Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos..
Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.
> how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos
The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.
YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.
A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.
I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.
Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.
You said it yourself - it'd be nice if YouTube stopped and thought about what it could be doing differently to not drive as many people towards things like this. As I said elsewhere, the root cause isn't the people developing these frontends, it's the fact that the existing official frontend leaves users wanting something else.
so, essentially, what you are saying is that yt-dlp should have never been open-sourced/published and ever posted on HN (so that not even you would have found out about it)?
No no. He’s saying that only people with his exact amount of technical skill and prowess deserves yt-dlp. If you for some reason are not knowledgable about cli tools, then that is the exact, natural, universal, god given reason that you do not deserve yt-dlp.
In order to ensure that not too many people learn about yt-dlp, we should also work to remove all access to knowledge about the magical super big brain requiring, mytical command line.
In fact to ensure that Google does not kill yt-dlp, everyone in the world except tracerbulletx should be force fed chemical powder that makes them stupid.
That way, only tracerbulletx will understand yt-dlp, and he can heroically guard this super secret tool that only those worthy deserves to know.
Seeing how people still seem to find a way to get the raw video data from the big paid streaming services (e.g. netflix), and the likes of bluray, I feel you are right.
Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.
My take is: its either there with all of its features and popularity or its not. The argument that it will be taken down if its more popular seems to me fundamenally wrong.
I mean, the root of the problem is that there is essentially only one "Youtube" that isn't a public service. Not sure if you make this better by leaning into it or not.
the desire is already there. they've testing DRM for videos as we speak. this cat and mouse game will never end until google creates some anti-cheat with kernel permissions to attest anti-tamper
Not sure it was ever youtubes desire to shut it down. Why would they, as there are a multitude of reasons why someone would want a video off a platform. It was the RIAA's, since there the ones who sent the takedown.
This year AlphaGoogle has an initiative to kill ad-blockers. To that end, Youtube now aborts playback after 60 seconds if it cannot contact its ad server to play commercials.
It's clear where this is heading:
1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos
2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams
If they shut down yt-dlp for good, a lot of power users and creators would find the YouTube platform useless for themselves and abandon it en masse for its nearest competitor. A tool like yt-dlp is very much required if you want to engage professionally with that kind of community. Even something as trivial as making a well-produced "video reaction" relies on it.
Yes, YT has good monetization, but it still pays peanuts to the average creator. So the competitive threat is very real - superstars alone wouldn't be enough to make for a really compelling platform.
> lot of power users and creators would find the YouTube platform useless for themselves and abandon it en masse for its nearest competitor.
Not so sure, since everything is monetized nowadays (YouTuber make video to earn money) and the audience is there, i don't see how they could move anywhere.
A question for the author or anyone else who has experience in similar solutions.
Is there any good solution for discovering new content? Much of the time, I want to stick to my subscriptions, but I do enjoy content surfaced by the algorithm at least once weekly, sometimes more often. My concern in taking my viewing off-platform is twofold: 1) going to YouTube will prompt me with all the stuff I've already watched off platform, and 2) any changes to my viewing habits won't be reflected in algorithmic suggestions.
Am I making any bad assumptions or missing anything that would be useful?
As an example, I usually get conference presentations surfaced for me, but I don't track conferences to know when I should go looking for presentations. YouTube is good at surfacing these for me.
I view Discovery as a social problem where the content you want is almost always clustered between a relatively small number of creators, regions, etc.
Technically it then becomes less of an indexing everything problem and more of a find a few cornerstone creators, say Khan academy, and occasionally branching out.
So to answer your question I don’t thing the cost/benefit for automating discovery is much better then spending 20 minutes and finding enough cornerstones to fill you for 100+ hours of content. Or similarly finding a social group like an rss feed, say in ios development it would be fatbobman, and sourcing it from there.
Time to source content isn’t the bottleneck worthy of software solutions, yet for monetization reasons discovery is the vice grip of social media and made to be the most important thing.
There’s a lot of truth to this but one of the most powerful elements of a discovery algorithm is finding things you completely did not look for, ie Christopher Columbus and the western continents. Like your cornerstones are iOS and recipe videos but you discover the right dance video and it changes your whole life.
If you were to have something local build you an algorithm, what signal would you want it to consume and how far from the median would you want it to deviate? Would you want it to use signal from online socials?
I looked into this as well since I find the YouTube algorithm terrible, but couldn’t find any API for exploration. Which makes sense they want to control what you watch and hence monetize. In a perfect world you could just pick an open source recommendation algorithm from a marketplace and YouTube would just be a wrapper around s3 buckets and some index.
I am almost a month into having a Perplexity subscription and I am not sure I can not have a deep research subscription at this point.
I have found youtube videos this month that I don't know how I would have found otherwise that were just part of the sources for what deep research came back with.
It has really created the opposite problem for me is I have so much good information I don't even know what to do with it right now. I am probably taking a month off to just sort through what I found this past month.
