One of the nice features added to yt-dlp recently: It integrates with sponskrub to call into the SponsorBlock database and with the right options will strip the sponsor segments from downloaded videos.
Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip, I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content; otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund. They’re not enough from YouTube itself unless you’re in the top percentile.
Also what sponsored content are people downloading versus just streaming live? I don’t get the use case.
> Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip, I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content; otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund.
In my experience, it's the same with ads everywhere else. It (usually) starts out not being overly obnoxious, with just a "this video is sponsored by [garbage tier mobile game/earphones/vpn/whatever] more about them at the end of the video" and then the pitch at the end.
I don't mind these. They quickly get the name out at the beginning and then don't interrupt the video. What really annoys me are the ones that interrupt the video. At some point a few of them annoyed me enough that I installed SponsorBlock. Because I don't want to hear or see these ads, but i tolerated them. But once that threshold is crossed where I don't tolerate all of them anymore, why would I not just block all of them? I'm not going to unblock specific channels that are well-behaved to listen to ads for products i will definitely never buy.
It's the exact same thing with regular ad-blocking. Sometimes when I'm on a fresh OS I start browsing the web and only notice I don't have an adblocker once I visit a page with super obnoxious ads (e.g. google on mobile and realize there's only ads and no organic results for like the first 5 screens).
> What really annoys me are the ones that interrupt the video.
Especially when those interruptions take two minutes. I don't mind them up to 30 seconds, but their length does get pretty ridiculous from time to time.
There's no medium that's gonna make watch two minutes ad without looking away or trying to skip it. You either sell it quickly or don't.
Bill burr on his podcast is also good. He usually spends the segment making fun of the companys or getting off topic mid read ranting about something else. Hes mentioned hes had a few companies demand refunds afterwards.
Personally I am done with indirect funding models where people burn my time and attention in hopes of getting me to waste enough money on something that surplus cash can be skimmed to pay for the original content. It's ridiculous. Direct payment or GTFO.
And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.
> And I'm putting my money where my mouth is. My Patreon bill was $150 this month. And that's not counting direct payments to creators.
Nice!
I'm still not using Patreon but I "guilty" of paying for promising alpha quality stuff, subscribing to services I don't use deliberately even after realizing I cannot use it yet etc.
I think we IT people have a reputation for being a bunch of cynical whiners and I also think it is somewhat deserved so I am happy to hear that I am not alone in actually wanting to pay for good stuff.
If anyone wonder what makes me pay, here is the best I can come up with:
- stuff I use or can see myself using
- one time payments, no subscriptions (unless there is a specific ongoing cost that I realized must be there)
- tokens are a nice alternative to subscriptions (eg: $10 for 50 tokens that let me start multi-player games is something I would easily consider for a good game like Polytopia)
- not too expensive, once it passes impulse buy at around $10 monthly or $40 one time it gets significantly harder bjt not impossible
I love this, but that means you are now paying 3 times: ads/premium, sponsored messages, and patreon. Even if you block ads - as well as the much more complicated sponsored messages - you are still paying by having to manage that system and work around its edge cases. Direct "donation" should include ad-free and sponosor-free access to videos.
I'm mostly supporting people who are writers and the like, so that's less of a problem for me. But I hope that more direct payment shifts things in that direction.
In some cases it does, but that requires basically way too much work from the content creator, they have to have a separate way to give paying subscribers videos. For example, LinusTechTips has videos on their own video delivery service available, and they're pretty much ad free. I know some other creators do a similar thing (not setting up their own youtube competitor, but the rest).
Personally I just use adblock, skip the sponsor segments and live with it. Sponsor stuff is really easy to skip in my experience, especially on mobile where if you double tap the right side it skips 10 seconds. You get used to how many taps to do per content creator, their sponsor segments seem to be consistent lengths usually.
Then throw 5 pounds at a rotating list of whoever you like's patreon and install an adblocker.
Merch, it depends. I've grabbed some tshirts here and there that are comfy and not branded all to hell, couple of random knick knacks. A lot of it is indeed not appealing, so I mostly just send money.
YouTube premium sends money to creators as people watch their videos. According to a redditor [1], CGP Grey (a prominent youtuber) claims to get more money from premium users than ads.
I’ve got YouTube premium but I’ve noticed more and more channels breaking mid video to go into ad mode. Ordinary Sausage has been a too channel with the kids but jeez the last few videos there are nearly more ad than content.
This is pretty much same thing as other websites in general. While the content is entertaining and good enough to watch it is not consistent enough to pay for.
I would think that cutting sponsored sections of videos wouldn’t affect the money they receive at all. With Adblock, they can tell it wasn’t loaded. Can the sponsor tell that your view skipped the sponsor part?
> But what then do you think is a realistic alternative?
Not my department. I'm perfectly happy being a parasite. I used to watch Twitch every now and then. Twitch introduced server side ads and made ad-blocking unreliable and annoying - so i stopped using twitch.
My life doesn't depend on youtube, and if they decide to shut me out or the platform stops existing, that's fine with me. Maybe other video platforms can try out other models instead of that effective monopoly google has on online video currently.
I've also already said that I tolerate non-obnoxious ads. But looking at the rest of the web, it doesn't seem to go in that direction, so I'll keep blocking until they kick me out.
Twitch is still perfectly fine with streamlink. There's a 15 second loading screen where ads are meant to go (only at the start of your stream), but you don't see any ads.
In fact I do pay for yt premium, yet still get these kinds of ads.
So much for that misplaced and invalid attempt at moralizing.
"are they so terrible?" and "what's the alternative?" are not my problem to answer, and I don't even have to agree they are valid questions that someone has to answer.
I do not accept the premise that the only way content can exist is if advertisers pay for it. That's a false dichotomy. There is no such either/or choice.
I will happily live in a world that only has content that was either fully paid for by purchasing copies or subscriptions, or given to the world for free.
You attempted to paint anyone using this software or anyone complaining about the ads as somehow morally lacking. I say, if you don't understand why anyone would give away something for free, and only think of the consumers as ungrateful parasites, then I think that says something worse about you than what you tried to say about anyone else.
> I will happily live in a world that only has content that was either fully paid for by purchasing copies or subscriptions, or given to the world for free.
How do you feel about DRM to make sure content is only accessible to those who paid for it?
I pay $10/mo for YouTube Premium, and my expectation is that I will not have to sit through any ads. A sponsorship is an ad, which violates that expectation, so I use SponsorBlock to skip them.
For channels that I watch regularly, I contribute to their Patreon if they have one. I shouldn't have to sit through a sponsorship segment in addition to that.
It's hard to compare apples to apples, as ad revenue is based on amount of ads shown and your premium subscription is divvied up among your most watched creators based on watchtime [1]
Great link! Do you think it is fair to say the YouTube Premium payout model is similar to the music streaming platform, Spotify?
At the risk of nerd sniping myself, thinking deeper, I wonder if people who sign up for YouTube Premium do less random surfing on YouTube and instead focus on a few channels they love? That would _further_ concentrate their payouts. If true, then the 10x figure sounds reasonable.
Nope. Spotify divides the whole subscription revenue per content's share in total time being played, thus it doesn't matter if you listen exclusively to some garage band - your money would go to whatever pop is now topping.
Well not really because you up the count for the garage band you're listening to. Quick calculation shows this model gives more influence on the repartirion of money to those who listen to the most music, even though they pay the same (as compared to YouTube's that gives the same budget to everyone)
It's not possible to give that specific information
The reason being that people in the businessy genre already get 10x (~$10CPM) what a gaming channel (~$1CPM) gets because there's more advertisers and less channels. You'd need to know the source channel
Its not entirely the channels fault. If youtube paid creators a higher share on monetized videos and didn't keep changing the ranking and terms there would be less need to add alternate forms of monetization.
Heck, youtube could even build in a patron feature much like twitch has with subscriptions.
