Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

github.com

41–49 of 49 posts

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#41

Anyone else write a a lot of ripper scripts like youtube-dl but never share them for fear of starting an arms race with the content provider? It's easy to rip most .ts/XHR video streams with a bash loop.

Im going to claim to be the first person to democratise the downloading of videos for later watching from websites. I created this for google video, because at the time they had lots of car videos i was interested in, but it had plugins for youtube and other content providers i used.

http://gvdownloader.sourceforge.net/

And yes, it was about a month after publishing that the arms race started with google. It was exciting at first, but then they started getting dirty, excluding me from search results and using whatever muscle they could to stop people finding the app.

(here is a link the hockeystick download graph, it got picked up by various other distribution networks in between) https://sourceforge.net/projects/gvdownloader/files/stats/ti...

I wrote it because bandwith was really expensive and slow back then. It was an experiment to solidify some programming concepts i was learning at the time, and also my first foray into browser plugin development.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#42
> MP3 works fine. M4a does not work.

Doesn't make much sense then. YouTube doesn't have MP3 so MP3 means unnecessary transcoding i.e. quality and time loss.

Why would anybody convert to MP3 today having AAC and OPUS originals? OPUS provides unprecedented quality at all bitrates (better than AAC and MP3), AAC also provides great quality&compression (better than MP3) and plays everywhere.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#43
post #35
post #15

Cannot understand what exactly is that. I have used a simple alias called (unsurprisingly) yt-audio for years, which is youtube-dl with appropriate flags (-x, --audio-quality, --download-archive, -o, etc.), and this seems to be exactly that, only written in python for some reason.

For the record, if you only use youtube-dl for the purposes of downloading audio (like me), then you can keep a config file in $HOME/.config/youtube-dl/config with default arguments so you don't have to look them up each time. For example, here's a sample from my config: # extract audio only -x # stick to mp3 --audio-format mp3 # get rid of the annoying URL stuff at the end -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s"

A minor extension of the idea here and of the GP - I have aliased 'yt' and 'ytm' to target two different config files in the same folder path you gave.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#44

> MP3 works fine. M4a does not work. Doesn't make much sense then. YouTube doesn't have MP3 so MP3 means unnecessary transcoding i.e. quality and time loss. Why would anybody convert to MP3 today having AAC and OPUS originals? OPUS provides unprecedented quality at all bitrates (better than AAC and MP3), AAC also provides great quality&compression (better than MP3) and plays everywhere.

Well, the audio quality is already reduced on upload - and much more than mp3 transcoding would.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#45
post #44

> MP3 works fine. M4a does not work. Doesn't make much sense then. YouTube doesn't have MP3 so MP3 means unnecessary transcoding i.e. quality and time loss. Why would anybody convert to MP3 today having AAC and OPUS originals? OPUS provides unprecedented quality at all bitrates (better than AAC and MP3), AAC also provides great quality&compression (better than MP3) and plays everywhere.

Well, the audio quality is already reduced on upload - and much more than mp3 transcoding would.

Among other options, YouTube offers 160 kbps OPUS (which, AFAIK, can be expected to be perceptually lossless and better than 320 kbps MP3). Would they waste bandwidth on streaming it this high if the actual quality they store is worse than that?

As far as I know every transcoding reduces it further. Even transcoding from 128 kbps AAC to 320 kbps MP3 will make the quality slightly worse.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#46

YouTube-dl demolishes 100 pain points of using the modern web This wrapper gets rid of the only pain point in using YouTube-dl which was having to google every time you wanted just the audio. Great work

Do you literally google it? Why not make an `alias` once, or `man youtube-dl`, or `youtube-dl --help | grep audio`?

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#47

> MP3 works fine. M4a does not work. Doesn't make much sense then. YouTube doesn't have MP3 so MP3 means unnecessary transcoding i.e. quality and time loss. Why would anybody convert to MP3 today having AAC and OPUS originals? OPUS provides unprecedented quality at all bitrates (better than AAC and MP3), AAC also provides great quality&compression (better than MP3) and plays everywhere.

When using file's metadata method for tracking downloaded records, m4a file extension is not supported. Metadata method relies on 'purl' metadata tag. And m4a format has no purl tag, so it does not work.

One can use archive file method instead.

This limitation has nothing to do with yt-audio's capability of downloading m4a format. M4a limitation only applies to metadata method of tracking downloaded tracks.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#48

> MP3 works fine. M4a does not work. Doesn't make much sense then. YouTube doesn't have MP3 so MP3 means unnecessary transcoding i.e. quality and time loss. Why would anybody convert to MP3 today having AAC and OPUS originals? OPUS provides unprecedented quality at all bitrates (better than AAC and MP3), AAC also provides great quality&compression (better than MP3) and plays everywhere.

When using file's metadata method for tracking downloaded records, m4a file extension is not supported. Metadata method relies on 'purl' metadata tag. And m4a format has no purl tag, so it does not work. One can use archive file method instead. This limitation has nothing to do with yt-audio's capability of downloading m4a format. M4a limitation only applies to metadata method of tracking downloaded tracks.

Why rely on tags if there is the ID appended to the file name and the file name is the title of the video? Youtube-dl names the files it downloads this way by default, just leave it as it is and you can identify the files easily.

Re: Show HN: YouTube-dl wrapper with added features to easily manage YouTube audio

#49
post #46

YouTube-dl demolishes 100 pain points of using the modern web This wrapper gets rid of the only pain point in using YouTube-dl which was having to google every time you wanted just the audio. Great work

Do you literally google it? Why not make an `alias` once, or `man youtube-dl`, or `youtube-dl --help | grep audio`?

its not a single command it's an actual ting you have to do manually.

you need to check what sources are available then manually input the number for just the audio stream of that specific video

Post reply on HN