• SpicyTaint@lemmy.world
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    14 hours ago

    I’ve started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.

    • gruhuken@slrpnk.net
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      58 minutes ago

      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

    • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip
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      9 hours ago

      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.

    • tal@lemmy.today
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      14 hours ago

      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…

      • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works
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        12 hours ago

        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.

          • throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works
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            11 hours ago

            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?

          • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
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            11 hours ago

            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.

            • passenger@sopuli.xyz
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              9 hours ago

              What they should be imagining instead is a better video sharing platform. There are alternatives already…

              • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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                8 hours ago

                Cause all you need is your imagination!

                And billions of dollars to build and run the site with servers worldwide. No biggie

      • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
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        11 hours ago

        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

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          10 hours ago

          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.

      • rumba@piefed.zip
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        13 hours ago

        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 :)

      • mesa@piefed.socialOP
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        14 hours ago

        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.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          13 hours ago

          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.

          • mesa@piefed.socialOP
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            13 hours ago

            Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.

        • Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub
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          11 hours ago

          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.

    • Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com
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      12 hours ago

      Me too. I’m up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.

    • B_DL@lemmynsfw.com
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      13 hours ago

      I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.

      • tal@lemmy.today
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        13 hours ago

        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.

        • Kairos@lemmy.today
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          9 hours ago

          Note that subtitles doesn’t include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction

      • SpicyTaint@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        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