44 replies
1d2h
"Self-hosted" ... on something that very much used to be a fairly simple desktop app... JDownloader anyone? Or yt-dlp ????
30 replies
23h50m
I don't understand one thing...why do you need to host it on a server? It can be just a standalone app on windows/Linux/mac. I recently just started using yt-dlp and have thought of making a simple app. Should I though? Are there any alternatives in existence of this kind?
6 replies
23h25m
you host it on the server which has a raid array and is/gets backedup vs a laptop that could get stolen or lost. the point is to have a copy of the videos that can't be deleted/lost so having that on a loseable laptop wouldn't satisfy that requirement
4 replies
22h39m
You don’t back up the data from your laptop to external media? :S
1 replies
22h28m
Not the GP but for me personally, no, never. I only sync a couple of text files which I update and reference regularly enough to need them to be synced across machines constantly.
I don't really understand HN's seeming aversion to having a headless server that handles centralized tasks like downloading, storing, and serving files. It's a great model for personal computing with a ton of upsides. As far as I'm concerned all storage on my laptop is totally disposable, and I should be able to wipe and reinstall everything quickly without loss of important data.
0 replies
21h5m
I back up the data on my laptop daily to rotating backup disks + there's a local server for git and some other stuff. So yeah, storage on my laptop is disposable. Which I test whenever I get a new one: restore from backup. Works.
1 replies
19h18m
Where to? Some sort of server? where you could run some sort of software that would organizeand catalogue your files in a more readily usable format than digging into a laptop backup archive?
0 replies
11h7m
Depends on your setup. Usually the easiest thing to do is to have an external drive that you connect with USB and backup the files to
0 replies
22h36m
Can't you just sync / backup your files?
4 replies
23h44m
What, like Stacher?
1 replies
23h33m
Or Seal for Android: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
0 replies
12h55m
This is a very neat implementation! Exactly what I was thinking. I'm gonna try it out. Thanks for the suggestion!
0 replies
12h56m
This looks like a good implementation. But I have to go to my desktop to explore more
0 replies
19h20m
> Stacher is a Desktop App Come Back on your PC/Laptop!
That is terrible UX. I can't even read about it on a mobile device? Maybe I'll check back next time I'm at a desk, likely I won't.
4 replies
20h5m
A server is just a computer. You could run this software on the computer in front of you, or a computer in a datacentre. Either is fine.
2 replies
19h37m
Yeah, but why mess with port numbers when you can just run it as a standalone process?
1 replies
19h25m
Because you might want to share it with other people or even your own other devices on the same network
0 replies
7h12m
Well, you can do so by using e.g. VNC.
One nice part is that you can use the same setup for everything and you don't have to play the sysadmin role all the time for every app.
0 replies
18h24m
The question then becomes why not just ssh into that computer or whatever and just use yt-dlp on a terminal on it instead of a javascript wrapper around it.
4 replies
19h14m
yt-dlp is not even necessary. If just downloading videos from YouTube this can be done with much less code and complexity. I use a tiny C program to do it. Tiny shell scripts work just as well.
What no one is discussing is that yt-dlp can no longer download itag 22 and itag 18 is now throttled.^1 This means yt-dlp has to download an audio file and a video file and use ffmpeg to merge the two.
YouTube ad revenue just missed consensus estimates. Perhaps the accessibility of videos on YouTube is going to get even worse.
1. One will not likely notice this unless one is in the habit of specifically choosing format. For example, some folks have used itag 18 and 22 exclusively for many years.
1 replies
18h57m
> yt-dlp can no longer download itag 22 and itag 18 is now throttled. This means yt-dlp has to download an audio file and a video file and use ffmpeg to merge the two.
I found yt-dlp did that more often than not anyway, if left to its own devices on choosing which formats to pick. Though I had noticed it doing that pretty much always recently.
> Perhaps the accessibility of videos on YouTube is going to get even worse.
I think that has started to happen. I've had a few occurrences recently where it tries to get a particular format and fails, so I've had to manually request something else.
They also seem to have started screening non-residential/office/similar connections more aggressively too, two external hosts of mine now get a message to the effect "login to prove you aren't a bot" when yt-dlp tries to pick something up, and I've seen people note that they have trouble with YouTube proper (without logging in) over some VPN services.
0 replies
18h19m
I found yt-dlp did that more often than not anyway
Yes, the default setting is to d/l and mux the highest available quality video and audio.
