this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2024
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It's the main way I watch youtube now. After Piped and Newpipe stopped working for me across all devices, I only use 2 methods of watching Youtube now. Open in mpv (which is configured to use yt-dlp in the backend to make things faster), and download using yt-dlp. So it's key to me keeping on watching Youtube. Recently, I've started getting ads showing up even on Mobile Vivaldi, so no more YT on my phone.
So my new workflow is to use Piped to find a video, then copy the end of the link and type "yt-dlp " in a terminal, wait for the video(s) to download, and open in mpv.
OR
In some cases, use Qutebrowser, with a custom keybind to open a video in mpv.
Try FreeTube.
Newpipe works fine for me. They always fix it almost immediately.
Yeah, but I use a fork called Tubular so I can get SponsorBlock and ReturnYoutubeDislike.
Edit: Turns out I just missed that there was an update. Phone playback is back!
How often does that break?
Yt-dlp or mpv? Never.
Newpipe and piped? Newpipe takes about a week or two, to rebreak after a fix. Piped has been broken and not updated yet, for a while.
Why not just pass the YouTube link to mpv so you don't have to wait for the video to download?
I still have to wait a long time for the video to load in the Mpv cache, and sometimes I want a bunch of videos to watch later (or watch multiple times if they're educational). In which case, I either open up a bunch of videos in their own mpv windows and they all load while I'm watching the first one, or I download them while I'm doing something else.
But loading a bunch of mpv windows is heavier than a bunch of terminals running yt-dlp (and I could also just switch to using tmux.... which I probably should get around to at some point).
In my experience the video loads in a few seconds compared to the minutes it'd take for it to download, but I get your second point.
Depends on the options mpv passes to yt-dlp—I personally have in my mpv config to grab 720p videos, so that it’s faster than downloading full quality.
Maybe just pay for YouTube Premium at at that point? It pays the video creators, and you don't have to have a janky playback setup.
No matter how hanky this setup is, the official YouTube app is jankier.
Then why are almost all of them on patreon and ask for a donation?
Because it’s an additional source of revenue, and they can provide rewards outside of YouTube.
Why would anyone want to support one of the most evil companies in the world alongside though?
If you don’t like Google keeping a cut, then sign up for all the Patreons for everyone you watch.
Now this is a much better answer but some people still just can't afford that.
Right, that’s why ads exist.
Ads exist because people want to make money. So these bad actors go out and look for places where people like to spend their time, and they poison these places with their money-hungry practices. In the process they destroy the innocence of all these manifestations of human creativity, and manipulate people into buying shit they don't actually need, effectively destroying the planet through overconsumption. That's not even mentioning that ad-companies put us on a path towards a mass-surveillance society, just because big-data leads to more effective ads. I can't help but see ads as a destructive force of evil in our world. I like human creativity in it's many forms, and I'm all in favor of rewarding creators to a certain extent, but using ads seems to be the worst possible method of doing so.
(not intending to criticize your comments, just spreading the anti-ad gospel ;-)
I don't like ads either, but they are the only functioning way of paying creators outside of direct payments, especially with economic inflation and competition from streaming services eating away at people's budget for media. No one else has a solution that works under capitalism.
But ads are not functioning, they are destructive. They are by no means cheap either, people are paying through being manipulated and we are paying collectively for the damage it's doing to our world. We'd be much better of if we had only direct payments. Direct artist payments will always be the more effective and efficient financing structure because then we pay just for the creative output, not all the unrelated economic parasitic activities.
The solution is very simple and there is nothing that inflation can do about it: we don't watch ads, we pay creators that we want to support, and if from these donations a creator doesn't earn enough money he has two options: 1. One has an intrinsic drive to create and publish so he does so through other means, for instance by working a part time job. If this sounds unreasonable then let us not forget that already most of all human creativity is financed exactly like this, it is only the exception that is financially lucrative. 2. One chooses not to create (or in a less costly manner). You could think of this as a sad outcome, but you'd be better off concluding that this creative output wasn't so important to anyone, not to the creator nor to the public. This means we'd be left with the better and more intrinsically motivated creative content.
So let's not justify ads, but let's reject them in the most radical ways we can.
Capitalism doesn't change the fact that giant companies fundamentally lack the right to hijack my attention and implant their bullshit in my head.
Good news, there is a subscription service to prevent that and also still pays the creators.
But they don't exist without terrible data collection with illegal elements. Dry capitalism never ends well, mister/miss.
The two options for compensating a creator for their work online are advertisements or direct payments. There are no other functional alternatives. In a better world, more countries would have grants or universal basic income, but that's not the world that exists right now.
What I'm saying is extremely poor people don't have to support anyone and nobody should ever force them or make them feel guilty like you're doing. The creator can also make their content completely or partially paywalled like what RCE is doing for example.
No