For about 20 years most everything was supported on nothing but some person's own desire to put themselves out into the world. This meant spending out of their own pocket if necessary. If hosting became too much of a bandwidth issue for them to be able to pay for hosting they would release it as a torrent and it would become shared and distributed peer2peer or they'd throw it up on a free file share and the it became the file sharing platform's problem to deal with the bandwidth and try to collect (typically through member-only "premium download speeds").
In the past 10 years or so quality has largely gone down and annoyances like ads and sponsor shoutouts have gone up to the extent "Sponsored by Raid: Shadow Legends" is an actual meme. There are very, very few content creators I feel are worth supporting. This ends up being a bit classist as mostly people with enough personal cash flow and free time can afford to become full-time content creators but by and large that's already kind of the case if you look at the people who become full-time content creators. But I personally feel that if your content is more of the "popcorn" variety that people use to fill their day but don't actually value compared to something people do value then the world at large isn't missing out. If enough people felt they would miss out - they'd pay to keep it around.
There are plenty of content creators I watch where I would not be all that sad if they vanished and they stopped creating content - because I use their content to fill gaps of boredom in my day and not because I place any significant value in their content. Then there are a few I absolutely do value and I already support them when possible. I assume ones without a method to directly support them are OK with losing some revenue to ad-blockers and the like. I have absolutely let personal opportunities of collecting cash slide past me because I weighed the effort to collect it to be greater than it was worth so I assume the reason they haven't opened up a way to donate to them directly is for similar reasons.
I consider ads to be psychological warfare and something that should (but never will) be illegal if they are designed to be emotionally manipulative in any way. If a dry, boring informercial doesn't inspire you to buy their product then it probably isn't worth buying howdy. I feel absolutely nothing bad about blocking them.
I'm 100% not going to buy whatever they're selling. If anything I'm less likely to buy something that's advertised to me. I've specifically stopped using services/products if I notice their ads too much.
So who is benefiting from me watching sponsor segments? Not me, not the content creator, not the brand.
I just skip them manually though tbh, haven't gotten around to automating it.
> I expect everything for free, then that’s both unrealistic and parasitic.
There are plenty of youtubers who do videos as a hobby with no money and the videos still are amazing. Then there are plenty of youtubers who only make 10 minute videos so they can get as many ad breaks as possible and add sponsor ads in the videos and the video quality and content is just terrible.
I'm perfectly fine with businesses that use intrusive ads going out of business - none of this is essential to my well being. The onus is on them to find revenue gathering methods that don't suck, not me.
And before you say "but creators have to make money too" - independent art gets created just fine without capitalistic motives, and I vastly prefer the patreon model, or just paying up front for larger content (documentaries, games, films etc).
(Although in this particular case, I'm pretty fine with the sponsor method with most of the creators I watch on youtube - there's definitely a line where it could get overbearing, but for the most part it's pretty easy to skip if you want and the brand they're shilling still gets shown to you over and over again so the advertisers aren't really losing out).
(Also chiming in with the "I do pay for YouTube premium" gang as well).
One thing I absolutely despise about "creators have to make money" is when some of those creators actually use YouTube to cram their shitty music down my throat via ads while I'm playing some other, completely different music that I actually chose.
It's grotesque that they think this is an ideal way to promote fan appreciation. I mean, the music styles don't even sync: You could be listening to Bach, with a playback history that clearly shows a preference for classical music, and some idiotic teen pop song by some attention-desperate, barely known singer starts playing via ad, which if you don't click to skip it (say you're in the kitchen with your hands dirty while listening to your interrupted Bach) will play FULLY for its entire 3 to 4 minute duration. Just bloody stupid...
Easy: a downloader that makes it look like you've watched those stupid commercials, but you actually haven't and you're back to the original video. Let the sponsors beware.
Until they see they get very little ROI and stop advertising that way. It's not like people sponsoring aren't looking to see what these channels do for them and just spend blindly...
In the 1940s and 1950s radio programs and eventually television shows were sponsored by advertisers. soap operas get their name for being vehicles for soap companies. Off the top of my head Fitch's soap company was a big advertiser in the 40s. Another big advertiser in the forties and fifties was rexall.
I don't know what the return on investment was, I always figured they did it as a way to show that they supported the arts.
Each show i listen to generally will have a primary sponser, who writes the show "headline song" and generally that sponsor will write lyrics to make that a jingle that has to do with their product.
Then you get the intro to the show, and sometimes a product spot. Then the show starts, and depending on the format (half hour, multi-part 12 minute, etc) you may get a mid-roll and finally at the end a final sponsor message, plus the studio (like CBS) would pitch other shows on their network, and the star of the show would also have their current movies and other productions pitched at the end, as well.
Check out Richard Rogue on OTRR or archive.org for both styles, the mid-roll and the post-intro roll with jingle, it varies depending on year of production. Their main sponsor was Fitch, as far as i can tell.
What is the difference between running this code and simply clicking ahead on the video timeline past the ad? How is it any different from recording a show on tape and just fastforwarding past the commercials?
Youtube doesn't really let you do that. If you're watching a video you chose and some shitty little ad gets crammed in there to screw with your enjoyment, its own little yellow timeline appears that you have to sit through until you can click to skip ahead after X seconds.
apparently the average viewer spends 41 minutes per day on youtube, so that's about 20 hours per month. 1 dollar per hour is pretty cheap when it comes to entertainment, no?
For me, yes, they're bad. I get it's not the end of the world, but a lot of the ad copy in sponsor segments really grates on me, like VPN ones. I try to get rid of ads from my life where I can, this is part of it.
And for me, a lot of the videos I download are played back, audio only, while I go for walks or am otherwise away from the Internet. YouTube lets you download videos, but my audio comes from multiple sources, YouTube is just one source. I can integrate yt-dlp into my feed reader so I don't need to think about the source anymore than I need to worry about going to a random podcast's website to listen to those.
In the end though, a tool like SponsorBlock is just another way I remove the annoyances from the modern Internet.
"MAKES IT SO YOUR ISP CAN'T SEE YOUR TRAFFIC" - yeah, congrats, now it's just another ISP that sees your traffic, which was probably protected by TLS anyway...
Heck, they even keep recommending the utility of Terms of Service violations like accessing contents from other regions.
I think you know that geo-blocking is due to licensing agreements with copyrights holders, which is a tangled mess in itself, not that streaming platforms believe that the content won’t be appreciated by foreign audiences. Most of what’s on them over here is already in English anyway. Besides, I don’t think Americans have access to 100% of the content available on Netflix worldwide, either.
That said, I agree that it’s ridiculous if you take a step back, and in a sane world we wouldn’t have these types of restrictions. But it’s an artifact of an old, complicated system and isn’t something Netflix or anyone else can unilaterally fix.
I also agree with arghwhat that marketing your service as a way to violate another business’ terms of service doesn’t come across as serious, even if it’s not something I’d necessarily have a problem with personally.
Not that I personally care if individuals violate terms of service, but using that in a sales pitch seems akin to advertising for piracy services.
Abiding by the terms of the agreement which you enter into with the company providing the service is a requirement to continue service and/or avoid liability, irrespective of whether it includes completely idiotic and archaic business practices and irrespective of whether this causes harm.
And yes, I also find Netflix to have extremely limited value.
Not paying for a service whose terms you disagree with in areas you disagree. Using alternative services that do not have those terms. Demonstrating against the business practice. Petitioning for law that renders the terms illegal or invalid. Finding way to challenge the parasitic middlemen that are to blame. And so forth.
I pay for YouTube premium but still see them. That’s not OK, especially when the creators make 10x more money off YouTube Premium users than from ad-based users.
YouTube needs to make a way for creators to label the sponsor sections and it skips it for Premium users.
As for why downloading, I download any/every video I find useful so I don’t have to go back to YouTube to watch it later. Everything from blender tutorials to car build videos that taught me something to music video clips and generally just anything interesting. It all goes to my NAS and I can instantly pull it up for reference and scrub quicker and don’t have to deal with YouTube’s increasingly annoying website.