0 replies
12h49m
I also realised the same thing yesterday. I tried using a specific tag quality, for a playlist and many of the videos failed to download. So, I just set it to download the best available quality for video and audio.
0 replies
12h35m
This has been the case for a while now. It may be temporary. Time will tell. Not being a video codec nerd, I do not find that itag 136 is any better than itag 22. Files are about the same size. But 136 needs separate audio file which creates need for ffmpeg and, generally, more temporary storage space.
1 replies
20h12m
you can ask that about so many things nowadays
why must the majority of software be provided as-a-Service? whatever happened to good old fashioned products??
0 replies
16h13m
shareware model didn't really work out, or did you finally buy winrar?
1 replies
19h6m
> why do you need to host it on a server? It can be just a standalone app
Your Windows/Linux/OSX device, or a VM or container on it, can be the server if you wish. This way the creators don't need to make two UXs (web for the server, native for the other).
A lot of people run thier self-hosted apps on an external server or home lab (or mix/multiple) with those resources being "properly" setup as infrastructure with backups and such, using their PCs/laptops/tablets/phones as relatively dumb clients/caches that can be easily replaced (pulling local content back from the server the old devices synced to) if lost/damaged. This is one reason self-housing that way is popular.
> using yt-dlp and have thought of making a simple app
I've seen a few desktop apps that seem to be wrappers around yt-dlp (and/or other similar utilities). I've not used any of them so can't comment on their stability/reliability/other, but I'd do a search before writing your own from scratch (unless you want to do that for fun anyway!) as you might find what you want already exists.
0 replies
9h57m
it also neatly integrates into easy-to-use things like runtipi. I have it on my spare home server, running a tandoor instance, invidious and metube for watching stuff later/offline.
1 replies
18h56m
You might want to download the videos to a NAS or home server and store them there, instead on the device you're on at the moment.
A dockerized web app is also much easier to build and maintain, than desktop clients for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and so on.
0 replies
14h14m
yt-dlp already exists, though, and conveniently, someone else packages and builds it for you already. Why are we boiling the ocean to download videos?
0 replies
23h31m
Celluloid streams using yt-dlp automatically if you ask it to open a supported URL. Parabolic is a purpose-made downloader that uses yt-dlp.
https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.celluloid_player....
0 replies
23h27m
Freetube is another one.
24 replies
19h21m
What I’d really like is a YouTube TiVo.
There are about 100 channels that I watch religiously, but, release infrequently. I never want to miss a video from these channels.
I also don’t want to open YouTube and sift through hundreds of releases from channels that release four times/day just to find the 1-2 videos that I actually want to watch (and will inevitably miss.)
Just give me a priority feed of the stuff I actually want/need to watch. If I can download everything and watch it over DLNA, even better,
Making sure we don’t miss the things we love isn’t YouTube’s M.O. Keeping the feedbag strapped to our faces while we watch someone stretch a 3 minute video into a 18-22 minute one, is.
13 replies
18h28m
This feels like it's covered by YouTube subscriptions, no? Subscribe to those 100 channels, bookmark your subscriptions page, and presto! You now have a priority feed of the stuff you want to watch and nothing else.
Maybe you just don't want to create an account, which is fine (NewPipe is a great fit), but it's a bit weird to see you say that "making sure we don’t miss the things we love isn’t YouTube’s M.O." when there's an entire page dedicated to a chronologically-sorted list of videos from channels you pick.
7 replies
17h13m
I have hundreds of subs. With no way to create sub tiers the channels putting out multiple releases a day quickly overwhelm the ones with fewer.
4 replies
15h59m
So, you have hundreds of subs but only care about a hundred of them, and that's YouTube's fault?
Why do you subscribe to channels whose content you don't watch?
1 replies
11h22m
I don't have this particular problem, but maybe they want YT to support these creators, even if they don't have time to watch it all.
0 replies
5h16m
maybe they want YT to support these creators
or maybe those creators brings more money to YT...
0 replies
11h21m
Youtube’s fault is that subs get sorted at random and you have to scroll through to see that blue dot. It is hostile to a user by design and will never make pinnable subs or sort/grouping modes.
0 replies
14h14m
He wants to watch them, but doesn't care if he misses any since they put out so much. Compared to the other ones that don't put out much and he never wants to miss.
0 replies
14h36m
Newpipe takes care of this pretty well. You can select what it calls "Channel groups", which would be a feed of a subset of your subscriptions.
