If the garbage takes itself out, I won’t complain. YT doesn’t see how the cable companies dying is the exact same future it is racing to emulate.
If you’re on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
Freetube is great but it’s also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won’t resume. Then it says “reload” and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn’t work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it’s more susceptible to breakage which is why I’m currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
It’s a bit of a faff, but I use FreeTube to grab the URLs which I then drop into a yt-dlp command that I use to download my subscriptions to watch on Plex on my Apple TV. Works a treat, though I wish I could get Plex to display them properly.
Why not just use tubesync? There’s another one like youtube archivist or something as well. If you already have a Plex server you probably have the skills to set it up.
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
Here’s the other that I’m aware of https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
I found tubesync kinda needs to be run on vpn if you don’t want YouTube to ban you during the initial sync, I assume the same is true for archivist. Works fine after that first sync tho (I’m actually using as an archive since people tend to take their stuff down once they change hobbies for some reason, so I literally was archiving whole channels).
Yeah, I’m aware of both of them but have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to get them to work. I’m fairly new to Linux, and the instructions for both seem to assume a certain amount of expertise.
Oh, and as I type this I’ve remembered that I did manage to get one of them to work, but something to do with the way it downloads the videos means that you need to install a Plex plugin of some description because Plex won’t recognise the metadata or some shit.
So for the time being I’m happy enough to fanny about with my manual method. Between my wife and I it takes up about ten minutes every couple of days, and that’s ok.
Yeah if small quantity it’s not too bad to do your way. I use jellyfin so everything shows up ok for me, although it’s weird to see the “wrong” thumbnails.
For me I’ve got everything as a docker setup using https://docs.linuxserver.io/ They don’t have a tubesync one but I found they have good instructions for setting it up and that’s how I learned enough to do so on my own with tubesync. But there is def a curve there.
My perfect ideal would be freetube as a web server just for browsing where I could hit the dl button and fire off a download command to my server, then it shows up in jellyfin or Plex. I… Haven’t found a way to do this seamlessly yet, but I’m always on the lookout
AdGuard pro, SponsorBlock, DeArrow, and Untrap for YouTube. I only rarely ever see a brief part of a sponsor ad, and never see YouTube’s own ads.
Untrap lets you modify nearly anything about YouTube like even removing the view count and channel avatars, among many other options.
I’ve landed on that page a couple of times. I’m just waiting to be blocked.
I almost never watch videos on youtube because I download them and watch them locally. The two things that I use to download them are Downie (Mac) and yt-download (cross platform). This helps me avoid ads unless they are baked into the video. I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
I also like to grab a bunch of content all at once and then watch at my leisure.
If you’re tech-inclined you might like pinchflat or Tube Archivist, which can archive channels/playlists in the background with video metadata automatically, which you can then use with JellyFin.
Need to be comfortable with /c/selfhosted@lemmy.world type setups, however.
I run a Plex server for my movie and television library. I just watch YT videos once and delete them, mostly in the background while I do other things. But I’ll look into both tools regardless because automation is always interesting to me. Thanks for the tips!
If you use yt-dlp you can save your subscriptions in a text file and download all their latest vids on a schedule.
Easy enough ChatGPT can write you this script and you may also find examples online.
If not directly useful for you, i am also putting this down for others. Do not let a monopoly dictate what is “the normal way” to do things.
mpv youtube-URL works just fine without even loading the crappy scripts to show a banner like that. Manage your subscriptions with a RSS feeder and you don’t need an account to follow creators.
Get a cheap (Argentina, Egypt, Ghana, India, Ecuador) premium… There are dozens of instructions on how to get it through a VPN.
Nah. I’m just gonna steal it all for free. Thanks, tho.
Wait yt premium has different rates in different countries? Anyway hosting a free to use service like youtube cost a ton in storage and bandwidth, contrary to nebula. I would rather support it as it doesn’t do DRM and other too much user hostile stuffs (I’m using free software clients for long time, no issue. I’ll continue after premium too as official client isn’t that good). But ofc first I would like to know actual budget and ad money cash flow to see if it needs help really or just a marketing tactic to pump up revenue in typical corporate fashion.
Anybody has such income-expense data source for youtube?