> YouTube needs to make a way for creators to label the sponsor sections and it skips it for Premium users.
I have read that more and more creators use sponsored segments because that pays much better than YT revshare..
So they may not care about the Premium user experience as much, and if Premium lets people skip sponsored segements, that might drive down the overall segment viewership, AND increase Premium subscribers and then it's a lose-lose for the creator since those segments will be less and less valuable to the sponsor.
They're talking about the free ad-watching type users. It's been published by multiple creators that YT Premium is easily their biggest income stream but there's just very very few people willing to pay Premium (for most creators it's like 1-2% or less).
If YouTube made it more appealing to buy Premium, eg by letting you block sponsored segments, download videos easily, etc etc... everyone would win.
I'm just pointing out that this should be the job of the premium team at YouTube, not left to subscribers.
so:
- Sponsorskip is a good solution to a problem that shouldn't exist
- If YouTube cared they could make this an even better experience and make sure both honest producers, paying customers and sponsors got a better deal. Today the revenue maximizing play seems to be to add sponsors on top of premium and hope advertisers doesn't realize they are being skipped.
I always remember the HN comment[0] where developer explained which video was the breaking point that pushed them into creating this app, and it was kurzgesagt of all authors.
I am personally wondering if Yourube themselves are going to start implementing some thing like this sooner or later; after all, you are paying for an ad free experience on YouTube premium, just to watch all of those new videos become filled with in-video advertisements.
> I am personally wondering if Yourube themselves are going to start implementing some thing like this sooner or later; after all, you are paying for an ad free experience on YouTube premium, just to watch all of those new videos become filled with in-video advertisements.
Unlikely. It requires monitoring content and ensuring they people add (correct) timestamps for sponsored content. This would need to be verified by YouTube moderators and in general requires a lot more resources than you think. Crowdsourcing like SponsorBlock is feasible but it's unlikely that YouTube will integrate SponsorBlock into the site.
Holy shit. Kurzgesagt of all things, indeed. It's the one channel where I could actually stand their sponsor section. Most other channels I know do much worse. But I guess the video referenced was kind of low, surprisingly low.
> Are the sponsor parts really so bad? To me not only is it easy to skip
Well, yes. Skipping involves effort. If I wanted to engage my hands with the content, I would've opted for a book, not a video.
Anyway, actual sponsor parts I can stand. They're at least somewhat interesting, by virtue of being unexpected. Like, who is this video sponsored by this time? Or, why this well-known and otherwise respected science/technology video vlogger keeps advertising scummy VPN services?
What I can't stand is the "like and subscribe" dance. It's just completely mind-dumbing. Yes, I know you have a Patreon, it's in the video description. Yes, I know where the stupid "bell icon" is, I don't need unsolicited YouTube UI 101 lessons. No, I'm not going to click anyway, because I'm here for a particular video, not the whole channel.
The more subscribers a channel has the closer they are to gaining an official star from YouTube. They want to boost the subscriber level to attract sponsorship too.
Considering the current system and real options that they have right now, what are they supposed to do if they want to earn money (or even a living) making videos that will make you happy?
Perhaps more importantly, would you give them money?
Sure. I pay for YouTube Premium (which I understand gives content creators a comparatively higher rate for my view) and I still have to deal with sponsorships.
This also goes for channels with well over 1M subscribers. I honestly have a hard time believing they're struggling to make a living (but I haven't seen the numbers).
Worst of all, the sponsorships tend to be for some scammy VPN or gacha, even when it comes to creators who otherwise create high-quality content.
> what are they supposed to do if they want to earn money (or even a living) making videos that will make you happy
Make me happy? It's simple: don't do videos for a living. If you have something interesting to say, say it, and put a PayPal link (or Patreon, if you discover that you regularly have something interesting to say). If you don't have anything interesting to say, just don't do the video. I'm not gonna watch it anyway.
But that's just me, really. There's no good answer to your question, because for me, the moment a YouTuber wants to do videos in order to make money (or a living), I don't want to watch them anymore. Under the current system, they're creating a huge conflict of interest for themselves - monetizing views through advertising is in direct opposition to delivering quality and trustworthy content. Almost all ways to improve engagement degrade the value delivered to the viewer.
I'd be more comfortable with creators doubling down on Patron and one-time donations. Even the merch[0]. "I make this stuff for as long as I can afford it, want to help, send me money" is a honest deal. So is a paywall, but that's tougher to implement on the Internet.
> Perhaps more importantly, would you give them money?
Yes, I would and I do. I subscribe to a bunch of Patreons, occasionally buy stuff from creators or send them direct donations. But not for everything, of course. That's the nature of the market. A random video I got linked to is worth $0 to me until I finish watching it, and after I'm done, it's hard to price.
--
[0] - Though I seldom buy any, and really dislike the concept. Most merch is a waste of matter and energy used to create it; it exists only to break through people's reluctance to spend money on intangible content, but at the cost of most money being lost in making and shipping stuff that will end up in a landfill after a short dust-gathering break at some viewer's home. I hate these sorts of "hacks" for human psyche, but I see why they're needed.
There's also a conflict of interest here too - the videos could become just a vector for peddling merch. But so far, I haven't seen any YouTube creator falling into that trap - unlike ad monetization, which affects everyone.
> If you are watching for free, and you're that annoyed by ads, then maybe you just feel entitled.
If the the content is there, I'll watch it; if it's not, I won't. I certainly don't feel entitled to it.
If anything, the sense of entitlement seems to be emanating firmly from the people who upload the videos: they seem to think that because they upload videos, they are entitled to make money from them. Sorry, no.
I'll add another wrinkle: I like content-creators that create for the love of doing it and not to try and turn it into a business.
When I follow a YouRuber (I'm borrowing that typo, I like it) and have seen them descend into the paid/promotional arena, I have been turned off and stopped subscribing to their channel.
Advertising tends to naturally weed out, for me, the ones who are not as passionate about what they do. Sorry if this model is counter to YT's business model.
Better: if you want to make a business out of it, sell plans like WoodenGears guy, or kits like Ben Eater.
Preface: I am a Youtuber who prefers not to do sponsored segments but has done some in the past.
> Advertising tends to naturally weed out, for me, the ones who are not as passionate about what they do.
This is a remark I see over and over again, basically "You're only in it for the money" once you do sponsors. Here's the thing that no one really gets, Youtube is not a hobby. I don't care what the channel topic is, building cars, lathe projects, tech reviews, pets, etc. The hobby for the creator is the subject, not the video production platform or process. Youtube is not social media, we're not posting videos so our friends can see what we're up to. The entire system is built completely differently from something like facebook, twitter, instgram, etc. It requires actual work. Planning videos, making thumbnails, responding to comments from strangers, making business connections, and more when you get larger. "Making videos" themselves isn't just waving a camera around while you do something either and requires it's own thought and effort.
Anyone who has reasonable success on Youtube can be monetarily rewarded for that. That alone creates an expectation that it could possibly be a source of income from the outset. If you can achieve making it a sustainable income source capable of being lived off of, why wouldn't you? You can continue to do and build upon your actual hobby, whatever it is. But instead of working a different "conventional" job you do video production, PR, marketing, and potentially advertising. The problem is that the on platform advertisement revenue is not enough to cover the effort and resources required to make videos as you become more serious about it. Part of this is on viewers because Youtube knows if you are using adblock. I can see this on the back end, on average for my channel less than 50% of views are monetized. So if nobody used adblock I could make literally double the amount on just the on platform ads alone. But that's not how it is and it's not going to change.