0 replies
15h9m
You could use separate Youtube channels for this. Use one to subscribe only to the infrequently releasing channels.
3 replies
17h10m
The problem is if one channel only uploads once a month and another channel uploads twice a day, I will see many videos from the frequent upload channels and might miss the infrequent uploads. If it was just a list of channels with their most recent video I'd see a new thumbnail and know to check that channel for any new videos.
2 replies
15h56m
I just unsubscribe from the spam channel because they're producing too much noise. I don't need content producers like that in my life, and making it less obvious that they're adding mostly noise is just disguising the problem, not solving it.
1 replies
11h14m
Good for you, but that’s not a solution if you have mixed interests, e.g. you want to get daily entertainment content to choose from and content that is deeper than that. You may not need it, but if you can’t do that anyway it’s indistinguishable from coping.
0 replies
4h59m
All I'm saying is that this appears to be an extremely niche use case, and OP's line about YouTube not wanting you to find things from channels you love is over the top. They have a very specific requirement that YouTube hadn't addressed, that's very different than YouTube being designed to prevent you from finding subscriptions.
0 replies
12h14m
Hacker News.
2 replies
19h8m
NewPipe works great for this usecase. Just get rid of the "Default Kiosk" column as content of main page, leave the "What's New" and watch only videos from channels that you subscribe to (on NewPipe, it's not integrated in any way with a Google Account).
0 replies
15h23m
NewPipe is my gateway drug for getting people into sideloading and fdroid. It's such a great app.
If anyone is reading this and doesn't know about NewPipe, it's a google free youtube front end. It's well worth installing.
0 replies
5h6m
Thanks, I'll check it out. Unfortunately, Apple TV support is a requirement as well.
2 replies
19h20m
I believe youtube still uses RSS. Could try using that
1 replies
15h6m
I was just going to suggest this. I don't use Youtube logged in anymore or have any subscriptions, I instead subscribe to any I want to follow via RSS feeds. Any Youtube channel has its own native RSS feed, no third party service required. You could create different lists in your RSS client of choice for your different priorities.
0 replies
14h27m
It's pretty easy - I have the FeedBro chrome extension (there are many RSS clients, that is just one) and a typical youtube RSS entry for a channel lookes like
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC2wdo5v...
that's the channel ID for Cutting Edge Engineering in QLD, Australia (mechanical engineering for life size mining | civil tonka toys)
1 replies
5h34m
I use Invidious for this purpose. Has a priority feed only on subscriptions which is great. I would say it’s not great for discoverability, but if that’s not a use case I’d look at it.
0 replies
5h9m
Will check it out. Thanks.
0 replies
9h36m
You could subscribe separetly to these channels on freetube (desktop) or newpipe(mobile).
0 replies
9h30m
There's the fraidycat extension that I use to do exactly that:
10 replies
18h58m
It's a bit puzzling to me, how many YouTube mirroring tools are available out there. If you're using something like that, what's your reason to download/archive the videos instead of just streaming them from YouTube?
I get that sometimes it's great to archive a video in the case it get's deleted from YouTube, but in my case this very rarely happens. I watch the video and I'm done with it. If I can't re-watch it, this doesn't really matter to me.
3 replies
18h2m
Block YouTube on kid's home network, but give them assess to your locally curated DadTube.
0 replies
7h3m
What’s the state of the art for doing this + accessible via your kids’ iPad?
0 replies
15h13m
Yep, that's what I do.
Not that I would let them anyhow but YouTube starts recommending really trashy stuff when it finds out you're a kid. The tamest of it being stuff like adults playing with toys in a very childish manner.
0 replies
17h35m
That's a very cool use case.
0 replies
18h42m
It's a bit puzzling to me, this guy is wondering why a tool exists and then gives the number one reason why that tool should exist.
Not to mention that sometimes streaming from youtube might not be possible (internet down) or cost prohibitive (mobile plan abroad), or just plain removing those shitty ads.
0 replies
16h5m
If you're using something like that, what's your reason to download/archive the videos instead of just streaming them from YouTube?
For me, the same reason people used VCRs, and I don't mean "copyright infringement" --- saving stuff to watch later or when I don't have an Internet connection, or only a slow one. The majority of what I download only gets watched once and deleted.