A lot of companies have regional pricing. Some regions jist have way lower buying power and as such cannot afford 60$ games as it can be quite a significant sum of their income as compared to us.
Pretty sure this doesn’t work anymore. They stopped it a few months back.
YouTube is canceling accounts in other countries in waves at the moment. My account in Vietnam (I live in Germany) will also be canceled in mid-January 2025. I would have to add a Vietnamese credit card, which would be a bit much work for me.
It works for me! I have a german account with YouTube family prem sub through Peru.
Running yt in browser is so inefficient. So in in its native app.
This again?
Good joke, YouTube.
Ah yes, but what about the violation to our time where we’ve had to sit through 30 second ~ 2 minute ads of over-dramatized ways for shitty companies to get us to buy shit we don’t want and subscribe to services we don’t need? What about those violations and those violations happen more frequently than us blocking your ads? The hell with you.
Nobody forces you to watch YouTube.
Psssst don’t anger the anti-corpo-crew.
Who cares. These of people are YouTube addicts. Just stop using it, if you find it so unbearable.
No, I’m just going to adblock harder.
Good for you if it works.
Oh I totally agree with you, I was just making fun of the downvotes coming from hypocrites who don’t want to abandon their favorite megacorp but instead cry a river about ads.
Now I hate ads like the next guy, but either I find a way to block them, or I move on.
Same here. These people are literally unable to vote with their wallet, not even metaphorically.
Well, then don’t go on YouTube, or use peer tube. You are trading 30 seconds of your time for:
- creators making the thing you so desperately want to watch
- disk space to store it
- bandwidth to send it around the world
- compute to transcode it and process it
- real estate and security for the premises
- power for the datacenter
- ac to cool the servers
- wages of workers to maintain that whole infrastructure
- wages of devs for the app
- yes, profits for the company
Of course, you can decide to not pay and steal it instead, just don’t act like you are morally entitled to do it.
blocking ads is not stealing
Is using up resources without paying for it. It’s stealing by any definition.
who do you pay for all the oxygen you use up?
Oxygen is not produced by workers. Electricity, bandwidth, storage, security, software, video content are all produced by workers.
For a commie you are quite unaware of the means of production…
seems like you aren’t aware of communist opposition to private property.
Wages have nothing to do with property.
watching ads doesn’t transfer money to YouTube. not stealing.
Watching ads absolutely does transfer money to YouTube, how do you think Google exists??
It’s astonishing how naive (or obtuse) people can be.
advertisers pay google. I don’t pay google by watching ads.
Advertisers pay Google when your watch ads. Goole pays the creators (and utilities, and rent, and employees, and…). By not watching ads, all those people are not getting paid, hence you are stealing.
There’s a very simple solution to this, and I’m honestly not quite sure why no one is doing it.
Make ads voluntary. Make them separate from the rest of the experience.
Make it so that you can watch ads and answer surveys based off of the ads in order to get credits which then allow you to watch videos.
Alternatively, make it so that you can purchase the credits out right.
Everyone fucking wins.
I don’t know why people are so stupid as to not even contemplate the easiest and most satisfying solution to all of the problems.
Your last suggestion is basically what YouTube premium offers. I don’t think I would personally watch ads voluntarily, but I’ve seen similar systems in some games. Smite (at least used to) let you watch ads to get gems that you can use to buy cosmetics.
Still working here, you can try clearing ubo’s cache to see if it goes away.
Looks like google needs more broken up!
Mine’s different:
You use Arch, btw
I kinda miss when places would host their own videos instead of relying on youtube, but that’s the problem of a centralized internet, the majority of people won’t want to leave yt/ig/fb/tiktok/twitter/reddit in order to watch or read whatever you posted.
People don’t want to deal with the heavy costs and load of hosting their own content. That’s unfortunately the sacrifice. Google is big enough to house it all, whereas, we’d probably see content from a creator last for a finite amount of time before they end up having to close up shop or beg for donations.
Beg for donations? How is being paid for your work “begging”?
As you said, hosting video is not only complicated but just fucking expensive, that’s why people don’t do it themselves. Google pays for it via ads/premium, not by magic pixie dust.
Let’s help grow Peertube, then.
Also said-hosted video often has really shitty players.
Use YouTube Kids.