So you have to do something else as well. Personally, as a Youtuber, I see two revenue paths. You either go crowd funded with something like Patreon or do sponsors. You can do both but unless it's well done and relevant it feels like double dipping to me. But the in video sponsors aren't any different than the other advertisements on platform on youtube, except they aren't blocked by adblock. (Youtubers properly disclosing the ads is a completely separate issue that should not besmirch everyone who does it.) Youtubers don't get to choose their sponsor partners unless they are gigantic and have to take what they can get. We get tons of spam offers that try to screw us, taking real ones from even slightly reputable companies can make a big impact. Youtubers should do a better job of picking them, but not everybody understands something like what a VPN actually is and how is just moves your endpoint to a different set of private hands. But advertising is tied to media and not new at all. Complaining about a slightly more effective version of it is just naivety about how the service works and what the people who make the videos do.
TL;DR: Youtube is not a hobby, the subject Youtubers talk about is. Youtube is a job that takes real work, but it can't pay well enough, partly because of adblock. In video sponsors are just a different ad method that directly pays bypassing the adblock problem.
PS: I do not use adblock, partly because it feels hypocritical to make money on ads and then block them for others. The internet is indeed annoying without it, but I manage just fine.
> Youtube is not social media, we're not posting videos so our friends can see what we're up to.
Speak for yourself. I post videos on Youtube to show some low hundreds of people (including friends) that are subscribed to me what I'm up to, to give them a good laugh or to share some music, art or software I've made. No one owes it to me to elevate this hobby into a job. There are many Youtube channels like this.
Maybe if I had a million subscribers the urge to attract people with youtube-faced thumbnails and to monetize through shitty mobile game sponsorships would be overwhelming but I'd like to believe that I wouldn't be pissed off if people opted to mechanically skip the latter.
> So if nobody used adblock I could make literally double the amount on just the on platform ads alone.
If people didn't have access to clean water on tap, I could make more money selling bottled water.
YouTube is not a hobby? Interesting. I don't think I ever thought it was. I guess I consider it closer to art.
Plenty of musicians, artists perform/create with no prospect of monetary gain. They do it for the accolades. They do it for the positive feedback. They do it because they have to: they're artists.
I suspect YouTubers like "Applied Science" are artists of a sort. I guess I'm drawn to YouTube artists.
I am conflating things in my mind a bit because most of the comments on my own videos that complain about sponsors or other revenue options use the "not as passionate" argument alongside the idea of "Youtube should just be a hobby". My apologies if that came off wrong. But it is inevitable that anyone making videos that is successful will have to treat it as a business because it is work.
Applied Science is a good example of someone who has not gone the sponsor route. He is crowd funded and has a Patreon page that is setup to charge when he releases a video(I'm a patron of his actually). It is still work to make the videos and describe what he's doing and how it works. He could be sponsored, even relevantly, if for example he used a Rigol scope to show something and then talked about it for a bit. But that wouldn't mean he is any less passionate about what he is doing.
The musicians and artists example is different though. Their hobbies produce media as an end result. Publishing it is part of the process. I make videos about vintage computers. My hobby without youtube would just be me sitting alone in a room tinkering. Creating a video out of whatever I'm doing requires deliberate additional effort.
I don't want to suggest in any way that creating the videos is easy and not work. I have put together probably 30 to 40 videos myself (Final Cut) and know how much work it is.
Gessoing a canvas is work. Setting up, taking down a drum kit is work too. If you want the world to see your hobby, or your art, there is a cost involved. We accept that cost for exposure in return: for the joy of sharing in return.
I don't fault anyone wanting to make money from their hobby or their art. But I also respect a little more perhaps those, like Applied Science, that don't want to ... sully their art with a blatant sponsor plug.
Again though, I'm just a viewer, fan, enthusiast, lurker — the content creators get to make their own rules, I don't get to tell them how to run their channel.
Subscribed to your YT channel, BTW. Wrote a very early game on the Commodore PET, LOL.
I think for some us pro-sponsor-segment people, I feel like regular ads are particularly dry and more of an "assault." But sponsor segments... can be creative, funny, and sometimes make me actually want to buy the product (...not the generic Raid: Shadow Legends ones... but even those if they're well done). I appreciate well-made ads, so I don't mind sponsor segments.
I watch a video for whatever topic the video title and description leads me to expect I'm going to hear about. A sponsorship segment, no matter how "clever", is still an ad.
> But sponsor segments... sometimes make me actually want to buy the product
That's exactly what I don't want: more sophisticated psychological manipulation that gets me to buy more stuff.
The only time I don’t smash the fast-forward button during podcast ads is during the Unmade Podcast. They actually manage to continue the show’s conversation while they promote Hover and Story Blocks. It also means that sometimes their ad slots (as defined by the time between “and now a word from this episode’s sponsor” and “thank you very much for supporting this episode”) can be over seven minutes at times.
Sure, but creators don’t have many other avenues for revenue when you’re already using YouTube-dl(p) to download videos without watching ads. I imagine sponsor spots will be devalued over time as sponsorblock usage continues to grow, especially for creators with audiences that watch content on desktop more than mobile.
Is it apparent to the sponsor when someone is watching using youtube-dlp versus a regular view? I'd imagine most sponsored segments are negotiated based on subscriber count or view numbers.
Sponsors might ask for some of the creator's analytics, eg. raid: shadow legends probably isn't going to sponsor channels that have very low mobile viewership compared to desktop. There are also paid analytics tools, eg. VidIQ, which can make good guesses about some metrics.
How would Google's backend know whether the traffic comes from their own frontend vs a utility like youtube-dl (assume for the sake of argument that the utility is trying to make the traffic look like normal YouTube traffic)?
Youtube proper does a lot of JS, eg. a view is usually only counted after ~30 seconds[0] and does other things like logging the current timecode so that it can return to that time in case the user clicks off the video and returns to it later[1].
It does, it shows up as a "Other YouTube features" for the source.
Though, YouTube seems to do some aggressive deduping here, if I download from 5 different IPs, excluding the IP I'm logged into YouTube's services, I see 5 views. If I download 50 times from one IP, I see one view.
You conveniently skipped the rest of his comment which was really the important part...
There is no need to state the obvious. Nobody would miss any kind of advertisement in the media they consume but that doesn't answer how content creators are supposed to be compensated for the effort they put in.
For me, the issue is that overwhelmingly the sponsor blocks are for products and services not available in or relevant to my country. Unlike the regular ads loaded through YouTube, they can’t be customized based on the viewer’s region. They will just assume that viewers of English-language content are in the USA, mostly. When you subtract mobile games, which I don’t play, I would say that maybe 1 in 20 of them are things I could buy even if I wanted to. So it just feels pointless, they see no benefit from my seeing the sponsorships and it wastes my time.
As for what sponsored content people are streaming: where I live Internet providers provide unlimited bandwidth during off peak hours (midnight to 8AM) but give you a monthly data limit outside those hours. If you are in an area not wired for high-speed internet, you might be relying on 4G which can have a monthly limit of as little as 50 GB… which isn’t much at all for a family. So it’s nice to be able to queue up all the videos you want to watch to download overnight, making the answer “everything/anything.”
(And that is the chief use of YouTube-DL for me. YouTube premium lets you save videos to watch offline, but only on mobile devices —- which typically have little storage for them —- and you can’t schedule it, you’d have to get up at midnight to manually select each video. With YouTube-DL I can schedule downloads of all my subscriptions and bookmarks to a nice big hard drive and then automatically put my PC to sleep.)
At first I saw the sponsor segments, later it became too repetitive so I started doing the double-touch action (skip 10 or 20 seconds forward) when a video would start talking once again about the VPN service of the month (really, it seems to always be VPN services!), and later I ended up having to actually pause the video, scroll forward even a couple minutes (some sponsor segments have gone wild in duration lately).
Then I started using[1] SponsorBlock, and now we're back at square 0.
[1]: I had known about it for a long time but didn't feel like using it, until I did (or you can see it as "they made me feel like using it"...)
All marketing is bad. It's essentially mindhacking.
> I want indie people to make enough money to produce high quality content
If people have something to say, they will say it whether they get paid for it or not. That's what I want. Real opinions from real people. Not some sponsored content you can't trust is real.
