, I get the need for ads, but in the past decade it's just gotten downright abusive, so they can keep it.

You build it around torrents and might earn the maintenance costs back with some non-intrusive ads.

It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.

Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'.

All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason.

0 - https://grayjay.app/

I haven't tried this yet, but it the app's creation process was overseen/managed by Louis Rossmann

Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.

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