0 replies
8h32m
i’m not really a regular user of most of the tools but the few times i have used them it’s because their search gets worse and worse by the day.
at least a dozen times in the past couple of months i’ve searched for videos i’ve previously seen, using almost exact title language the search just wouldn’t give them to me. the vids i did find was only because i ultimately remembered the names of the channels they were on and had to trawl through them directly to find it.
it’s to the point now where it’ll just be easier to grab videos i find interesting and be able to find them later with much less hassle.
for me it wouldn’t be an issue if they hadn’t broken their search so badly.
0 replies
18h47m
> what's your reason to download/archive the videos instead of just streaming them from YouTube?
1. Removal of ads is a pretty big reason for many.
2. As you already note: you can't stream a video again if it or the entire channel has since been taken down due to copyright claim (spurious or otherwise) or other complaint. This may matter a lot more to some people than it does to you, depending on the content they are consuming.
3. Some may be downloading for offline play. You can do this with the official YouTube app too, but not without paying for Premium (which seems exorbitant to me) and still being subject to the takedown problem.
4. Local indexing: if keeping reference to videos for future rewatch or sharing, arranging then in your own structure may be more convenient than maintaining bookmarks to YouTube copies or searching for them each time.
5. Some mix of the above, and likely other reasons I've not considered/remembered.
0 replies
16h12m
Bandwidth usage limits. IF I want to have the same music video playlist over and over, it really eats that up.
0 replies
18h49m
I usually download my own videos, or videos that I need to edit/repurpose.
8 replies
1d1h
Consider also Tube Archivist. If you just want to download a few videos it's overkill, but I use it to archive and index technical channels I like. It can do advanced full text and metadata searches on the transcription/subtitles as well as comments (and title and description). Much better than what alphabet provides, annoyingly.
1 replies
18h28m
I was looking at TubeArchivist. But didn’t like that it required 3 separate containers. Then I found Pinchflat on the selfhosted sub. It works as a single container and was easy deployment. Has been working well.
0 replies
9h38m
That is a super clever name for a youtube downloading tool!
0 replies
23h12m
How does it compare to PeerTube? Would be cool if these instances could be federated, ActivityPub or something similar.
0 replies
1d
I second this. It's great!
0 replies
18h27m
Google will never make it comfortable to use their products in any structured, advanced way as it is super beneficial to the user and gives away way too much control. Google hates that.
0 replies
22h15m
Another option on the home page earlier today:
Yark: YouTube Archiver with Offline UI
0 replies
17h55m
Hard pass.
The file naming is predicated on having the database. For ephemeral storage this is understandable but any software that describes itself as "archival" should assume that it will not outlive the data it is preserving.
I was excited to have a PeerTube clone with download capabilities until I looked at the result. `yt-dlp` and clever configs and scripts will do the archival job properly.
0 replies
22h32m
I've been meaning to migrate to tube archivist forever, but I have several TB of youtube videos I don't want to re-download which I gathered using tubesync. Luckily I have the format string used to save the files by name and since tubesync uses django and a postgres backend I might be able to tie them to the youtube ID. But migration still seems like it might be a bit of a nightmare
5 replies
21h53m
Does there exist a “light weight” YouTube self hosted clone.
Something like plex for YouTube?
I want to auto download videos from my favourite podcasts, but then have a super simple dashboard that shows the videos and lets me watch them.
1 replies
21h42m
Just use plex?
0 replies
21h35m
I have tried but it’s really taxing. A lot of the videos are like daily podcasts or whatever and it’s a battle to get them to import correctly, with correct naming, etc.
1 replies
21h5m
Yep, just add the channels to a text file and itll download them for you and keep them up to date. Put the script into crontab. Zero running processes and only a couple of KB on disk. That's as Lightweight as you can get.
https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
You could have a shortcut or hotkey that reads it from your clipboard and appends.
Just add the destination dir to your media player (or set it to your videos folder) and you're done.
0 replies
21h2m
Wow thank you internet stranger!
0 replies
21h38m
I'd use https://flexget.com + Plex for that
4 replies
20h20m
I wouldn't mind a single program like this that let's you download from all sources: youtube, reddit, ig, twitter, facebook, etc.
2 replies
19h40m
Lets! Not let's! Lets is a form of word let, let's is a contraction of let us. Those are completely different words and are not inrerchangeable
1 replies
9h13m
inrerchangeable
0 replies
5h15m
This is obviously a typo. Which can't be said about deliberately inserting an apostrophe into a word
0 replies
20h13m
Despite the name youtube-dl can download from almost any platform.