> otherwise media is just what a few biggies want to fund
It already is. All they have to do to lose funding is say or do something those sponsors don't like.
How many youtubers have you seen shilling out raid shadow legends? They all praise it like it's the next coming of Jesus while everyone knows that the game is absolute garbage.
How many times will I get ad for NordVPN? Why would I use such a widely known and blocked VPN for streaming services? It is literal noob trap.
Worst is the reybud or whatever ear buds. Everyone says how good they sound and how amazing they are, but realistically if a brand comes out of nowhere with no other products what are the chances that they are good or even decent?
All of these are terrible sponsor ads for me. All they do is annoy me and waste my time. At least many video makers I follow have the decency to somehow indicate in the video how long the ad will go on so it is easier to skip. Only reason I don't use the automatic extension is that anyone can mark any segment of any video as an ad and it will be automatically skipped and I don't like that idea. Maybe if it was just some friends who I trust.
Some people, like Internet Historian puts some effort in and the sponsor segments are actually entertaining and I don't mind watching those. Some people also do the quick shout out that takes some 10 seconds and they're fine too.
I also watch some meme compilations with my SO and they're usually pretty different. I appreciate that compiling those memes into one video is for the convenience of the viewer but the original video creators don't benefit from those, only the ones making the compilations so I don't want to support that. On top of that, there are some channels that have several minutes long product ads inside the video, not the normal YouTube adverts. I simply hate those.
Bad? No, not really. If you ask me, (almost?) nothing is inherently bad. But it's a nice and obvious feature to skip them if you want, so it's pretty amazing that such options are possible now. (However, I don't think I'll use it, because there is an mpv plugin for that, and it feels pretty weird, to actually skip parts of the video when downloading. I mean, what if I'll need it one time: do I have to re-download the video?)
There is only a certain number of times a person can watch a video where the creator mentions they are sponsored by Raid Shadow Legends before a person will go mad.
I usually see sponsorships for products that I already know about. If it's a creator's first sponsorship or if it's a new product (I check the description links to see) then I watch it through but otherwise, it's a massive waste of time to sit through a bunch 1 minute sponsorship in the middle of a 10 minute video.
Ads are a terrible monetization model and I will never willingly consume them. What was wrong with the original model of supporting artists via patronage anyway? Now with platforms like Patreon it's very simple to set up.
It depends. Some Creators get pretty creative with their sponsor blocks. JayzTwoCents comes to mind with his "iFixit" ad - it's hilarous every time it appears.
I never buy anything based on ads, so it makes no difference for the advertiser whether I remove the sponsored part or not, they won’t see a dime from me either way.
It doesn't make any difference to the channel whether you watch the sponsored segment or not. If you want to archive some videos then sponsored segments are just a waste of space. I archive any useful information that I intend to use. For example, an instructional video showing how to repair my car.
Man I thought I was in heaven when I accidentally stumbled upon SponsorBlock. Now you're telling me about this?! Amazing! How does the video quality fare after stripping? Is it re-encoding the video or somehow stripping it without altering the quality?
I doubt it would have to re-encode. First it would split the video into separate files which don’t include the sponsored content.
Then would use something like the ffmpeg concat demuxer which will adjust timestamps of the input streams, and then output a concatenated result stream (no reencode) (https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-formats.html#concat-1). So it should probably have zero quality loss.
It re-encodes. Actually, I think it defaults to marking the sponsor bits ... somehow. Whatever it's doing wasn't enough for my player to notice.
That said, for this stuff, I've only downloaded audio, and of that mostly talking head type stuff, where I let it cut out the segments. Whatever re-encoding is done would have to be pretty bad before I'd care.
$ yt-dlp -x --sponskrub --sponskrub-cut "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7vPNcnYWQ4"
[youtube] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading webpage
[youtube] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading android player API JSON
[info] _7vPNcnYWQ4: Downloading 1 format(s): 251
[download] Destination: Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].webm
[download] 100% of 12.72MiB in 00:00
[ExtractAudio] Destination: Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].opus
Deleting original file Making an unpickable lock. Calling locksmiths [_7vPNcnYWQ4].webm (pass -k to keep)
[SponSkrub] Trying to remove sponsor sections
WARNING: Cutting out sponsor segments will cause the subtitles to go out of sync.
[libopus @ 0x5462c20] No bit rate set. Defaulting to 96000 bps.
size= 3515kB time=00:04:33.53 bitrate= 105.3kbits/s speed= 26x
Without the audio only option, it's more clear it's re-encoding:
[SponSkrub] Trying to remove sponsor sections
WARNING: Cutting out sponsor segments will cause the subtitles to go out of sync.
[libopus @ 0x5575420] No bit rate set. Defaulting to 96000 bps.
frame= 51 fps=8.5 q=0.0 size= 1kB time=00:00:01.95 bitrate= 3.5kbits/s speed=0.326x
> It integrates with sponskrub to call into the SponsorBlock database and with the right options will strip the sponsor segments from downloaded videos.
Also here is a fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock functionality.[0]
So dlc is a fork of dl, but dl itself has actually a bunch of fairly recent commits which dlc does not have. And dlp nor dlc are 'forks' in the Github sense of forking. So how does one figure out whether recent dl commits are in dlp? And does this matter? Is this the downside of 'if you don't like it then just fork it and fix it'?
Other than a few commits [1], everything in youtube-dl is already in yt-dlp. You can see upto which upstream commit is merged into yt-dlp in the changelog [2]
I was recently looking for a library that did this and couldn't find anything nice. I was surprised but also slightly disappointed to see that yt-dlp has essentially rolled their own (cookies.py [1]).
chr_cookies = pycookiecheat.chrome_cookies('https://example.com')
session = requests.Session()
for k, v in cookies.items():
session.cookies.set(k, v, domain='.example.com')
It’s open source so you could theoretically pull it out and generalize it… idk if anyone wants to manage that project (seems like a ton of work even for an open source project) but I’m sure it be interesting.
As much as I like this feature, it is scary on the other side how easy it is to essentially steal cookies - what yt-dlp can, so can malware.
Why don't OSes have some sort of system-wide secret store linked to an user's account (like the macOS Keychain) and an application's code-signing certificate? That would at least prevent easy file-dump attacks, moving the barrier to "execute something in the browser process context" instead.
Linux does right? I believe this is how android works but you can set something up manually by creating a seperate user and changing the permissions on the browser cache/data folder, then run the browser as one user and yt-dlp as a seperate one.
There might be a more modern and streamlined solution for Linux, but in Windows land they also introduced Controlled Folder Access into defender.
1. Other OSes (at least linux) have user keychains.
2. Once malware is running as your user, how do you expect to protect against that even with a keychain? They can log all your keystrokes, extract certificates and keys from applications running as your user or anything your user has access to, etc.
3. How are you going to support different keychains on different OSes? And what happens when they diverge? Say Apple gets "brave" again and allows only Apple signed binaries to access the keychain with the excuse of "user security", will binaries have to roll their own keychain? Are you going to make apps add another corporate dependency?
> 2. Once malware is running as your user, how do you expect to protect against that even with a keychain?
A kernel-backed mechanism could enforce that access to the secret decryption syscalls can only be done from untampered signed processes.
Assuming an user has a distinct login password they are not using anywhere else and the public key of the codesign certificate is part of the kernel-side secret, a malware has no chance of getting access to the secret, unless it exploits a code execution vulnerability in the target program.
> How are you going to support different keychains on different OSes?
A minimal interface with three calls: 1) create/delete a kernel-side secret, 2) encrypt a secret using a key derived from the user's keychain and the application's public key, 3) decrypt a secret using said key.
Android brings such an API (KeyStore), macOS' Keychain should support something like that via its ACL feature. Where additional work is needed is Windows (its DPAPI only protects secrets from other users, apps can get other apps' secrets by design to implement SSO) and Linux (which doesn't have any way to verify in the kernel if an application has a code signature).
