Aha I’m not crazy! There was about a week where YouTube videos were so slow and we mainly use SmartTube on the shield TV, the fucked up part is I pay for YouTube premium, I just like the UI and options available on SmartTube better then the default app.
It did seem to get better, so maybe they realized I fucking pay for this service.
Or it was just a weird network issue. A week is a long time, though.
Very good news!!
Is it possible to post the same video both to youtube and peertube without trouble? I wonder if this is prohibited cause I think many creators would mirror their content to peertube if they could.
I have no issues at all, once a vid is running. Choosing a vid takes much longer these days though, because the goddam stupid fucking algorhythm serves up 95% slop these days. Already viewed vids, ones expressly blocked, “news” stories that are YEARS old, or those in weird foreign languages, make up most of the garbage I get offered…
Sample size one but I’m on Fedora with Firefox and uBlock. Not seeing any issues yet.
I’m on Android w/ PipePipe & GrayJay and have been experiencing issues with videos loading a little then buffering for like 5 minutes
Same, using CleanTube.
Same setup, same results. I do intentionally keep the resolution low though.
Same with Piped. Pinchflat downloads it so even if it were throttled when it fetches, it will play at local speeds
Same on FireDragon with Garuda.
ublockorigin etc… 5 second unnecessary delay, very annoying . that’s my experience
Remember when videos would buffer all the time on non-chrome browsers lol
Freetube works pretty well, there’s a cat and mouse game with youtube changes though.
A wild YouTube appeared!
Go, uBlock Origin!
Wild YouTube used Throttle!
It’s not very effective…
uBlock Origin used Evolve!
It’s super effective!
YouTube fainted!
This made me laugh. I wonder which one will prevail in the end
Piracy always prevails
Yeah they are, I noticed it get really, really bad this week. It’s an awful experience. But they’ll leave my browser before my adblocker does.
100%. Half the time I get blocked due to VPN or whatever I just close the tab and go with my life. The rest of the time I try all known workarounds. If those fail, I just go with my life.
My hatred for monopolisation and enshittification is stronger than my desire to watch content on any platform.
So say we all.
So say we all.
Lol, this is exactly why I use Lemmy. Sure there might be less engagement than reddit. But I’d rather gargle a bucket of diarrhea than go back to that shitty place.
Amen.
The thing is, their anti-adblocking measures are still less unpleasant than actually watching ads.
Same. When I opened the Stats for Nerds pop-up, I noticed that I was being throttled to 1500kbps. Anything above 720p was unplayable this week.
But apparently the Ublock Origin devs yet again figured out another workaround, because streaming speeds are back to normal for me as of yesterday.
just use invidious instead
It’s not perfect, but I use grayjay. They have an android app and a desktop client, and are usually pretty quick to make updates that will sidestep Google’s anti-adblocking measures (within 1-2 days.) Again, not perfect, but I don’t mind a slightly worse experience to avoid having to see an ad. Plus it has sponsor block support built right in
This is also a good beginner way to learn about self hosting in docker.
Freetube can make a great backup for when google inevitably breaks something.
And for thise videos you really cant miss there is always yt-dlp scripted to download a channels latests video on a schedule straight to jellyfin of course.
I have not visited the youtube website in more then a year.
This doesn’t seem very straightforward…
it’s like lemmy: you choose an instance, make an account, import your subscriptions from YouTube and done. you can watch all channels from there
So it’s not very straight forward lol?
for us it is ;)
Sadly, most of the instances seem to be completely nonfunctional. Nadeko.net seemed to be the only one working for months.
yehh it’s been a while since i used it and my instance seems to be down too…
Ok, so there are hosted instances? At face value this looks like you need to self host. Which I am more than capable of both in terms of equipment and experience. I just don’t want to go that far to watch youtube. Thanks for explaining.
not many but there are
So it’s wait a few seconds and watch a black screen or watch a minute of ads? What a choice…
I watched videos on Newgrounds using dial-up
They are going to have to slow ad blockers by a lot for me to consider it slow
My wife and I were discussing this. This isnt “slow” to us, its just a tiny bit inconvenient. We were used to the old AOL pictures taking a good minute or two to load.
We would get rid of Youtube before we get ads.
Ahh seeing images load line-by-line and you get excited as you can actually start to tell what the image is!
“Finally, a nipple!”
So this is it. The enshittification has reached slowlorris levels.
I’m finding I’m using youtube less and less that I can’t actually remember the last time I used it for anything. Youtube has so much crap now.
Because of their monetisation scheme for content creators, it was profitable for creators to drag 15 mins of information out to one hour, and then to include shock faces as thumbs to get more clicks, and then to get more viewers just to watch a bit of the video as viewership dwindles into just mindlessly watching suggestions.
I feel sorry for those creators who have gone balls deep with youtube content and who have no “plan b”.