2 replies
1d
Pretty cool! I currently use https://cobalt.tools, it's nice as well.
0 replies
23h45m
Great link! Bookmarked
0 replies
21h0m
Perfect! It has option to download original yt audio format without transcoding to mp3.
1 replies
1d1h
Would be nice if there was an interface into Jellyfin so that you could search Youtube, have yt-dlp download, and then stream through Jellyfin without ads.
0 replies
18h28m
That's pretty much what I do, except the yt-dlp step is manual. A Jellyfin plugin would be great.
1 replies
1d
It was pretty straightforward for me to install and use yt-dlp. On a Mac with Homebrew you can do `brew install yt-dlp` to install it in one command. IIRC yt-dlp also provides binaries you can install directly. I'm not sure if installing docker and running a web server is any way easier than that.
However, there are ways to download Youtube videos without installing a native app. For example, it is possible to use a library like Youtube.js [0] to make a browser extension that downloads Youtube videos directly. You won't find those on Google's web store due to policy, but you can find a handful on Github.
0 replies
1d
This project is literally just a UI for yt-dlp. This is for people that want a front end for it.
0 replies
21h48m
I discovered that brave for iOS has a playlist button which downloads YouTube videos and stores them on your device, allowing PiP and offline playback without ads. I wonder why more apps don't do this as they have an open license based off a Mozilla iOS backend. They found a way to get Apple to accept it and their CEO has even posted HERE about it defending their technique as valid. Essentially, it triggers only after loading the video inside the regular YouTube website, like a reader button that works across any video content (not just YouTube).
0 replies
20h40m
I use this to download videos I add to my playlists into our shared Plex server.
Mostly concert videos and skate parts. We have an archive.
0 replies
8h51m
MeTube works really well. There are browser plugins for it too. I supports not only YT, but x.com and (a-hem) other sites too
0 replies
10h35m
really great tool. can it also download the videos that are in members only?
0 replies
11h9m
This is awesome! I’ve been putting off building the same thing myself.
0 replies
19h41m
I think that one of these yt-dlp based servers wrapped in a dead simple PiHole-like imager and some nice front end client apps for playback could really take off in the same way PiHole did with less technical users.
Buy a Raspberry Pi, image the microSD card, select your favorite YT channels, install client apps… all your favorite YT content now available locally and ad free!
0 replies
1d1h
See also yt-dlp-web-ui: https://github.com/marcopeocchi/yt-dlp-web-ui
Not AGPL, support for custom profiles, better UX (IMO)
0 replies
23h28m
I made one similar thing to download music. It kind of worked but I end up giving Spotify a chance.
0 replies
23h49m
I have an ios shortcut I use to "share" a url to metube for background download.
0 replies
21h56m
Why self hosted when you can use something like freetube? So you can access through mobile? I only tend to watch videos one time so this seems like overkill unless you use youtube A LOT and regularly for the same streams.
0 replies
1d1h
0 replies
19h0m
I currently use TubeSync. Despite its simple functionality and many bugs it has, it works well enough for me.
My only task: subscribe to a channel or playlist, download videos to a path and check once a day for new stuff.
The only UX I need is for setting up the channels. Then just save the files and let Plex take it from there.
Anyone knows of a better option?
I totally agree. The idea of running a server application in Docker and then firing up a browser for something like this just seems so... round-about and alien to me! Is this the direction software development is really going?
For a large group of people, the vast majority of their computing and consumption is done apart from a desktop or laptop. Something like this makes perfect sense in a mobile-first world.
My generation dropped the ball on teaching computer literacy
Curious if this is at millennials for not teaching the next generation(s) or at genz/alpha for not teaching themselves.
Ive encountered a shocking amount of 30yr olds that don't own a computer or know how to properly type. I'd say GenZ and Alpha have plenty of computer literacy as laptops were better integrated into education by time they got or will get to high school.
Outside of some AP classes that had their own computer labs most kids in my age group (early 30s) took one computer class in their entire secondary education. I knew one other person in my entire high school that coded.
Hell you can code Python on ti-84s now.
They're all issued Chromebooks and live in a glorified browser and GSuite. There's something of an epidemic of students landing in college CS programs and not knowing how to manage files outside of Google Drive.
Millennials got to use real computers growing up. Gens Z and Alpha got locked down Google appliances tightly monitored by schools.
