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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

#151

Wonderful! (Also, to all the other posters who have done the same for themselves) -- I have been mentally building a UX I want out of YT over the last few weeks. What I want to do is have it go through all my history and categorize it and give me a local page and sqlite3 of my browsing hist with various meta-data.. My YT experience has gotten so poor, that even browsing which channels I am sub'd to and finding newer…

I have one for categorizing subscriptions/channels. I've been running it for 3y maybe more. SQLite too. No history integration. I have not opened sourced it because the code is thrown together and there are some subscriptions that the YouTube API doesn't return. I'm not certain what the commonality between them is, either. Possibly country of origin.

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

#152

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…

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.

To do that we literally need shareholder not chasing money and pushing Alphabet pushing the Youtube team for higher and higher profit margin.

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

#153

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.

Server Side Ad Insertion is a production technology used by many OTT services, so it is not something new.

What it means is adblocker can block the reporting API, but you still get to watch the ad and cost the streaming provider wasting money to splice the ad.

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

#154
post #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.

Why should it be a public service?

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

#155

What I've wanted for a while now is a browser extension that adds a button on youtube video pages, where you click on it and it does yt-dlp downloading but saves it to something like ipfs and posts it to some free video site for indexing. Basically, there should be a video indexing/search/discovery protocol (don't care if it's still http) where random people can submit metadata and a link to a distributed content-add…

What you're describing is a piracy platform. That makes it pretty tricky to get off the ground, with regards to funding and outreach.

pirating who? I actually don't know who holds the copywrite to youtube videos. I assume the creators do, and that a lot of them would be happy to have their videos shared. It's google that wants suck the value out of the creations for themselves.

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

#156
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 deal with a lot of archival and forensics and tools like yt-dlp are invaluable, even outside of YouTube.

There are important use cases for these tools outside of "free stuff".

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

#157
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.

It's not free. Regardless of what the original intention was two decades ago, Google is putting everyone under mass surveillance and their manipulative algorithmic feeds are threatening our democracy. That's an enormous cost all of us are paying right now. If people don't like that, good luck trying to avoid it. Youtube is now so pervasive that not using it effectively means not participating in society.

But yeah, why not also attach our payment information to our watch history to make it even more efficient for Google to keep on what it's doing right now?

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

#158
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.

> prefer to get stuff for free rather than paying for it

This is how you describe a glorified VCR?

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is a piracy platform. That makes it pretty tricky to get off the ground, with regards to funding and outreach.

pirating who? I actually don't know who holds the copywrite to youtube videos. I assume the creators do, and that a lot of them would be happy to have their videos shared. It's google that wants suck the value out of the creations for themselves.

Well as long as you don't know who owns the copyright and/or make an assumption that they'd be cool with it, must be good to go.

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

#160

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

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)?

They're not talking about yt-dlp itself though.

But if they were, they probably would agree that it never should have been posted to HN, not even the first time they saw it on HN.

Not publishing at all would obviously be incorrect. You know they're not saying that.

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