6 ms·

Too bad they host their course videos on Youtube. It has become painful to use. I don't understand why they cannot host them on their own server.

willbw 7y ago
Interested to hear how you think self-hosted video is superior to Youtube, I have found the opposite to be true in every circumstance (unless you are without adblocker for some reason).
- LeftHandPath 7y ago
  I've actually started to hate YouTube so much (just for being terrible to content-creators and consumers, and supporting toxic videos (time watched is a ranking factor, promoting high-engagement "edgeline videos)), and so on and so forth) that I wanted to create a white-label HTML video player that would keep the benefits of a consistent, well-made UI but drop the publisher aspect of YouTube. I don't think I ever will, but the world needs an alternative that has a good encoding/optimization (like switching to lower bitrates on slower connections), a unified interface (familiar no matter what site it's being used on) and that doesn't tempt users to write custom skins for the video player.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    And the player needs to fit into an ecosystem that will cover the bandwidth costs of the video it streams. I don't think that's a simple part of the system if one is seeking to avoid having any advertising (a good goal, that I'm absolutely for).
    - LeftHandPath 7y ago
      That's what I was wondering about. Honestly I was thinking that some sort of integration where content creators could be directly contacted by advertisers - who would pay for in-video advertising by the content creator (this is more for personalities than for corporations) - and have a vetted way to be payed for their time / platform / ads would work (with companies paying to be part of that system). This would result in higher quality ads that are more beneficial to the content creator than the video distributor (a goal I view as equally good). And to benefit the companies advertising, you could create a tool where shorter clips of the advertisement could be sent back and forth, previewed, and approved as needed (if integrated with a payment system, this protects both parties from a bad deal). I also think some, but not all, content creators would view paying for a small hosting company to store and stream their videos in the same way they view buying a new webcam or microphone.
    - kragen 7y ago
      PeerTube is what you're looking for there. youtube-dl already supports it. Not sure if it deals with bit rate adaptation well, or at all.
    - z3t4 7y ago
      Small channels on Youtube that are avaraging under 100k views per video could be hosted on a good home Internet connection. Youtube basically gives you peanuts. So you have to get your own sponsors anyway, and there are so many videos on Youtube that you can forget about discovery unless you have a very large network.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Here is a good example, if you are in Germany, thanks to our GEMA friends you may be unable to watch a talk if it is on YouTube. While this might occur also with self hosted, YouTube is their main target and what they mostly care about.
  - morsma 7y ago
    Please explain...
    - pjmlp 7y ago
      GEMA, https://www.gema.de/ https://www.gema.de/, is an organization that takes care of collecting royalties for authors. So far so good, everyone is entitled to be paid for their work. However they are quite aggressive collecting those royalties, to the point that there are royalty free song books for the children on primary schools, for them to avoid paying GEMA. Since we are approaching Christmas, several typical Christmas markets did had another set of songs going around, a couple of years ago as protest. So coming back to YouTube, if there is something on a video that might trigger GEMA to act upon, Google just triggers "Sorry this video isn't available in your country". It was much worse a couple of years ago, when Google refused to pay any kind of royalty to GEMA and just blocked everything, they have kind of settled now, but it still comes up occasionally.
- herodotus 7y ago
  Even with Adblock installed, there are interruptions. Try listen to the slow movement of a piece of classical music, for example: the mood is certainly ruined with commercials placed randomly in the stream. And if Adblock is active, there still could be a short break in the stream: more than enough to ruin the mood.
ThePadawan 7y ago
They do, and they are linked as "Video (ETHZ)".
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
zozbot234 7y ago
> It has become painful to use. I've found the opposite, despite advertisements. For one thing, Youtube provides very good auto-generated captions and makes it easy to watch a sped-up version of the video. This saves way more time than would be taken up by looking at ads. Of course people should still host their own videos but I see this as more like a backup, in case YouTube goes rouge somehow.
- RealityVoid 7y ago
  I think the proper word is "rogue" - but your points are spot on.
  - angry_octet 7y ago
    But it's (unintentionally?) clever, because the product they keep pushing on you is called YouTube Red, i.e. YouTube Rouge. (How they came up with this name, given the existence of porn site Red Tube, I'll never know.)
    - ZeikJT 7y ago
      They changed the name to YouTube Premium
arberavdullahu 7y ago
Actually they host on their own, here is the first lecture https://video.ethz.ch/lectures/d-infk/2019/autumn/263-2210-00L/aaba3fa6-1d4e-4760-91c0-adf965d24394.html https://video.ethz.ch/lectures/d-infk/2019/autumn/263-2210-0...
FabHK 7y ago
You can use youtube-dl (a wonderful command line utility available eg on home-brew) to easily download the videos at your desired quality and and watch from your HD whenever/however you like. https://youtube-dl.org https://youtube-dl.org
- noir_lord 7y ago
  Works great for music as well...allegedly. Some genres are very popular on YouTube but not elsewhere (relatively), New Retro Wave been an example that comes to mind, good programming music.
  - tanderson92 7y ago
    It also works for Facebook (!), though FB keeps changing the API / keys so make sure to keep an updated youtube-dl.
    - codetrotter 7y ago
      > It also works for Facebook (!) People often assume that youtube-dl only works with YouTube because of the name, but it actually works with a really huge amount of sites, including Vimeo and Twitch. You can see the full list of extractors that they have in the source here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_d...
      - rdc12 7y ago
        I have also found it works pretty well (works 80% to 90% of the time), at fetching videos from random websites that self host a video
      - userbinator 7y ago
        Perhaps they should just rename it to something more generic like "video-dl", but then again I suspect its primary use is for YouTube and the other sites are just "extras" it grew over time.

willbw 7y ago

Interested to hear how you think self-hosted video is superior to Youtube, I have found the opposite to be true in every circumstance (unless you are without adblocker for some reason).