My kid still cannot really grasp the concept of "things being stored locally on the computer or on the phone vs. things being on the Internet". She doesn't understand why some apps require Internet and others don't. No concept of the boundary between local and network. "What do you mean 'it's stored on the phone'? YouTube is stored on the phone, right?"
I think a lot of this is developers intentionally blurring the line between local and cloud storage. If you were a layman iPhone user, would you be able to confidently tell me which of your photos are stored in iCloud and which are stored on your device? Apple is deliberately obfuscating it.
It is exactly this. I'd like to think it is less developers and more marketing/product manager/bizdev types trying to keep their customers ignorant as a form of lock-in.
When I say "developers" I usually mean the entire development apparatus, including designers, product, and, yes, programmers. They all have agency, all work together to produce the product, and should share the honor and/or blame for their product.
And not even in a "hey, the network is also a filesystem!" sorta transparent way, either. It's an obscure patchwork of half-baked ideas (especially iCloud. To this day, I'm just trusting that I'll be able to do a phone restore, if need be).
It doesn't help that network-transparent storage is _hard_. Before, if you wrote something to storage, there was a preeeeetty good chance it was going to wind up on disk. Yes, yes, disk IO is a dark art that's still probably full of subtle bugs, and there is no God, but generally: file -> disk was, and is, solid.
Now, you have file -> several HTTP round trips -> ope, fiber cut -> hung. And that's just to turn on your living room lights! I've seen networking code that is supposed to provide the same guarantees that the people writing filesystems and disk drivers do, and I can't say it usually succeeds. And people wonder why everything feels more and more broken.
I fully believe this, but that is just bonkerstown to me. I mean, okay, I guess the Plan 9 folks eventually won, I just didn't expect "the computer" to be "Google.com".
Of course, university IS meant to be an introduction to whatever your field is, but those of us with in-depth computer knowledge, even basic knowledge of something like Java, had a much easier time of it.
I don't envy the youths today.
You can't teach a person who doesn't want to learn.
This is aimed directly at millenials; schoolteachers have been sounding the alarm on this for the past 10-15 years.
I think it's a little of: generations being more disconnected than before, cars and other items being more complicated and less easily repairable (remember you used to pop out a battery on your phone), a culture of buying cheap and replacing instead of taking the time, energy, and learning to fix.
I think looking at the prevalance of something like DoorDash delivering fast food to people shows you how strange culture has gotten.
As a millenial, I don't think it's either of our generations. IMO, the issue is just due to the general culture shift from generalized computers being used in the average person's daily life to smartphones becoming sufficient for most people's computing/socializing/shopping needs.
Well, also Chromebooks, which basically take away the opportunity to learn how to really use a computer in favor of only teaching you how to use a laptop to open Chrome.
When everything just works, you don't sit around half a day troubleshooting and having to do so feels exceptionally bad when you didn't spend half your childhood doing it to get your brand new game/graphics card/weird controller to work.
Most of my computer skills were self taught because I wanted to figure out how to do stuff with my computer as a kid without spending money, or how to upgrade my PC while spending as little as possible.
Computers have become generally good enough to be used without much knowledge. Same happened with cars. 30 years ago it was very beneficial to know how your car works. These days you can own and a car without knowing much about it and you will most likely be ok.
It's a pretty expensive way to own a car, though: having to take it to a mechanic in order to maintain or fix things. But you're absolutely right that it's an option today that wasn't really an option 30+ years ago.
Or have a family member (Or trusted person) with enough knowledge to keep you trucking on when things go south, seems to work with both cars and tech
Except this breeds a learned helplessness, and makes every layman beholden to some wizard who knows the Old Wisdom, the right incantations to make the devices we rely on every day even function. It must feel awful to have to go through life at the mercy of tech crap that just doesn't work half the time, and little to no ability to reasonably deal with it.
