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Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

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Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so, essentially, what you are saying is that yt-dlp should have never been open-sourced/published and ever posted on HN (so that not even you would have found out about it)?

No no. He’s saying that only people with his exact amount of technical skill and prowess deserves yt-dlp. If you for some reason are not knowledgable about cli tools, then that is the exact, natural, universal, god given reason that you do not deserve yt-dlp. In order to ensure that not too many people learn about yt-dlp, we should also work to remove all access to knowledge about the magical super big brain requirin…

lol so poetical

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#113
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DRM was.. and still is dumb... as it collectively punishes paying customers. Maybe it's true in other contexts, but users of such frontend likely are not paying for youtube and they're also not paying with their eyes (ads) so the DRM here is working as intended... Also paying customers are already allowed to download youtube videos (granted they can't watch it outside of youtube but it still counters your broadband…

"already allowed to download youtube videos" Sure, but it is not users that ultimately make that policy choice, and may be rescinded at any time. Thus, still seems lame... Most streaming platforms have fragile resolution fail-back thresholds, and rightfully discourage camping on CDN host connections for 10 times longer than most of the users. These days the amount of media data people consume in a year will be dispro…

At least for my circumstance, Comcast has a 1.2TB/month limit before they hit you with hefty fees. If I stored my entire 14.4 TB/year, that'd cost ~$150 worth of disks (and not even require a full disk). So the storage for a full year of data use (Comcast alleges the actual average use is ~500 GB/mo) is less than the cost of a single subscription service. If you use a file more than once, that works out even better. And for things like music, storage costs are essentially irrelevant even if you use SSDs.

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you feel the same about ad blockers?

Ad blockers are basically about blocking ads. Yt-dlp has also uses whose main purpose is not about blocking ads.

In some reguards I would say it is. Yt-dlp terminates my need for an adblocker for the lifetime of the videos I download, something chrome no longer does on a per-view basis and these days not as easily. It also blocks the YouTube algorithm suggestions, which in my eyes are an advertisement too.

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#115
post #54

"wanted to get back my chronological feed, instead of a "algorithmically curated" one" The 'Subscriptions' link at the top left of the Youtube home page only shows the things you subscribed to, just bookmark that.

On android, you can even force the app to open up to that page (long press the icon and you can place a shortcut to subscriptions).

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#116

I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.

Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos.. Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese…

YouTube downloaders have existed since the dawn of YouTube. And I really don't think they have jumped in popularity recently or anything.

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#117

I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.

Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos.. Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese…

You said it yourself - it'd be nice if YouTube stopped and thought about what it could be doing differently to not drive as many people towards things like this. As I said elsewhere, the root cause isn't the people developing these frontends, it's the fact that the existing official frontend leaves users wanting something else.

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#118
post #54

"wanted to get back my chronological feed, instead of a "algorithmically curated" one" The 'Subscriptions' link at the top left of the Youtube home page only shows the things you subscribed to, just bookmark that.

They are constantly testing pushing other things into the subscription box.

What I want is it to only show me videos. Now, it also shows shorts, and also now “community posts” which are frequently just self-promotion and useless polls that drive engagement. I’ve started unsubscribing from anyone that uses those features too much. I want videos not “check out my twitch channel” and “want more merch? Check out my merch! Also this is a poll so that you will click it”

One channel I follow got some new “comments from the community” kind of feature, and suddenly posts from anyone on YouTube were showing up in my sub box because they also subscribed to the same creator. All of the posts were image posts that were blatantly rule breaking spam, or comments like “why is this a feature”. None of them were from anyone I intentionally followed. Literally just random internet comments as a huge section in my sub-box. I instantly unsubscribed.

YouTube REALLY wants to shove other content into the “subscription box” because as-is it lets you avoid all the algorithmic clickbait.

Re: Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

#120
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say it's less people's fault and more Google's for driving people to want something like it.

Yes, people prefer to get stuff for free rather than paying for it. That's not a very interesting insight.

I think the truly uninteresting insight is the flippant assertion that people "just want to get stuff for free", rather than the numerous other reasons someone might want a different frontend, or to use yt-dlp.

Edit: Take me, for instance. I can tolerate ads, much as I hate them - waiting 15 seconds and hitting "skip" twice isn't going to kill me. But good christ do I not like YT's UI/UX.

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