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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it was ever youtubes desire to shut it down. Why would they, as there are a multitude of reasons why someone would want a video off a platform. It was the RIAA's, since there the ones who sent the takedown.

This year AlphaGoogle has an initiative to kill ad-blockers. To that end, Youtube now aborts playback after 60 seconds if it cannot contact its ad server to play commercials. It's clear where this is heading: 1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos 2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams Both will come to pass. It's…

> Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams

They stream the commercials separately on purpose, because this makes it a whole lot easier for them to track ad impression metrics. Splicing the ad within the same feed is technically quite feasible and indeed almost trivial, it doesn't even require a re-encoding of the entire video. So we can assume that they're avoiding that for a reason.

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

#142

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

I mean, the root of the problem is that there is essentially only one "Youtube" that isn't a public service. Not sure if you make this better by leaning into it or not.

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

#143
post #90
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of truth to this but one of the most powerful elements of a discovery algorithm is finding things you completely did not look for, ie Christopher Columbus and the western continents. Like your cornerstones are iOS and recipe videos but you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life.

> you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life You're going to have to explain this one, how would a dance video change my life? Being exposed to something new that becomes profoundly life changing seems like a romanticized notion and not a realistic one especially within a monetized environment. We're exposed to new stuff everyday, just because .0001% is truly impactful doesn't justify watching…

Well I’m sure there others who will agree that something small and completely unexpected has had a profound influence in their lives. The simplest example is something so novel and interesting opens you into a deep rabbit hole that changes your career and or who you meet, befriend or marry. The lack of a good recommendation algorithm is exactly the problem where these content platforms is you feel like you have to watch 100k videos to have a chance at such an encounter.

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

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead. YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t. A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads. I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl…

Us not having the right seems a little extreme. What if I close my eyes and block my ears during evey ad? Do I not have the right to use YouTube then?

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

#145

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

the desire is already there. they've testing DRM for videos as we speak. this cat and mouse game will never end until google creates some anti-cheat with kernel permissions to attest anti-tamper

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

#146

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…

I think mister tracerbulletx has drank the stupid juice. its not a problem with developers (and products/apps the developers make), it's with google, not allowing downloads even when you pay a subscription

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

#147
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get shut down constantly if they become popular though. yt-dlp is itself a fork of the (very popular) youtube-dl

youtube-dl just went largely dormant. There was a fiasco involving a unit test specifically downloading copyrighted content, but it was corrected. yt-dlp just became the more active fork.

Specifically testing the extra code needed to download certain videos - they didn't pick them just for the hell of it. It seemed unwise to have that in the public repo but I wouldn't describe it as a fiasco.

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

#149
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.

netflix (initially at least), spotify and steam have all shown that it's not a money problem, but a service problem.

Good services will not get pirated.

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

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This year AlphaGoogle has an initiative to kill ad-blockers. To that end, Youtube now aborts playback after 60 seconds if it cannot contact its ad server to play commercials. It's clear where this is heading: 1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos 2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams Both will come to pass. It's…

> Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams They stream the commercials separately on purpose, because this makes it a whole lot easier for them to track ad impression metrics. Splicing the ad within the same feed is technically quite feasible and indeed almost trivial, it doesn't even require a re-encoding of the entire video. So we can assume that they're avoiding that for a reason.

it isn't cheap to splice a video.

Even if they do it via some sort of chunking, then it's possible to skip chunks easily too (aka, relatively easy to bypass given the amount of effort to implement).

Not to mention it's hard to do caching this way imho.

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