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MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

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Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#121
post #3

"Self-hosted" ... on something that very much used to be a fairly simple desktop app... JDownloader anyone? Or yt-dlp ????

Could I use this hypothetical desktop app from my desktop, my other desktop, my mobile phone, my wife's mobile phone, and the Chromecast on my media center?

Desktop applications never worked on phones, mostly because Google and Apple want you using their own version of what used to be called "programs". Of course, if you need to download YouTube videos on every device you own and the toaster, then sure, maybe don't use yt-dlp. But, ya know, I'd wager that most people don't need to do that.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have hundreds of subs. With no way to create sub tiers the channels putting out multiple releases a day quickly overwhelm the ones with fewer.

So, you have hundreds of subs but only care about a hundred of them, and that's YouTube's fault? Why do you subscribe to channels whose content you don't watch?

He wants to watch them, but doesn't care if he misses any since they put out so much. Compared to the other ones that don't put out much and he never wants to miss.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#123
post #93

I don't understand one thing...why do you need to host it on a server? It can be just a standalone app on windows/Linux/mac. I recently just started using yt-dlp and have thought of making a simple app. Should I though? Are there any alternatives in existence of this kind?

You might want to download the videos to a NAS or home server and store them there, instead on the device you're on at the moment. A dockerized web app is also much easier to build and maintain, than desktop clients for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and so on.

yt-dlp already exists, though, and conveniently, someone else packages and builds it for you already. Why are we boiling the ocean to download videos?

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#124

I don't understand one thing...why do you need to host it on a server? It can be just a standalone app on windows/Linux/mac. I recently just started using yt-dlp and have thought of making a simple app. Should I though? Are there any alternatives in existence of this kind?

you can ask that about so many things nowadays why must the majority of software be provided as-a-Service? whatever happened to good old fashioned products??

[flagged]

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. The idea of running a server application in Docker and then firing up a browser for something like this just seems so... round-about and alien to me! Is this the direction software development is really going?

I see that a lot in the stuff our interns produce. Instead of a simple command line too they often create a node server you need to post your requests to. This may somehow have some advantages but it makes building scripts or pipelines much harder than it should be.

[flagged]

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#126
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My generation dropped the ball on teaching computer literacy

Computers have become generally good enough to be used without much knowledge. Same happened with cars. 30 years ago it was very beneficial to know how your car works. These days you can own and a car without knowing much about it and you will most likely be ok.

Tell that to anyone who had CrowdStrike's latest rootkit installed on their machine last week.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive encountered a shocking amount of 30yr olds that don't own a computer or know how to properly type. I'd say GenZ and Alpha have plenty of computer literacy as laptops were better integrated into education by time they got or will get to high school. Outside of some AP classes that had their own computer labs most kids in my age group (early 30s) took one computer class in their entire secondary education. I knew o…

They're all issued Chromebooks and live in a glorified browser and GSuite. There's something of an epidemic of students landing in college CS programs and not knowing how to manage files outside of Google Drive. Millennials got to use real computers growing up. Gens Z and Alpha got locked down Google appliances tightly monitored by schools.

I fully believe this, but that is just bonkerstown to me. I mean, okay, I guess the Plan 9 folks eventually won, I just didn't expect "the computer" to be "Google.com".

Of course, university IS meant to be an introduction to whatever your field is, but those of us with in-depth computer knowledge, even basic knowledge of something like Java, had a much easier time of it.

I don't envy the youths today.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're all issued Chromebooks and live in a glorified browser and GSuite. There's something of an epidemic of students landing in college CS programs and not knowing how to manage files outside of Google Drive. Millennials got to use real computers growing up. Gens Z and Alpha got locked down Google appliances tightly monitored by schools.

My kid still cannot really grasp the concept of "things being stored locally on the computer or on the phone vs. things being on the Internet". She doesn't understand why some apps require Internet and others don't. No concept of the boundary between local and network. "What do you mean 'it's stored on the phone'? YouTube is stored on the phone, right?" I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the l…

And not even in a "hey, the network is also a filesystem!" sorta transparent way, either. It's an obscure patchwork of half-baked ideas (especially iCloud. To this day, I'm just trusting that I'll be able to do a phone restore, if need be).

It doesn't help that network-transparent storage is _hard_. Before, if you wrote something to storage, there was a preeeeetty good chance it was going to wind up on disk. Yes, yes, disk IO is a dark art that's still probably full of subtle bugs, and there is no God, but generally: file -> disk was, and is, solid.

Now, you have file -> several HTTP round trips -> ope, fiber cut -> hung. And that's just to turn on your living room lights! I've seen networking code that is supposed to provide the same guarantees that the people writing filesystems and disk drivers do, and I can't say it usually succeeds. And people wonder why everything feels more and more broken.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These days you can own and a car without knowing much about it and you will most likely be ok. It's a pretty expensive way to own a car, though: having to take it to a mechanic in order to maintain or fix things. But you're absolutely right that it's an option today that wasn't really an option 30+ years ago.

Or have a family member (Or trusted person) with enough knowledge to keep you trucking on when things go south, seems to work with both cars and tech

Except this breeds a learned helplessness, and makes every layman beholden to some wizard who knows the Old Wisdom, the right incantations to make the devices we rely on every day even function. It must feel awful to have to go through life at the mercy of tech crap that just doesn't work half the time, and little to no ability to reasonably deal with it.

Besides, so many problems now aren't even fixable by end users. Why? Because all of our computation happens somewhere in the bowels of us-east-1. If your budgeting program breaks on your computer, you might be able to fix it, especially if you have the source. But GET /budgets/123 returning a 500 is the equivalent of saying "pound sand", and you have zero hope of actually fixing the issue. You're at the mercy of some faceless on-call person halfway across the globe, and they're overworked and on their third bourbon of the evening.

Re: MeTube: Self-hosted YouTube downloader

#130
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then your laptop gets stolen/lost and the video is deleted from YouTube. maybe some people want an archive that's theirs that won't be deleted it edited?

Not sure what this has to do with anything, external and backup drives are cheap and cloud storage is even more cheap.

Even more cheap? I have to disagree: every time I've looked, purchasing your own backup drives outright always appears to be much cheaper than subscribing to cloud storage. Cloud storage has its advantages of course, but sheer cost savings per TB I don't think is one of them.
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