I've been using Unhook[0] for years that it's almost a jumpscare for me to see a recommended video or the Youtube homepage. Your social circles and natural serendipity should be plenty for finding new creators. And in general, avoiding algorithmic feeds will help with ADHD and mindless scrolling.
I use a Firefox profile to watch specific videos while logged-out just for the focused recommendations.
I've also noticed that I getting more recommendations for small creators with little to no views/subs when I'm browsing from a smaller, developing country.
I readily follow youtube links offered on HN discussions. If anything, I could use more of these.
But otherwise I agree with your concern. Video recommendations on youtube was far from perfect (very repetitive in my experience), but was uncovering useful stuff.
good question. I don't think I have a definitive answer but I'll try:
- pure luck. sometimes I discover a channel/creator/blog by pure accident, I'm an avid rss reader and HN adept so content comes to me naturally, so to speak.
- following a feed (be it a website's rss feed, reddit/YouTube) sometimes made me discover related feeds, simply because someone wrote about a cool project a peer made and links their YouTube/github/blog
Can you make either a hub.docker or ghcr.io premade image so that people can just pull the image and run it and automate the updates? Its pretty standard practice in the self hosting world and if you don't do it a lot of people will not install it. People have 40-50 odd services installed, managing it via git updates just isn't going to happen.
We built Videocrawl [1] to enhance the learning and watching experience using LLMs. It handles the usual tasks like clean transcript extraction, summarization, and chat-based interaction with videos. However, we go a step further by analyzing frames to extract code snippets, references, sources, and more.
You can try it out by watching a video on Videocrawl, such as the OpenAI Agent video, by following this link [2]. LLMs have the potential to significantly improve how we learn from and engage with videos.
What I've wanted for a while now is a browser extension that adds a button on youtube video pages, where you click on it and it does yt-dlp downloading but saves it to something like ipfs and posts it to some free video site for indexing.
Basically, there should be a video indexing/search/discovery protocol (don't care if it's still http) where random people can submit metadata and a link to a distributed content-addressable system like ipfs. Alternatives to youtube,tiktok,etc.. even platforms like Bluesky can make use of this. Popular videos get more "seeds"/"mirrors" this way. The biggest problem is getting enough interesting content, so the browser extension helps with that, you just click "share in <insert platform name>" and you have it locally available as well as available on any of your other devices, and now others can see the content without having to use yt.
pirating who? I actually don't know who holds the copywrite to youtube videos. I assume the creators do, and that a lot of them would be happy to have their videos shared. It's google that wants suck the value out of the creations for themselves.
it's piracy when you share it with others, it can default to act as your personal cloud. It is dropbox/onedrive/gdrive except optionally searchable/shared/indexable by the public or a group of people (those legit services already allow public sharing of arbitrary data).
What I'd like is essentially a user-controlled caching layer for everything. When you view a webpage or video or something you are fully downloading all of that data, you might as well optimistically write it to a local cache. Then a browser extension could be made that says "save this version" which tells the caching layer to add a tag to all of the assets that were downloaded in this page view. It would create a tag that means all of those assets aren't garbage collected from your local cache and you retain your copy forever.
Super-charging this idea with IPFS is even better. Essentially a collective Internet Archive will be created with every version of every page someone has decided they are interested in, for whatever reason.
This kind of thing would be perfectly feasible with the web as it was designed, which was designed with caching in mind.
But, of course, big corporations like Google will fight hard to stop such a thing happening because they don't want you in control. They want to be in control. They hate peer to peer technologies because they can't control them.
I built the same thing a few years back [0], and used the YouTube API for searching. It was fun on the building part.
For hosting, though, I picked Heroku, and they kept removing my deployment because I downloaded ytdlp on it! I ended up deploying it on my own server to make it work.
I use the "unhook" extension which let's you remove recommendations, set your youtube home page to your subscriptions (chronologically ordered videos), block shorts and more (you can cherrypick the features you want). Highly recommended. I would have paid for youtube premium if I was given these options, honestly.
They are constantly testing pushing other things into the subscription box.
What I want is it to only show me videos. Now, it also shows shorts, and also now “community posts” which are frequently just self-promotion and useless polls that drive engagement. I’ve started unsubscribing from anyone that uses those features too much. I want videos not “check out my twitch channel” and “want more merch? Check out my merch! Also this is a poll so that you will click it”
One channel I follow got some new “comments from the community” kind of feature, and suddenly posts from anyone on YouTube were showing up in my sub box because they also subscribed to the same creator. All of the posts were image posts that were blatantly rule breaking spam, or comments like “why is this a feature”. None of them were from anyone I intentionally followed. Literally just random internet comments as a huge section in my sub-box. I instantly unsubscribed.
YouTube REALLY wants to shove other content into the “subscription box” because as-is it lets you avoid all the algorithmic clickbait.
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Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.
The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.
YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.
A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.
I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.
Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.
In order to ensure that not too many people learn about yt-dlp, we should also work to remove all access to knowledge about the magical super big brain requiring, mytical command line.
In fact to ensure that Google does not kill yt-dlp, everyone in the world except tracerbulletx should be force fed chemical powder that makes them stupid.