Besides, so many problems now aren't even fixable by end users. Why? Because all of our computation happens somewhere in the bowels of us-east-1. If your budgeting program breaks on your computer, you might be able to fix it, especially if you have the source. But GET /budgets/123 returning a 500 is the equivalent of saying "pound sand", and you have zero hope of actually fixing the issue. You're at the mercy of some faceless on-call person halfway across the globe, and they're overworked and on their third bourbon of the evening.
while i agree that we might be moving too fast with our “progress” regarding tech, my guess is we’ll get it smoother before we fully move on.
however, don’t confuse helplessness with having better things to do with your time.
for example, we’re not helpless when we turn on a faucet to get water. we’re totally capable of hauling heavy buckets down the hill to the river and hauling heavy pales of water back home, then boiling the water to cook with and then again to take a bath. we just decided it’s a waste of time for every single person to do that for hours every single day. now we just turn a faucet and boom, that’s it. that’s not helpless.
we’re not incapable of hunting and gathering for hours every single day either. we just found a better way. now i can just go to the store grab a bag of chips without needing to grow potatoes for months first.
we’re not helpless, we just decided to be more efficient.
good news is, those who like growing a potato to make their own chips can still absolutely do it. if you’re someone who likes hauling 50 gallons of water by foot everyday from the local river, set up that fire and boil that water to your hearts content.
you may not have been implying it, but a lot of people lately seem to often confuse having different priorities with “helplessness.”
I don't want my acknowledgment to be confused with approval, if you depend on something you should have a reasonable understanding of it
As the family wizard, I expect people to know their passwords, keep track of their mails / services and such (And will refuse to save them / store them, within reason) But even with tech literate people, sometimes they prefer to defer some stuff to me since they trust I'll know what to do I do the same with stuff they are competent in, we are (mostly) better for it
Tell that to anyone who had CrowdStrike's latest rootkit installed on their machine last week.
What a mistake!
Those people don't have servers, docker, and hosting.
Besides that, Invidious has a download button for audio and video.
As far as apps there's very simple mobile apps: Tubular and newpipe both support downloading, and ytdlnis and seal are explicitly for downloading. I'm sure there's a dozen more in F-Droid.
In my experience they do. Do you never use a mobile for browsing/videos/etc?
Nobody that is managing servers, self-hosted services, etc is doing it primarily from mobile.
There's already a mobile application for downloading from YouTube, NewPipe. It's a simple desktop app, except that your desktop is a phone. Nobody hosts anything.
It's not the most elegant, but for cross platform, a web app and container are the easiest UI and deployment methods.
So what’s the actual goal?
- easy to deploy (developers problem) - easy to use (everybody else’s problem)
There’s like ~1 dev and >x.000’s of users, so…
I see that a lot in the stuff our interns produce. Instead of a simple command line too they often create a node server you need to post your requests to. This may somehow have some advantages but it makes building scripts or pipelines much harder than it should be.
Kinda sucks but freetube doesn’t work well with wayland or touchscreen, so I may give this a go in desperation.
I normally would agree, but there are some use cases I was not aware of until more recently. Unraid server may be a good example here. In that case, docker for a self-hosted instance works well for most purposes AND can be accessed by less technically minded family members depending on what you actually use.
FWIW, I agree with you that it probably should not be the default.
and then your laptop gets stolen/lost and the video is deleted from YouTube. maybe some people want an archive that's theirs that won't be deleted it edited?
Not sure what this has to do with anything, external and backup drives are cheap and cloud storage is even more cheap.
Even more cheap? I have to disagree: every time I've looked, purchasing your own backup drives outright always appears to be much cheaper than subscribing to cloud storage. Cloud storage has its advantages of course, but sheer cost savings per TB I don't think is one of them.
Times my laptop has been stolen: 0. Times a video I like has disappeared from YouTube: 10,000-ish. Offsite backups: priceless.
Could I use this hypothetical desktop app from my desktop, my other desktop, my mobile phone, my wife's mobile phone, and the Chromecast on my media center?
Depends, do you know how to use Remote Desktop? There are RDP or VNC clients for all of the above.
Sure. But I think using a web page is a much nicer solution than getting a remote desktop stuffed onto my phone screen and trying to use a desktop-native app that way.
Desktop applications never worked on phones, mostly because Google and Apple want you using their own version of what used to be called "programs". Of course, if you need to download YouTube videos on every device you own and the toaster, then sure, maybe don't use yt-dlp. But, ya know, I'd wager that most people don't need to do that.
I'd be excited to have this on a NAS. Something in a container makes it easy and I can direct it to save in a directory that has Plex or something like that.
+1 for me. As a yt premium sub, I still think it'd be great if I could just pick a channel and have a recurring check to see if new content is up and to just dump them into a folder which my video player can show to avoid needing to open the app all the time. It'd work for my consumption uses better than relying on the sometimes great, sometimes terrible algorithm to surface the content I want to watch.
It is yt-dlp under the hood.
or just use freetube?