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It would be nice if they have a 0 pixel option. I use YouTube mostly for the music and I let it play in the background
by ponsin 7y ago
It would be nice if they have a 0 pixel option. I use YouTube mostly for the music and I let it play in the background
- spullara 7y agoMaybe something like this? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-only-youtube/pkocpiliahoaohbolmkelakpiphnllog?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/audio-only-youtube...
- noir_lord 7y agoNewPipe free on f-droid and it allows "download audio" in whatever format is available, it's great on phone for music from non-traditional studio sources (NewWaveRetro) etc.
- symplee 7y agoI think most "Lyric" videos, where the screen is a single image, or nearly the same image, can be compressed to be almost the size of just the audio. If not, I would second the "zero pixel" option!
- Insanity 7y agoI think this is a safe assumption, there should be no difference between each frames thus nothing should be sent.
- nightfly 7y agoVideos usually have key frames (full pictures) after ever interval of x seconds/frames. So new data will be sent occasionally even with no changes.
- est31 7y agoYeah, I've downloaded this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHpDOWhkGk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHpDOWhkGk youtube-dl -k gave me two files, one webm/opus audio file and one mp4/av1 video file. The files had roughly same sizes, the audio being 9728k large, the video 9476k. The video had 127 keyframes, out of 17030 frames total, distributed over 567 seconds of video (one keyframe every 4.5 seconds). I don't have a method at hand to measure the encoded size of the keyframes but if I extract the first 90k of the file using dd (bs=90k count=1), I get 21 frames, so that's a lower bound for the size that's actually needed to encode one single keyframe, more shouldn't actually be neccessary. So of the 9.4M video file, > 99% is waste. Quite literally as 1% of 9476k is 95k. With the addition of audio, the amount of waste has to be adjusted to roughly half of the total audio+video data. Still a large amount of data that can be saved, especially at youtube scale where reductions of traffic in the sub-percent range are material for promotions.
- the8472 7y agoThis could also be solved by youtube detecting these situations and simply spacing keyframes farther apart or using duplicate frame decimation/vfr encoding. Seeking would still be fast since it could just fetch and skip a huge bunch of empty P-frames.
- clouddrover 7y agoFor static image videos YouTube's H.264 version of the video is generally significantly smaller than either the VP9 or AV1 versions. Either YouTube's detection and modification of the encoder settings for this type of video or something intrinsic to the x264 encoder delivers better results from their H.264 encoding pipeline. The 480p video-only file sizes for this video as reported by youtube-dl have VP9 at 9.70MiB, AV1 at 9.25MiB, and H.264 at 3.55MiB.
- 6510 7y agoSo we give them something 13 kb-ish[0] and they compress it to 4.16 MB. I'm sure I'm already not putting it kind enough. Combined with the tiny battery in my phone I really feel like people are pulling a prank on me. I'm a behavioral experiment now! I think my roomba just looked at me. [0] http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/DwHpDOWhkGk/hqdefault.jpg http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/DwHpDOWhkGk/hqdefault.jpg
- akiselev 7y agoIf it's a solid color or simple enough for the static image compression algorithms in play to optimize away, even those keyframes would be tiny. Some codecs will just optimize those keyframes away entirely.
- Insanity 7y agooh okay, TIL :)
- close04 7y agoYoutube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. This is to prevent free streaming on devices like Sonos since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos. It's also why when using the free service the app doesn't allow streaming with the screen off. A 0 pixel video would defeat this by being in effect an audio stream separated from the video. I always wondered why manufacturers don't just resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS.
- cwkoss 7y ago> resize the video stream to 1 pixel and use any of the device LEDs to "display" the video thus bypassing this part of the ToS Hilarious hack, love this idea
- NoodleIncident 7y ago> Youtube doesn't offer a "no video" option for free because the ToS for the free service says you are not allowed to separate the video and audio streams. Isn't this backwards? It seems more likely that the TOS follows the business decision here. I believe old versions of the official mobile apps continued to play the video with the phone screen off.
- close04 7y agoI imagine the ToS were written as such in order to make sure some features can be monetized (like offline or screen-off playback). But this just means they would not offer any feature for free that undermines this decision. A "0px" video would effectively turn it into an audio-only stream and be an "official" way for others to bypass some of those restrictions. It would make streaming to all devices that now require a Premium/Music membership, or stream ripping (something they don't actually sue for but insist it's illegal) fair game.
- gray_-_wolf 7y ago> since it's harder (if possible at all) to monetize those videos it's not like we don't have ads on radio
- qwerty456127 7y agoI just wonder why wouldn't they put the lyrics into the subtitles channel.