Browsers and other apps wishing to protect secrets from malware could use an abstraction layer that uses the best available mechanism on each platform, the three operations should be enough for this purpose.
It’s annoying that this has been downvoted because having your identity in easily-readable files on your computer is literally worse than saving passwords in a text file: Passwords will prompt 2FA, notifications and whatnot; Cookies might just work, albeit temporarily.
While I see the problem with malicious applications pillaging your users home directory, let's not forget that being able to tinker and hack together things is also one of the greatest strengths of the desktop platform.
Availability is a fundamental part of security - if the information you wish to access is made unavailable to you, that is a security failure. If the only goal was confidentiality, we would turn the computers off and bury them in concrete.
>yt-dlp is a youtube-dl fork based on the now inactive youtube-dlc. The main focus of this project is adding new features and patches while also keeping up to date with the original project
yt-dlc's last commit was only 4 days ago, from the project owner. What are the advantages of each, and what about other forks out there?
The previous update was July 25, and the one before that was December 2020.
While the July update dealt with the updater, having 2 days of small changes since December is not very active.
As far as the advantages, there are plenty of comments now outlining them better than I could. For me there are many additional sites that work with yt-dlp that do not work with the other forks. I found myself using this fork more and more instead of youtube-dl due to the additional support, until I've now made it my default. It does have a compat mode so if you use a lot of youtube-dl switches that yt-dlp may of removed or depreciated in the cleanup, they will still usually work if applicable with this fork as well.
For me, something like this is exactly where Deno would shine. I could just run `deno run <script url> --allow-net=YouTube.com --allow-write=.` and not worry about that it could do anything dangerous. Probably the url list would be a bit more complicated, but I could also just blanket allow net without worrying, since allow-read isn't needed.
Should it also be the OS's job to sandbox JS from the websites you visit?
Admittedly, that question is made in bad faith -- I know what you mean, even if what you mean isn't necessarily "sandboxing": permissions!
Android and iOS do it right. One OS-level source of truth that manages application-level permissions for the entire machine. When you frame it that way, it becomes clear that Deno asking for rights on a per-run basis is indeed silly, but only in the context of the user experience... not necessarily the core software design.
Do you know if generic sandboxing tools exist? I feel like it should be possible to use Docker and some sort of Firewall to isolate your running application from your system if you're worried about it accessing things that it should be able to. And that way you don't need to worry about using deno or relying on the program being written in a certain framework/language.
youtube has recently been implementing download speed throttling on some video downloads. See: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326 . Youtube-dl does not yet have a solution for this occasional download speed throttling.
Currently it's WPF based and therefore only supports Windows. I'm considering porting it to Avalonia so I can also use it on my Linux desktop.
The reason I made this GUI is mostly for manual format selection. The automatic 'bestvideo+bestaudio/best' doesn't always result in the best format combination. So I always select AV1 + Opus manually and use the WebM container. The GUI also includes some opinionated defaults like embedding metadata, thumbnail, subtitles.
- The extractors part (all the scrappers basically)
- The cli tool
What would be wonderful is that the extractors part is splitted out, so that anyone can use it without using youtube-dl. That would be much easier to update it too, each extractor is independent, so it is only a question, does this scrapper (extractor) works or not.
The next step would be to have a multi-language format to describe a scrapper, instead of being coded in Python. But no idea if this is possible or maybe that would make things much more complex
Being two different projects has advantages, especially when one part (need to) moves much faster.
The fact that some requires custom logic doesn't prove that you need a programming language, it is just custom logic compared to the standard framework.
If you’re implementing custom logic, why not just make it easy on yourself and use a proper programming language. Trying to invent custom logic systems gives us cmake.
Why can't YouTube and Alphabet simply provide a download button or a public API? When you are running the worlds largest digital museum of rare video footage, you have some obligations to the society.
Can't run ads on them, and you risk lawsuits of all kind if you let people easily download copyrighted content. They aren't running a museum, it just happens to be the largest video sharing platform on the planet.
No chance. YT has 2bn+ unique logins a month. China only has 800m internet users max. Further the video streaming landscape in China is much more fragmented than outside the country where YT is dominant.
Apparently, copyright law makes this an unwise proposition. But the least they could do is offer the Internet Archive with some privileged access so all this can be mirrored and viewed when it's out of copyright in 80 years.
They could at least let you download videos for which the author specified a free license, such as Creative Commons, or videos that are public domain. There are a lot of these videos so why not?
Just discovered that several video sharing sites, like pexels.com, have a download button on videos with creative commons license. They are off course useless for professional YouTubers, but great for everybody else.
It's not copyright law, it's the agreements that YT has with copyright owners. No one is going to license their content to YT if the site allows anyone to download whatever is there.
I pay for YouTube premium, but this beautiful piece of software automatically strips out the commercials from the videos and it seems I can download any video from YouTube even without logging in. My question is the following:
What is benefit of setting my credentials to the config file?
I know it sounds incredibly picky, but given it's supposed to be a drop-in youtube-dl replacement, it's quite annoying to suddenly change the name to something as hard to remember as yt-dlp instead of, say, youtube-dlp. I will be mixing it up every time I'll google it, I guess. Not to mention it messes with naming scheme of bash scripts and aliases I already have.
Honestly, I think they should've fully changed the name while at it. youtube-dl is such an antiquated name that doesn't even fit the tool anymore, as it now supports thousands of sources.
I've switched very recently, but searching "youtube-dlp" still got me the answer I was looking for. I will admit I've typed "you [tab]" and gotten confused why it wasn't working almost every time so far, but I imagine that'll change in under a week.
Here's the aliases that I typically use. I'm very pleased to see that yt-dlp added --split-chapters, it's great for separating long videos into separate songs! e.g. the Faça Você Mesmo EP from Under Control, a Brazilian punk rock bank https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSHEZ_HdjHs
I alias "youtube-dt <options>" to "yt-<something>". i guess a lot of people do. I won't be surprised if I already have some yt-dlp among the other variations. Also, I already said it's not hte only problem. So suddenly naming the thing itself yt-dlp is a "fuck you".
I've started saving anything I ever watch more than once. Cooking recipes, music videos, learning materials, etc.
I started when a group I listened to removed all the content they had put up over the past year and said it was promotional material for their latest album which was garbage.
Ads have gotten so bad that any videos over three minutes have multiple ad breaks so watching longer music videos or sets are just completely ruined when watching on YouTube.
I wish there was a good set up for single watch videos since the ad algorithm tries to anticipate good places for breaks, which often times is right before punch lines to joke and when you skip over the ad they tend to put you back a few milliseconds ahead of where you stopped which can ruin jokes. I rarely watch for enjoyment (as opposed to learning) on a computer so I don't get the benefit of using an ad blocker like Ad Nauseam.
My experience is that the internet is really bad at forgetting the stuff you want gone, but really good at turning all your bookmarks into 404s and parked domains (another reason why bookmarks are pretty much worthless). So if you don't save it, it'll be gone next time you're trying to look it up. Doubly so if it is something even mildly controversial (now or then).
> Doubly so if it is something even mildly controversial (now or then).
Triply so if it's hosted by a corporation.
Looking at you, Microsoft. For all the good[0] things you're doing for developers using your platforms, I'm still angry at the way your documentation links rot. It seems that everything that ever linked to MSDN prior to ~2015 will now have their links redirected to 404 or "buy new Surface" page. Hell, plenty of internal links are broken too. It's particularly apparent when trying to read about C++ and COM (vs. C#/.NET, which seems to be MS's main focus).
--
[0] - In a pragmatic, day-to-day dev experience sense. Explicitly not talking about wider ethical issues here.
1. I download whole channels if there's a series I want to watch.
2. I download music, since youtube is a really quite nice music library.
3. I download long videos before I watch it, because it's just more pleasant to rewind the thing when it's already on your SSD. Also, it won't freeze spoiling a beautiful scene because of some stupid WiFi problem.
