Earlier quoted context omitted.
by constantly trying to break stuff. It's long been known that Google's weapon is change; they've been doing that with web "standards" too. For YouTube, I guess the next stage in the cat-and-mouse game is to automate fixing it, and I even dare say that this new AI stuff might come in handy for that.
> by constantly trying to break stuff. > > Google's weapon The culture I find myself in, in 2024, is one of war; unrecognisable from anything I've seen in "peaceful civilian life" before. It has no resemblance to business, to markets, to value, to a lawful society of fairness, utility and cohesion. What happened to us?
YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.
Yes, exactly that. So much stuff just vanishes, it's prudent to simply download everything by default. Whether that's a video with yt-dlp, or a webpage with singlefile or other tools, save it all. I wish I had better tools for simply saving everything I see on the internet at all times. The disk-space cost would be trivial in the era of terabyte drives, and simply never worrying about link-rot would be huge.
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.
It turns out that it's easy to rig eww (Emacs's built-in browser) to automatically pass URLs to whatever special handlers you desire, via the "browse-url-handlers" variable. I did that earlier this weekend for Github and Youtube. For Youtube, I have a wrapper function just starts mpv with the supplied url. For Github, a different wrapper just breaks out the user/repo pair from the url and invokes github-explorer, ava…
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#64This is just google being google and changing stuff.
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, exactly that. So much stuff just vanishes, it's prudent to simply download everything by default. Whether that's a video with yt-dlp, or a webpage with singlefile or other tools, save it all. I wish I had better tools for simply saving everything I see on the internet at all times. The disk-space cost would be trivial in the era of terabyte drives, and simply never worrying about link-rot would be huge.
I found grab-site to be extremely effective with even complex, content-heavy websites. Dunno about YouTube though, I’m afraid of what would happen if I tried running such an archival routine. My server would probably catch fire.
Browser history _used_ to do that, almost. You could browse your history offline and pages would still render. And at some point, that stopped working.
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> by constantly trying to break stuff. > > Google's weapon The culture I find myself in, in 2024, is one of war; unrecognisable from anything I've seen in "peaceful civilian life" before. It has no resemblance to business, to markets, to value, to a lawful society of fairness, utility and cohesion. What happened to us?
I don’t think anything happened to us, so much as your memory is flawed. We’ve never evolved beyond base self-interest, we’ve just become much more productive at extracting value from every aspect of life.
I'm genuinely sorry for you that you feel your culture has become nothing but an extractive free-for-all. There remain people who still aspire to treating others as ends and not means. Extraction is not productivity. To produce is to create. Your comment kinda validates what I was hinting at more though; that BigTech now sees itself as in all-out "do what though wilt" conflict with the civil population. It's a cyber war in all but name - though we still pretend it's "business". At some point the population are going to figure the rules have changed. From that point I'd give FAANG a few months to a year. Most analysts have figured that a cyber war would be inter-national rather than intra/civil conflict. We'll need a backup plan for Google/Microsoft etc unless they're radically neutralised (by government breakup or similar)
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
It turns out that it's easy to rig eww (Emacs's built-in browser) to automatically pass URLs to whatever special handlers you desire, via the "browse-url-handlers" variable. I did that earlier this weekend for Github and Youtube. For Youtube, I have a wrapper function just starts mpv with the supplied url. For Github, a different wrapper just breaks out the user/repo pair from the url and invokes github-explorer, ava…
You browse youtube with Emacs? How do you see the thumbnails (or don't you care)?
I've also evolved a CLI YT client, based on mpv/yt-dlp and fzf; it does not show thumbnails. Even so, it's perfectly fine for gathering lots of search results, like
$ yt 500 medical uses for hollandaise
which will gather the first 500 results about medical hollandaise [1], filter out the shorts, and present the remaining results in an fzf-based UI. I haven't really missed the thumbnails.---
[0] One of the first things I did with eww was to bind "I" to a function that toggles images on or off and re-displays the current page.
[1] In my setup, I can override all special handling of a URL by holding Ctrl while hitting Enter to follow a link.
[2] Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with TinyLLama about the medical uses of hollandaise and options for regulating it. Did you know that it can be taken intravenously to help fight cancer?
Re: YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
You browse youtube with Emacs? How do you see the thumbnails (or don't you care)?
Not quite. Late last year I began running a Searx instance locally, less for privacy than for having a hackable meta-search engine. Since it supports several "bangs," like !ddg and !yt and the like, I generally use this for quickly searching Youtube without changing context. When I enable images [0], I can see the thumbnails just fine. Regardless, there are plenty of places on the web (like here) where people will po…