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YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

rg3.github.io

141–150 of 338 posts

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#141
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... My mom did teach me DOS, and programming, and a lot of other things – but these days she doesn't have that kind of patience anymore. If things don't work right away, out the window they go. For a lot of people the patience with technology decreases as they age.

Absolutely. I'm also an example of that. 15 years ago it was difficult to see my PC tower closed and without the entrails exposed, I was always trying strange Linux distributions and stuff like BSD or BeOS, and I configured everything I could in OSs and programs. Now, if my hardware fails I just call tech support, I mostly use Windows, I almost never spend more than 5 minutes configuring anything, and any program I n…

It has nothing to do with lazyness for me. When I was young I wasn't getting money for tinkering with hardware, neither for programming. Nowdays I get lots of money for programming...guess which of the 2 I'm doing more

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#142
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is about 2 steps longer than most family member capabilities.

Always the same argument, and still wrong. It depends 100% on the desirability of the expected result. I have seen a non-IT guy do an incredibly complex serie of super user operations on his PC just to install CS. He was very motivated. But if you asked him to install Chrome in place of IE he would even understand what it meant. Same: many people still use peer-to-peer software to download movies, mostly porn. I gues…

I agree. I think it's important to keep track of who cares about the user's task too. As you say, if the user cares about a task, they'll jump through many hoops to get it done. Especially when money is involved (e.g. finding cracked copy of XYZ to avoid paying license fee)

When someone else wants the user to do a task, e.g. a business wants users to install and use its software, then it's definitely better to assume that users will give up at minor annoyances or complications. Again, especially when money is involved; i.e. it should be as easy as possible for people to give you money.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#143
post #28

The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al). The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just becau…

I don't think it's a tragedy because if it was very popular and easy to use YouTube would likely block it. It's directly competing with their own YouTube Red. Also look at popular Linux distros like Ubuntu. As soon as they reach mass market they lose what made them special to begin with and start experimenting with advertising and so on.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#144
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not illegal. It's a bit worrying how many people run to defend corporation profits by default.

>> "It's a bit worrying how many people run to defend corporation profits by default." Not the OP but I don't think it has anything to do with corporation profits. If I spend money creating a video, put it on Youtube, and try to recoup costs through ads you're bypassing that by downloading the video with this tool.

> and try to recoup costs through ads you're bypassing that by downloading the video with this tool.

99% of the people and organizations in YouTube never recoup costs. For almost all this is wishful thinking.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#145
post #28

The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al). The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just becau…

Good! The top slots belong to those services which don't require you to download anything but the video to your computer. In this day and age, is there really any excuse for making anything beyond a web app, or in rare cases, a browser app?

If I want to do a one off task, I'm not going to download any software for it, when I know there is an alternative that can be used entirely on the browser.

There are plenty of addons for major browsers that do this. Those belong on page 1, not this. Most users don't give a shit about FOSS.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#146
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy because it's an command line. Not a single family member would touch this here. It's sad but understandable.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

> I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath.

Are you sure you apprehend the differences between the look and feel of a browser and that of a command line?

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#147
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... My mom did teach me DOS, and programming, and a lot of other things – but these days she doesn't have that kind of patience anymore. If things don't work right away, out the window they go. For a lot of people the patience with technology decreases as they age.

Absolutely. I'm also an example of that. 15 years ago it was difficult to see my PC tower closed and without the entrails exposed, I was always trying strange Linux distributions and stuff like BSD or BeOS, and I configured everything I could in OSs and programs. Now, if my hardware fails I just call tech support, I mostly use Windows, I almost never spend more than 5 minutes configuring anything, and any program I n…

Not to be morbid, but at some point in my mid-late 20's I considered how many Sunday afternoons I have left in my life. The thought made me a lot less likely to want to spend them dealing with xorg.conf or fiddling with drivers. Though for me, the solution has been to use plain-vanilla desktop Ubuntu on a laptop that ships with it (XPS 13).

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#148
post #137
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs... I think it is time antivirus, Google Chrome, et al recognize those installers as crapware and give a warning before installation (yes, including Java SDK and Skype trying to install toolbars). Currently Google Chrome is giving a malware warning just because you have an .exe in your web page that for them seems malware, and if you work in

> Currently Google Chrome is giving a malware warning just because you have an .exe So how should one make available for download windows executables?

More info here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9512919/getting-around-ch...

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#149
post #6

Some of the things that make this the 'ultimate': - Supports hundreds of services, not just youtube [0] - Allows you to extract audio in multiple formats - Download entire playlists (and general batch support) - Configure video/audio quality - Extract/build metadata - Cross platform [0] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

Half of these things can be done with FFMpeg.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#150
I'm in China and streaming youtube videos is mostly out of the question, due to the very unpredictable and usually too slow nature of connectivity (I gave up on VPN long time ago and use a number of strategically placed cheap virtual servers). Over the years, youtube-dl has been a godsend. I ssh into one of my servers, download the video and then rsync it over to my laptop. Most of the time I don't really need to have the video stored locally - if I was at home I'd just stream it again - but for some niche applications like mine it's next to nothing. The buffering built in to youtube itself too often just stops or throws me into 'an error has occurred'.
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