- jmiskovic 7y agoThe 'they' part is critical. YouTube relies on users to provide actual content. Digitalized music is uploaded by people with vast differences in tech abilities, access to tools, and even personal tastes. Some get creative and want to have HD city time-lapse as background and power point animation of lyrics. What do you do with those? It is not impossible to go over all music videos, automatically fetch lyrics and replace video with static album cover or something, but who would do it? If YouTube does this then they are responsible for any copyright infringement, and they become huge competition to user-created content on their own platform.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI thought they did switch to audio feed only in the background? After all, youtube-dl usually reports an audio-only file.
- smichel17 7y agoyoutube-dl violates the YouTube terms of service. That's why they scrape the website intstead of using the api.
- nickthegreek 7y agoYoutube music app allows this. I don’t think the website does.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y agohttps://music.youtube.com/ https://music.youtube.com/ This does what you want.
- filoleg 7y agoI like the concept of it, but the app has atrocious UX on mobile. For a specific example, it has a nice toggle above every track, where you can flip between video and audio-only. It works great, except that I cannot find a way to force it to stay on audio-only. As soon as the current track ends, the toggle resets back to "video". And this kind of stuff is all over the app.
- weatherperson 7y agothat's weird, I use the app and don't have this problem. I love the UI even on iOS.
- lone_haxx0r 7y agoYou should try Newpipe if you're on Android.
- ferysurya 7y agoYou can toggle off the video mode in the app setting.
- eastbayjake 7y agoI wish more ASMR content were available on music streaming services instead of with bulky videos on YouTube!
- qwerty456127 7y agoThe video channel plays a serious role in ASMR.
- jdminhbg 7y agoYou can use youtube-dl to pull down audio-only tracks. I do this frequently for talks without much in the way of visual presentation that I then listen to as podcasts. youtube-dl -F https://youtube.com/video-url That will give you a list of formats, pick an audio-only one, and use the -f flag to download that format.
- James_STT 7y agothe 'bestaudio' format is particularly useful, you can't be certain of the container it serves you but it avoids having to check '-F'
- JJMcJ 7y agoPick the lowest resolution, usually 144. The audio quality seems unchanged and the video network bandwidth greatly reduced.
- pjc50 7y agoOn Android you have to pay extra to not watch the video.
- TrinaryWorksToo 7y agoThis is YouTube Music: https://music.youtube.com/ https://music.youtube.com/
- lukifer 7y agoI think the iOS player will stream only audio if the app is backgrounded; it seems to restart the stream to get video back if the app is brought to front again. As others have said, if the "video" is a static image, the bandwidth usage should be negligible in practice. But I've seen lots of promotional album streams that intentionally add busy graphics, motion lyrics, etc; while they're sometimes cool, they're wastes of bandwidth and processing if I just want it play audio in a background tab.
- Cyberdog 7y agoBackground audio play only works if you're paying for the subscription service. Otherwise both video and audio stops when the app is backgrounded. Many times I've listened to a YouTube video or stream without watching it by just starting the video and then pocketing my phone and being careful not to touch it. I hear the audio and continue my shopping or cleaning or whatever while battery and bandwidth is wasted displaying the video to the debris inside my pocket. I can only assume Google has run the numbers and decided it's actually more profitable for them to make something so silly and wasteful on both sides of the connection necessary, but that's what it is.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoYour phone might be saving you some battery; there is a sensor to detect when your face is close to the phone, turning off the screen and disabling touch. Not sure if it actually works when it's in your pocket though. There's a serious "light in the refrigerator" problem, where trying to measure it changes the outcome
- Dylan16807 7y agoIt's really easy to see if that sensor is active. It's not fridge light at all, it triggers at a distance and you could test against your shirt to see if the light shines through. I've never seen it be active outside of a phone call.
- lukifer 7y ago
- catalogia 7y agompv --no-video [youtube url] (This uses youtube-dl, without saving it to your hard drive.)
- rampant_ai 7y agoYou're still pulling down the video data itself, it's just being removed after-the-fact. But this will save your battery on a laptop since you're not rendering the video.
- arandomsapien 7y agoThis is an option in the mobile app, but only if you're a paid premium user. Otherwise, to listen to audio only on mobile you need to keep the screen on.
- Waterluvian 7y agoTwitch has audio only mode. I use it when working outside.
- Hamuko 7y agoyoutube-dl -f bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5I Or if you want to listen to it straight away mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio https://youtu.be/YT0k99hCY5I
- dredmorbius 7y agompv is absolutely transformative for Youtube (and a huge number of other platforms, services, & urls). youtube-dl can directly stream as well, e.g., youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc - (from the manpage). And there's mps-youtube as well.
- Zhyl 7y agoif you want to search for a song: mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio 'ytdl://ytsearch1:John Butler Trio Ocean' As a function: !#/bin/bash yt(){ mpv --ytdl-format=bestaudio "ytdl://ytsearch1:$*" } Edit: as per comment below, swapped '--no-video' for '--ytdl-format=bestaudio'
- sidcool 7y agoThey have YouTube premium for that feature.