I think that says more about the channels you watch and your viewing habits. I enjoy STEM and STEM related channels; I don’t experience the same as what you’ve described.
I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they’re likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but…I’m sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
Nah. How would you crack down a program that just play the videos in the background and then just capture the content while it’s played?
Just queue up a bunch of vidoe you wanna watch, and let the program just essentially screen record it.
Well if you say “DRM”? Well we could share it to a display that itself is hacked and record all the signals.
Unless they are doing proctoring as if it were a test, there will always be some way to circumvent it.
Hmm, but in this case you would be recording either the ads or the buffering.
I’m so used to the sponsorship thing that I just instinctively tap/click the right side of the screen a few times to skip it.
(As for why I don’t use sponsorblock: I don’t block them because I wanna take a few seconds to take a peak into the sponsor segment to make sure they don’t have very evil sponsors like ahem “Betterhelp” (I don’t trust someone that still have that as a sponsor in 2025)
Edit: Also, I’m pretry sure someone will build a locally run AI model that can detect the ads/buffering and cut it out. “AI” might not give you true information in terms of search results, but pattern recognition is like its main job, right?
Imagine adblock re-rencoding software that picks mp4s clean based on repeated content(ads). The user could select each ad as they happen, mark them as such and let it identify them from there. Imagine sharable or federated caches of these ad records between users.
Someone who can code, please, imagine it.
What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already…
Cause all you need is your imagination!
And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie
Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I’m that level of anal
I’m not really following video DRM, but my understanding is that Widevine won’t run in a VM with a virtualized video card like that.
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It’ll be a UX hit, so it’ll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can’t stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don’t require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
can’t stop us from HDMI capturing
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
it’s not hard to do it yourself either
How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I’ve never looked into this.
Open PassDCP software is one method, or you can obtain a splitter that strips hdcp
strip out the HDCP
Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn’t kept up with what was actually around.
But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you’ll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.
We’ll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven’t made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.
It’s certainly not an ideal solution, but it’s an option that will usually work.
They aren’t fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
I break HDCP right now. Those keys have been leaked for AGES. $10 amazon HDMI copy in between your videocard and the capture.
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
I’d just hop a vps around to different countries.
…I’d never do it here, admins, honest lol
theoretically anything is possible so what
Right. At the end of the bullshit, the content still plays to completion if the user hits play. We can script and Ai and remove ads all day long after a program snags the feed.
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it’s an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I’m quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven’t seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they’re working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn’t work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It’s also useful for skipping intros, “like and subscribe” messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can’t go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and “like and subscribe”, too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I mean, you don’t need anything; it’ll work with no flags. I have these:
$ cat ~/.config/yt-dlp/config --embed-subs --embed-metadata --embed-chapters --embed-thumbnail --sponsorblock-mark=all $That’ll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
Also if you just want the audio to listen to (I like to do this with TTRPGs) you can do:
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio
Also works great in a pinch for getting sounds and music for FoundryVTT.
I’m pretty sure that it defaults to best quality.
goes looking at man page
By default, yt-dlp tries to download the best available quality if you don't pass any options. This is generally equivalent to using -f bestvideo*+bestaudio/best. However, if multiple audiostreams is enabled (--audio-multistreams), the default format changes to -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best. Similarly, if ffmpeg is unavailable, or if you use yt-dlp to stream to stdout (-o -), the default becomes -f best/bestvideo+bestaudio.So I think that it should normally pull down the best audio unless you get into some situation where YouTube doesn’t offer a format that simultaneously has the combination of highest audio quality with the highest video quality; if it has to do so to get the highest video quality then, it’ll sacrifice audio quality.
EDIT: Hmm. I could have sworn that there was more text about prioritizing relative audio and video quality at one point in the man page, but I don’t see anything there now. Maybe it can just always get the best audio quality, regardless of video quality, can pull 'em entirely separately.
Note that subtitles doesn’t include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction
Thanks.
EDIT: There isn’t an
--embed-auto-subs, but there is a--write-auto-subs.Fixed thanks.
I’m a filthy Windows user that’s too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
> Path\to\yt-dlp.exe -P <target directory> <URL>Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
deleted by creator
I like https://github.com/ArabCoders/ytptube gui. Only started using it yesterday, so far for indovidual videos. However it looks like it can also watch new videos being uploaded, thought not tried it myself.
Use docker compose for quick deployment
I’ve been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it’s made me paranoid ha
Yo I pay for premium and it’s been fucking slow. Cancel my subscription? Guess I might need to.
I had to turn off privacy badger and ublock for it to not be slow. It’s stupid I’m paying for the service to be ad free it should be ad free without complaints.
Your premium tier has been upgraded to the basic plan with ads at no extra charge for you yet, Dear Customer! Aren’t you happy?
