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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

#181

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 I'd like is essentially a user-controlled caching layer for everything. When you view a webpage or video or something you are fully downloading all of that data, you might as well optimistically write it to a local cache. Then a browser extension could be made that says "save this version" which tells the caching layer to add a tag to all of the assets that were downloaded in this page view. It would create a tag that means all of those assets aren't garbage collected from your local cache and you retain your copy forever.

Super-charging this idea with IPFS is even better. Essentially a collective Internet Archive will be created with every version of every page someone has decided they are interested in, for whatever reason.

This kind of thing would be perfectly feasible with the web as it was designed, which was designed with caching in mind.

But, of course, big corporations like Google will fight hard to stop such a thing happening because they don't want you in control. They want to be in control. They hate peer to peer technologies because they can't control them.

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

#182
post #12

As a user of a Firefox-based browser, YouTube's performance really is hit or miss. Sometimes it's ok, other times it's barely useable. These days I simply queue up videos in mpv. It is much lighter on the resources, and also provides a nice cache that makes seeking through videos a breeze. I can open a link straight in mpv using a very nice system[1]. Once I have an mpv instance open I simply drag links on top of it…

I never have yt issues in FF. Do you have addons that are yt related?

There was a thing couple months back where Google was AB testing stuff that broke FF. So not everyone experienced it

Went away about a week later

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

#184

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…

the advertising industry doesn't have a right to invade people's privacy on an unprecedented level, and create a massive black market for reselling people's personal information. But they do, so adblocking is, at the moment, the ethical and morally correct option.

If you work in a part of the advertising industry with any kind of privacy invasion you deserve to lose your job and have your business be shut down, in some cases even jail time would be completely deserved. So no you don't need to allow ads for ethical reasons.

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true, there are still lots of ads that you'll have to sit through. They're just not out there by Google, they're out their by the video creator. Which, I get it, YouTube isn't paying them enough and they gotta eat. So, it kind of feels like YouTube letting them post their own ads is an intentional choice on YouTube's part to not give me the service I'm paying for.

This is a weird take. What is an "ad", and how would you expect any company to remove in-video "ads" without rampant accusations of censorship? If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?

> What is an "ad", and how would you expect any company to remove in-video "ads" without rampant accusations of censorship?

You can already do this with Sponsorblock.

> If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?

Yes.

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

#186
post #179
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe they'll come up with a solution that requires you to turn on your camera while on youtube so that they can detect if you have your eyes and ears unblocked during ads. Blocked-eyes-blocked-ears detected = popup that pauses the video and asks you to unblock before continuing.

This is an actual black mirror episode

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

#187
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What? Literally all those services have piracy problems, and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.

> and pretty much any time piracy drops it's because of more effective DRM, not service.

Do you have any evidence to support your claim?

Music purchased on iTunes used to come with DRM. There were programs to get rid of it but they got shut down by Apple and were not easily accessible. Consumers pushed back on DRM and Apple eventually got rid of it.

Rather than leading to widespread piracy, most people just started renting their music from Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.

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