That way, only tracerbulletx will understand yt-dlp, and he can heroically guard this super secret tool that only those worthy deserves to know.
But if they were, they probably would agree that it never should have been posted to HN, not even the first time they saw it on HN.
Not publishing at all would obviously be incorrect. You know they're not saying that.
Dead Comment
Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
It's clear where this is heading:
1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos
2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams
Both will come to pass. It's not 'if' but 'when'
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Yes, YT has good monetization, but it still pays peanuts to the average creator. So the competitive threat is very real - superstars alone wouldn't be enough to make for a really compelling platform.
Not so sure, since everything is monetized nowadays (YouTuber make video to earn money) and the audience is there, i don't see how they could move anywhere.
Is there any good solution for discovering new content? Much of the time, I want to stick to my subscriptions, but I do enjoy content surfaced by the algorithm at least once weekly, sometimes more often. My concern in taking my viewing off-platform is twofold: 1) going to YouTube will prompt me with all the stuff I've already watched off platform, and 2) any changes to my viewing habits won't be reflected in algorithmic suggestions.
Am I making any bad assumptions or missing anything that would be useful?
As an example, I usually get conference presentations surfaced for me, but I don't track conferences to know when I should go looking for presentations. YouTube is good at surfacing these for me.
Technically it then becomes less of an indexing everything problem and more of a find a few cornerstone creators, say Khan academy, and occasionally branching out.
So to answer your question I don’t thing the cost/benefit for automating discovery is much better then spending 20 minutes and finding enough cornerstones to fill you for 100+ hours of content. Or similarly finding a social group like an rss feed, say in ios development it would be fatbobman, and sourcing it from there.
Time to source content isn’t the bottleneck worthy of software solutions, yet for monetization reasons discovery is the vice grip of social media and made to be the most important thing.
As a first step, a page showing recent youtube links from HN would be nice!
Instead of just clicking the video I click share and watch on the unofficial with no ads.
I have found youtube videos this month that I don't know how I would have found otherwise that were just part of the sources for what deep research came back with.
It has really created the opposite problem for me is I have so much good information I don't even know what to do with it right now. I am probably taking a month off to just sort through what I found this past month.
[0] https://unhook.app/
I've also noticed that I getting more recommendations for small creators with little to no views/subs when I'm browsing from a smaller, developing country.
But otherwise I agree with your concern. Video recommendations on youtube was far from perfect (very repetitive in my experience), but was uncovering useful stuff.
- pure luck. sometimes I discover a channel/creator/blog by pure accident, I'm an avid rss reader and HN adept so content comes to me naturally, so to speak.
- following a feed (be it a website's rss feed, reddit/YouTube) sometimes made me discover related feeds, simply because someone wrote about a cool project a peer made and links their YouTube/github/blog
You can try it out by watching a video on Videocrawl, such as the OpenAI Agent video, by following this link [2]. LLMs have the potential to significantly improve how we learn from and engage with videos.
1. https://www.videocrawl.dev/ 2. https://www.videocrawl.dev/studio?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yout...
Basically, there should be a video indexing/search/discovery protocol (don't care if it's still http) where random people can submit metadata and a link to a distributed content-addressable system like ipfs. Alternatives to youtube,tiktok,etc.. even platforms like Bluesky can make use of this. Popular videos get more "seeds"/"mirrors" this way. The biggest problem is getting enough interesting content, so the browser extension helps with that, you just click "share in <insert platform name>" and you have it locally available as well as available on any of your other devices, and now others can see the content without having to use yt.
Super-charging this idea with IPFS is even better. Essentially a collective Internet Archive will be created with every version of every page someone has decided they are interested in, for whatever reason.
This kind of thing would be perfectly feasible with the web as it was designed, which was designed with caching in mind.
But, of course, big corporations like Google will fight hard to stop such a thing happening because they don't want you in control. They want to be in control. They hate peer to peer technologies because they can't control them.
For hosting, though, I picked Heroku, and they kept removing my deployment because I downloaded ytdlp on it! I ended up deploying it on my own server to make it work.
[0]: https://github.com/huytd/xaudio
[0]: https://github.com/christian-fei
The 'Subscriptions' link at the top left of the Youtube home page only shows the things you subscribed to, just bookmark that.
What I want is it to only show me videos. Now, it also shows shorts, and also now “community posts” which are frequently just self-promotion and useless polls that drive engagement. I’ve started unsubscribing from anyone that uses those features too much. I want videos not “check out my twitch channel” and “want more merch? Check out my merch! Also this is a poll so that you will click it”
One channel I follow got some new “comments from the community” kind of feature, and suddenly posts from anyone on YouTube were showing up in my sub box because they also subscribed to the same creator. All of the posts were image posts that were blatantly rule breaking spam, or comments like “why is this a feature”. None of them were from anyone I intentionally followed. Literally just random internet comments as a huge section in my sub-box. I instantly unsubscribed.
YouTube REALLY wants to shove other content into the “subscription box” because as-is it lets you avoid all the algorithmic clickbait.