4. Even if I don't download it before watching, I still use mpv to watch it, which uses youtube-dl internally, because mpv is a much nicer video-player than what you can have in a browser.
And I'm sure I forgot some important use-cases. Browsers are evil, js-apps are stupid, don't use them, if you can.
If you feel like chatting with others who also archive YouTube content, consider stopping by my discord server: https://discord.gg/xjj538vD
We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content.
1) Videos disappear. Anything I think I might want to watch again in the future, I always download rather than bookmark. Not just YouTube but any video site (e.g. Reddit).
2) When Internet is flaky or doesn't exist. I've downloaded whole sets of tutorial videos for example to watch on a plane.
3) Stuff in 4K where my video player does a better job with hardware acceleration than my web browser does
I mean out of all the video I watch from the internet, 95% is streaming, but youtube-dl is for that other 5% that falls into the three categories above.
A recent example of videos disappearing is when Radio TV Hong Kong got a new, more pro-Beijing head. The “inflammatory” stuff first went down, followed by anything older than 1 year on YouTube as cover.
Safekeeping, offline viewing, producing derivative works (it's great they allow setting CC licenses on videos, but are subsequently hostile to anyone trying to actually use those rights), and viewing on platforms where the browser or player doesn't work (that's been a few years by now though, now that all my hardware is newer and I'm no poor student anymore).
A great example I recently saw is someone extracting the audio feed and double checking the Doppler shift of a passing quadcopter to confirm a speed claim. It checked out and the math was included. Stellar comment. Harder to do if obtaining the video's data is made hard.
I made a tool for myself so I could 1 click download videos to my iphone's camera roll. It's based on youtube-dl. I like to share raw videos and do not like to share URLs. I use this tool to make that easy -- I copy a url and run the iOS shortcut and the video auto saves to my camera roll.
I also use it to stream videos, not just for downloading. I can watch using a native video player (such as mpv) instead of the web interface. More control over the playback speed and less buffering when I pause or fast forward. Very useful for longer lectures and presentations.
My internet connection can be flaky, and just downloading stuff and playing it locally works a lot better. YouTube tries very hard to minimize the buffer size to only what's needed – which makes a lot of sense at their scale – but it also means that less-than-stable internet connections are difficult because it'll never buffer enough to bridge the 3 minute outage.
For me was YouTube playing the same add every few minutes on almost every video I watched (some tooth paste ad) on the iPad. I started by downloading the videos on a PC and watching them later from my NAS but in the end I gave up on YouTube on the iPad and bought a Surface Pro.
I genuinely hate using YouTube because it's awful. Random pop-ups all over the page. Weird suggestions on the sidebar because I don't have an account and don't want one. Ads that start in the middle of a sentence and play again if you rewind, etc. so you can't actually understand the video you're watching. So I wrote an app that takes a YouTube URL, downloads the video with youtube-dl, and just plays it in a normal OS window. No web browser needed. No junk. It's awesome!
Mostly for off-line usage. Especially for videos where I care about audio only, I can download the audio part and then save it to my phone so that I can listen to it later without a need to have network connection. Another use case is archival.
Live music performances, both new and old. YT is a great resource for that sort of thing, and I don't trust that that stuff will remain on YT and readily accessible for years to come, so I slap them on my NAS and watch them via Plex.
So... on-the-go playback, general data-hoarding, music piracy, weird 'raw video' sharing instead of URLs that everyone has been doing since 2006 (please stop this! It's baffling to receive video files in emails from boomers in this day and age), and a bit too much attention to the abundance of terrible passively consumed content that you all spend too much time on youtube.com itself for
Thanks for this post! First I am hearing about this fork!
Darn...unfortunately still can't download Joe Rogan Spotify. Guess they haven't found a way around the widevine encryption...(Right now it seems like only a few podcasts are encrypted so other Spotify streams work)
It's always strange to think that there is encrypted data flowing through my software, through my operating system, into my hardware, that somehow I, the user, I am unable to access, but that the hardware can handle just fine.
With Widevine L3, it does send your OS unencrypted data. You're free to screen record videos or audio record e.g. PulseAudio Monitor channels of your speakers. You just can't easily convert it to a DRM-free format at speeds faster than realtime.
HDCP is one method, as are the “safeguards” built in to the audio and video APIs on macOS (to protect them from losing revenue by recording iTunes Music (before they removed DRM) or screen capturing new movies (thus threatening the contracts with Hollywood).
Right. This is not just Mac OS, same thing can happen on Windows. Modern media DRMing sometimes involves bypassing your OS entirely[0]. Audio/video streams have special hardware paths through the CPU and GPU. HDCP uses encryption to create a safe pipe between the incoming stream and your monitor, so the data can't be snooped on or modified mid-flight. Etc.
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[0] - Or at least almost entirely, I suspect at least the kernel must get involved somehow. Otherwise Widevine support wouldn't be an issue on Linux the way it is (or was).
One way is x86. Intel’s chips have SGX (software guard extensions) that allows code to run in “enclaves” that outside code can’t access. You can send data into the enclave and read what it spits out, but you can’t inspect (debug) it.
youtube-dl has been inactive for the last 2 months.
Most things still work but support of different services is something that needs daily updates to not break. Even if most popular websites still work, pages like Newgrounds are breaking.
There's 3.7k open issues right now and nothing gets merged [0].
It's really stupid that this stuff still happens. I mean, youtube-dl main devs are stepping away, it's understandable. But it would be so much more convenient for everyone, if it was passed over to somebody, who is still interested (yt-dlp devs?) instead of ending up as a bunch of forks nobody knows about, and a dead project everyone continues to use. Just think about how many apps and scripts have youtube-dl hardcoded somewhere in them.
For longer than that. 846 open PRs, 3.7k open issues. And this long predates the GitHub takedown debacle. This isn't to say that they're totally AWOL: they do a really good job keeping on top of the boring break/fix work, like keeping on top of the ever-changing interfaces of video providers. But they're very conservative about expanding functionality, and even fixing more minor bugs.
The linked issue contains several issues describing the same problem, but what I meant to say was
that which duplicate they were of was never made clear. The maintainers seemed to assume that everyone knew what it was and never provided a link to the original issue.
Never heard of YouTube Vanced. I see it's not open source. The feature list is interesting, but it doesn't say anything about tracking/telemetry. Does the app track you (and how much), independently of YouTube tracking?
I'm currently happy with NewPipe - which is essentially a youtube-dl GUI, and has to be updated just as often, which is damn annoying because FDroid is still completely broken UX-wise - but I have less tech-savvy people around me, who would very much like an alternative to the official YouTube app.
Newpipe works as well. Youtube vanced cannot be open source as it is just a nodded youtube client, which isn't open source. I cannot speak on tracking but I tracked its DNS requests and nothing out of the ordinary.
A neat tool, but YouTube is generally an abysmal source for music. That's partly deliberate (from record labels) and partly an inevitable consequence of recompression with different lossy formats.
Unless something is completely unavailable elsewhere, you'll find far better audio quality from other (original) sources.
It's not so much about availability or even quality as it is convenience for a lot of us. Soviet funk here, favorite TV news theme there, C64 remixes over here, NPR tiny desk over this way, and a rendition of the full original vocal lyrics to the M:I theme which is basically only available on YT itself...
I can't imagine trying to source this stuff independently and keeping up with it, and if some commercial music crept in I imagine it'd be easier to simply stay on YT and ask what level of quality one subjectively needs for dental drilling, or mindless work, or throne-in-lair-sitting, or whatever it is...
> Unless something is completely unavailable elsewhere
I do run into this from time to time. Let's say I want the soundtrack to one of my favourite anime, from 2006.
Some items from it are also on the source game soundtrack, so are available on iTunes. This is actually kind of rare for older anime which usually don't bother releasing in iTunes outside Japan, but being a game adaptation helps it here, I guess. Still, anything composed for the anime are not included.
