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YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

chipp.in

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Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#41
post #29
post #11

Google really needs to revamp their YouTube model. I'd sign up for an embedding API with a low user fee (~$0.50) and generous low volume (free) and reasonable high volume (>50k requests/month at $0.01/1k). Ad free, of course, because YouTube ads are probably not great money makers for small businesses, hence the awful commercials we see pushed and successful creators reliance on in-video promotions.

YouTube streamed 21,885,984,000,000 minutes of content in 2023 and made $31.5 billion, which works out to an average of $0.0014 cents per minute. If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.

> $0.0014 cents per minute.

0.0014 cents per minute is $0.000014 per minute.

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#42
post #37
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are correct, thank you. I've updated the post. Wolfram Alpha helpfully formatted it as "0.14" and I missed the cent sign. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2431.5+billion+%2F+21%...

All good! Thanks for your intellectual honesty!

What a commendable dialog.

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#43
post #3

yt-dlp is still working for me, and when/if Google ever break that, I'll stop watching youtube.

How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.

It turns out that it's easy to rig eww (Emacs's built-in browser) to automatically pass URLs to whatever special handlers you desire, via the "browse-url-handlers" variable. I did that earlier this weekend for Github and Youtube. For Youtube, I have a wrapper function just starts mpv with the supplied url. For Github, a different wrapper just breaks out the user/repo pair from the url and invokes github-explorer, available in MELPA. (When I need more from a repo, I can just clone it and explore it locally. Either way, there's little need to deal with Github's web UI.)

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#45
post #6

yt-dlp and NewPipe still work though.

Been running a non-public Piped instance for a couple of years now.

There are videos where it works and videos where it doesn't.

It's been a few months now where some proportion of videos fail to play over Piped no matter what (the same videos will fail across public instances too) and anecdotally that percentage has increased recently.

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#46
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube streamed 21,885,984,000,000 minutes of content in 2023 and made $31.5 billion, which works out to an average of $0.0014 cents per minute. If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.

Given your numbers, you are off by 100x. 31.5 billion / 21,885,984,000,000 minutes is 0.14 ct/minute.

I definitely don't watch 850 videos/mo.

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.

I often use mpv with a yt-dlp hook, which means I can basically just do ``mpv youtube.com/watch/whatever``, and stream the video in mpv.

I love that, but lately it seems to freeze a few seconds into the video.

Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious

#50
post #29
post #11

Google really needs to revamp their YouTube model. I'd sign up for an embedding API with a low user fee (~$0.50) and generous low volume (free) and reasonable high volume (>50k requests/month at $0.01/1k). Ad free, of course, because YouTube ads are probably not great money makers for small businesses, hence the awful commercials we see pushed and successful creators reliance on in-video promotions.

YouTube streamed 21,885,984,000,000 minutes of content in 2023 and made $31.5 billion, which works out to an average of $0.0014 cents per minute. If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.

Could you point to the source on that figure? I gather streamed means simply “showed to an individual” in this context, but is this figure official or an estimate and does it take jnto account actual viewing time or is it based on an estimate of virwijg time and total video views?
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