LeftHandPath 7y ago
I've actually started to hate YouTube so much (just for being terrible to content-creators and consumers, and supporting toxic videos (time watched is a ranking factor, promoting high-engagement "edgeline videos)), and so on and so forth) that I wanted to create a white-label HTML video player that would keep the benefits of a consistent, well-made UI but drop the publisher aspect of YouTube. I don't think I ever will, but the world needs an alternative that has a good encoding/optimization (like switching to lower bitrates on slower connections), a unified interface (familiar no matter what site it's being used on) and that doesn't tempt users to write custom skins for the video player.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  And the player needs to fit into an ecosystem that will cover the bandwidth costs of the video it streams. I don't think that's a simple part of the system if one is seeking to avoid having any advertising (a good goal, that I'm absolutely for).
  - LeftHandPath 7y ago
    That's what I was wondering about. Honestly I was thinking that some sort of integration where content creators could be directly contacted by advertisers - who would pay for in-video advertising by the content creator (this is more for personalities than for corporations) - and have a vetted way to be payed for their time / platform / ads would work (with companies paying to be part of that system). This would result in higher quality ads that are more beneficial to the content creator than the video distributor (a goal I view as equally good). And to benefit the companies advertising, you could create a tool where shorter clips of the advertisement could be sent back and forth, previewed, and approved as needed (if integrated with a payment system, this protects both parties from a bad deal). I also think some, but not all, content creators would view paying for a small hosting company to store and stream their videos in the same way they view buying a new webcam or microphone.
  - kragen 7y ago
    PeerTube is what you're looking for there. youtube-dl already supports it. Not sure if it deals with bit rate adaptation well, or at all.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    Small channels on Youtube that are avaraging under 100k views per video could be hosted on a good home Internet connection. Youtube basically gives you peanuts. So you have to get your own sponsors anyway, and there are so many videos on Youtube that you can forget about discovery unless you have a very large network.
pjmlp 7y ago
Here is a good example, if you are in Germany, thanks to our GEMA friends you may be unable to watch a talk if it is on YouTube. While this might occur also with self hosted, YouTube is their main target and what they mostly care about.
- morsma 7y ago
  Please explain...
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    GEMA, https://www.gema.de/ https://www.gema.de/, is an organization that takes care of collecting royalties for authors. So far so good, everyone is entitled to be paid for their work. However they are quite aggressive collecting those royalties, to the point that there are royalty free song books for the children on primary schools, for them to avoid paying GEMA. Since we are approaching Christmas, several typical Christmas markets did had another set of songs going around, a couple of years ago as protest. So coming back to YouTube, if there is something on a video that might trigger GEMA to act upon, Google just triggers "Sorry this video isn't available in your country". It was much worse a couple of years ago, when Google refused to pay any kind of royalty to GEMA and just blocked everything, they have kind of settled now, but it still comes up occasionally.
herodotus 7y ago
Even with Adblock installed, there are interruptions. Try listen to the slow movement of a piece of classical music, for example: the mood is certainly ruined with commercials placed randomly in the stream. And if Adblock is active, there still could be a short break in the stream: more than enough to ruin the mood.

ThePadawan 7y ago

They do, and they are linked as "Video (ETHZ)".

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

zozbot234 7y ago

> It has become painful to use. I've found the opposite, despite advertisements. For one thing, Youtube provides very good auto-generated captions and makes it easy to watch a sped-up version of the video. This saves way more time than would be taken up by looking at ads. Of course people should still host their own videos but I see this as more like a backup, in case YouTube goes rouge somehow.

RealityVoid 7y ago
I think the proper word is "rogue" - but your points are spot on.
- angry_octet 7y ago
  But it's (unintentionally?) clever, because the product they keep pushing on you is called YouTube Red, i.e. YouTube Rouge. (How they came up with this name, given the existence of porn site Red Tube, I'll never know.)
  - ZeikJT 7y ago
    They changed the name to YouTube Premium

arberavdullahu 7y ago

Actually they host on their own, here is the first lecture https://video.ethz.ch/lectures/d-infk/2019/autumn/263-2210-00L/aaba3fa6-1d4e-4760-91c0-adf965d24394.html https://video.ethz.ch/lectures/d-infk/2019/autumn/263-2210-0...

FabHK 7y ago

You can use youtube-dl (a wonderful command line utility available eg on home-brew) to easily download the videos at your desired quality and and watch from your HD whenever/however you like. https://youtube-dl.org https://youtube-dl.org

noir_lord 7y ago
Works great for music as well...allegedly. Some genres are very popular on YouTube but not elsewhere (relatively), New Retro Wave been an example that comes to mind, good programming music.
- tanderson92 7y ago
  It also works for Facebook (!), though FB keeps changing the API / keys so make sure to keep an updated youtube-dl.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    > It also works for Facebook (!) People often assume that youtube-dl only works with YouTube because of the name, but it actually works with a really huge amount of sites, including Vimeo and Twitch. You can see the full list of extractors that they have in the source here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_d...
    - rdc12 7y ago
      I have also found it works pretty well (works 80% to 90% of the time), at fetching videos from random websites that self host a video
    - userbinator 7y ago
      Perhaps they should just rename it to something more generic like "video-dl", but then again I suspect its primary use is for YouTube and the other sites are just "extras" it grew over time.