Some of it is there on Spotify. Actually, at one point it all was, and I can still see the tracks are there but grayed out in other people's playlists, so I assume there exists some region in which it was available, and the availability in my region initially was a mistake by a licensee who forgot to limit it to the regions they had rights for. Either way, it's no longer legally available for me.
So I could.... VPN to Japanese iTunes, thereby breaking the terms of service, (assuming it's still there) or I could try import some decade old special edition DVDs of the anime which contained the OST.
Or I could rip it from YouTube. Eventually, if you make no effort to sell to me, I'm going to resort to other options.
> So I could.... VPN to Japanese iTunes, thereby breaking the terms of service...
In my experience, you'd immediately enter "vacation mode", which is limited to two weeks in free version, but unlimited in premium. Spotify doesn't even complain when you switch countries in a couple of seconds. They're very lenient on enforcement, I've used it for like five years before Spotify actually became available in my country (though I couldn't pay for the premium with a card from a different country). Just log in via VPN once, then it works for two weeks.
YouTube has a ton of obscure music that can’t be found on Spotify, plus things like old TV specials, theme tunes, outtakes and the like.
The quality is usually pretty bad, it’s true. But in many cases, this stuff is almost impossible to buy even if you wanted to, so YouTube is your only option.
YT is also fairly unpleasant to use, which is why a lot of people go for youtube-dl.
That and a lot of music I have found on there has a music video version of the song which can sometimes be slightly different than the original song. It's usually something like a longer intro before the music starts or something like cheering from a crowd or whatever to mimic it being a live performance music video. So you're getting a subpar sound quality combined with a sometimes differing song from the original.
The killer feature of YouTube-dl is that it has been actively maintained for years. Any competing tool will need to do the same, and it is highly unlikely that others will carry it on.
They were DMCAed, they got bad press out of it, they eventually stood up for the developer in exchange for a token concession (deleting test data that referred to copyrighted music and was named in the complaint): https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo... , and reversed the takedown unilaterally (which would mean the claimant could take github/microsoft to court if they felt like it).
Whether it's a matter of principles or just the bad press from the initial takedown is less clear, but I think it'll be a while before they re litigate this issue.
> (which would mean the claimant could take github/microsoft to court if they felt like it)
I can't imagine that ever happening. But what I can imagine is the media groups giving Microsoft a hard time on whatever deals they have in the Xbox ecosystem, pressuring until GitHub unilaterally reverses their reversal, or does something else to satisfy them.
Blocked meant that when I tried to view my fork I got a DMCA page. There were some instructions about how to merge in the changes or something but I didn't have time at the time.
Oh, so if you merge in the changes from the original repo that remove the copyrighted music URL from the test data, then your repository will work again?
Yes I think that was the instructions. But I forgot where I kept my local copy of the repo, and it was far behind the current master head. I was just parsing wfmu playlist to make track meta-data.. probably if I did it again I would write it better anyway.
I wonder if I should switch ArchiveBox to use this… is it available as easily via apt/pip/brew/Pkg/etc as YouTube-dL? Otherwise vendoring is always a pain.
Please don't take HN threads on tedious flamewar tangents.
(Also, please don't downvote-bait or whatever that first bit was. Also tedious, and actually against the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - see the second-from-last...)
Can't blame you for keeping HN tidy. I honestly wasn't trying to bait anyone and definitely didn't expect that crazy tangent. Will hold my tongue on off topic quips in the future. Thanks for the tip on the community guidelines!
To be fair I would agree with you that some of his guests are great (e.g. Quentin Tarantino) and I do enjoy the long-form interviewing. But Rogan himself, to me, gives off bad vibes. Not really sincere or actually interested in his guests more than he is interested in himself. I find he'll say he's interested and come back with some show of how cultured and learned he is by bringing some obscure minutiae. I think he should be truly interested in his guest and put them in the spotlight.
Sorry to point out the truth but Joe himself is an unaccomplished stoner and promotes lifestyle choices that are repugnant to me. I would never trust him with my kids. So why would I trust him with my time?
Others do a much better job of the long form interview and have themselves provided some value to society on their own merits. Tim Ferriss and Jordan Harbinger to name a couple.
Sorry that this whole thing spawned something we both didn't expect.
Joe does look pretty hilarious these days. If you look at pictures of him younger vs now he went from decent looking italian showman to some alien humanoid. Becoming a muscleman who works out for hours, plus tries crazy things like his diet, pill regimen, and sitting in a sauna/ice bath for an hour daily is something he wants to do and it is his prerogative.
The only thing he really promotes heavily is for people to lose weight and stop eating junk food. Yeah he does have ads for Gatorade clone drinks but still I don't think he is really implying people should adopt his whole routine. It is easy to ignore and focus on the podcast content.
If you don't mind which lifestyle choices are you referring to?
>Not really sincere or actually interested in his guests more than he is interested in himself. I find he'll say he's interested and come back with some show of how cultured and learned he is by bringing some obscure minutiae.
There have been a lot of podcasts where he has no freakin clue how to add to the conversation so he tries to contribute topic he does know about (comedy, MMA, working out) but for the most part he sits and listens. For me if the guest is not interesting or acting in bad faith, I shut it off and move on with the understanding that I will rarely miss any insight from Joe himself. If he is friends with the person then I see a totally different vibe. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, just stating my observations.
At the end of the day he has repeatedly said that the podcast is just supposed to be two people sitting around "shooting the shit". In fact I only started listening in mid 2020 just because of some guest that intrigued me. I didn't even know who Joe Rogan was before that.
This is an interesting take. I personally find Joe Rogan to be an abhorrent human being that gives a platform to pseudoscientists and white supremacists, but I’ve never heard “his tens of millions of dollars are negated by the fact that he smokes weed” as a criticism.
Out of curiosity, what value does Tim Ferris provide to society? I’m not being sarcastic, I just only know him as the guy that wrote the four hour work week book, which I did not find substantive.
I didn’t mention blacklisting. I said that I, as an individual, do not like Joe Rogan. I personally do not listen to his podcast, nor do I watch or listen to Alex Jones.
Thank you for your suggestion about what I should do, but I’ll politely decline your request that I go out of my way to consume media made by people I dislike in order to reverse an arbitrary judgment of being in an “echo chamber” from a stranger.
I’m happy stating my opinion and not being prescriptive. I hope you enjoy whatever media you choose to consume.
I thought it was telling that Rogan tends to pair Jones with another guest who is ... obviously out to lunch. The last time I saw he had AJ on he was sitting beside a flat earther. Having the two together made both look as ridiculous as they really are.
That said, he's had too many questionable dieticians, anti-vaxxers, and such that he leaves unquestioned and unchallenged. To say nothing of his poor history with gender issues.
I've done a lot in my life. Enough to be proud of myself, if I may be so bold, but I'm nowhere near as accomplished as Joe Rogan; irrespective of how I or others may feel about him.
At the very least, he has impacted the lives of far more people than I, and given a platform to many others to do the same. I've impacted many, millions even, but I'm still nowhere near his capacity for influence.
Joe Rogan was a UFC interviewer & commentator, Fear Factor host, and comedian. Not exactly an unaccomplished stoner. All his jobs were great experience in interviewing people.
Everything you said is subjective. I don't really like him as a person, but our personalities are different. His interviews and podcasts are interesting because he lets the guest talk, unlike many other hosts.
All in all I don't agree with your assessment. I'm sure they people you listed are nice, but you could apply your same shallow subjective critiques to them as well.
Joe's interviews with some people are excellent. He more or less lets them talk for an hour straight, something they probably rarely get to do. It gives you much more insight into a person than a quick 2 minute TV interview or sound byte.
But lately he's anti-vaxx, conspiracy theory, and peddling nonsense that's going to get people killed. It's no longer worth listening to.
Edit: Correct typo