5 ms·

What do people use YTDL for? Is it to maintain personal records of videos you like?

dijit 5y ago
It’s useful to download talks before jumping on a flight. It’s also useful to pipe the output to mpv and have a native video playback experience. This is especially useful on Linux where there is no hardware acceleration for video in the web browser.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  >This is especially useful on Linux where there is no hardware acceleration for video in the web browser Pretty sure there is some now, but I still would rather just watch media in my media player.
hkt 5y ago
I cut chunks out of videos and put them into a home brewed speech therapy application for my son, to teach him to type. (Bonus points is that my 5 year old appears to be getting the hang of bash)
fwn 5y ago
I use youtube-dl for my cloud backup routine. The only YouTube account feature I really use is playlists. I threw all of those in a bat file and ytdl downloads them for me into different folders whenever I start it. Many videos I've downloaded this way aren't available on YouTube anymore. It's definitely worth it.
xdfgh1112 5y ago
A lot of stuff will disappear from YouTube even after 12 months, let alone 5-10 years. If you want to archive your favourite videos then downloading is the only option.
NaN1352 5y ago
Although there is now Premium LITE for 7 eur (which I finally subscribed to), listening to music mixes on YT is now atrocious. You just can’t listen to a music mix anymore on YT. They play "ads" except the ads are complete music videos that run for 2-5 mins easily. It’s so dumb. Whatever happened to "soandso new album out now!". You don’t get an excerpt, you get an entire track of some random band, often times quite different genre that the mix you wanted to listen to. It’s so fucking bad, it’s literally like YT says "hey you want to listen to ABC, why dontcha listen to XYZ instead". I wouldn’t mind a short ad for some random album or artist when I listen to music, but now YT as made it almost impossible to listen to a good mix, when you get some OTHER music that starts every 5-7 mins, and runs for 2-3mins average… EDIT : forgot to mention on one music mix (just progressive house dj mix), I’d keep getting an "ad" which is some electricity mini doc in Turkish that runs for 25+ mins. WTF !? Youtube is actually making people want to skip and block ads because their "ad" program is atrocious for users. Thankfully they do have a Premium LITE now but it’s still a bit expensive imho it should be just 5 eur. And wtf I had to Google to find it. Within the apss I was never told that it was available, and clicking through the premium engagement was always showing me the 16+ EUR sub with Google Music etc. But anyway even saying all that I still want to save videos that are invaluable to me, and just disappear randomly or turn "private" after few months/years. What is the point of making a playlist when they show you unavailable items as the months go by? AND, also you have sometimes vdeos that get edited. Like there was a really nice cafe ambiance and because some losers complained about being in the video, the uploader replaced it with a audio-only version. So tldr when you see a video you REALLY like, you should DL it asap. You never know when it gets deleted.
foxfluff 5y ago
I mostly use it to work around crappy youtube's buffering. Download a video and you can watch it without hiccups. It's also handy for saving music that you want to listen to without being deliberately interrupted and paused by youtube. I.e. it's all to work around youtube's crappiness.
m-p-3 5y ago
Where I live for some reason YouTube Kids is not available, which means that YouTube is effectively not available on my kids device. A workaround for me is to grab the videos and put them on my Plex server, which at the same time allows me to curate what they can listen to. And since Plex allows me to locally sync content to the tablet, at works quite well for road trips too without requiring a data connection.
- watwut 5y ago
  YouTube kids is useless anyway, especially in non-English speaking countries. It has extremely limited content. And what it is completely missing are videos my kids watched that I was glad that they watched (as opposed to merely not minding) - crafts and ideas videos, not limited to but including minecraft inspiration videos, history for kids and other educational videos. Especially when not in English.
watwut 5y ago
so that you can use it as a podcast offline.
mdoms 5y ago
My personal use case is syncing my music to my Garmin watch. I'm a paid Youtube Premium member but Garmin only syncs with Spotify and some other small-fry services, not Youtube Music. So I use ytdl on a daily scheduled job to pull down every mp3 from my Workout playlist. These get automatically added to my watch when I plug it in for charging. I don't believe anything I'm doing is illegal, or if it is I doubt anyone would care. It's just a way for me to listen to the music I already pay for that works for me.

It’s useful to download talks before jumping on a flight. It’s also useful to pipe the output to mpv and have a native video playback experience. This is especially useful on Linux where there is no hardware acceleration for video in the web browser.

boomboomsubban 5y ago
>This is especially useful on Linux where there is no hardware acceleration for video in the web browser Pretty sure there is some now, but I still would rather just watch media in my media player.

hkt 5y ago

I cut chunks out of videos and put them into a home brewed speech therapy application for my son, to teach him to type. (Bonus points is that my 5 year old appears to be getting the hang of bash)

fwn 5y ago

I use youtube-dl for my cloud backup routine. The only YouTube account feature I really use is playlists. I threw all of those in a bat file and ytdl downloads them for me into different folders whenever I start it. Many videos I've downloaded this way aren't available on YouTube anymore. It's definitely worth it.

xdfgh1112 5y ago

A lot of stuff will disappear from YouTube even after 12 months, let alone 5-10 years. If you want to archive your favourite videos then downloading is the only option.

NaN1352 5y ago

Although there is now Premium LITE for 7 eur (which I finally subscribed to), listening to music mixes on YT is now atrocious. You just can’t listen to a music mix anymore on YT. They play "ads" except the ads are complete music videos that run for 2-5 mins easily. It’s so dumb. Whatever happened to "soandso new album out now!". You don’t get an excerpt, you get an entire track of some random band, often times quite different genre that the mix you wanted to listen to. It’s so fucking bad, it’s literally like YT says "hey you want to listen to ABC, why dontcha listen to XYZ instead". I wouldn’t mind a short ad for some random album or artist when I listen to music, but now YT as made it almost impossible to listen to a good mix, when you get some OTHER music that starts every 5-7 mins, and runs for 2-3mins average… EDIT : forgot to mention on one music mix (just progressive house dj mix), I’d keep getting an "ad" which is some electricity mini doc in Turkish that runs for 25+ mins. WTF !? Youtube is actually making people want to skip and block ads because their "ad" program is atrocious for users. Thankfully they do have a Premium LITE now but it’s still a bit expensive imho it should be just 5 eur. And wtf I had to Google to find it. Within the apss I was never told that it was available, and clicking through the premium engagement was always showing me the 16+ EUR sub with Google Music etc. But anyway even saying all that I still want to save videos that are invaluable to me, and just disappear randomly or turn "private" after few months/years. What is the point of making a playlist when they show you unavailable items as the months go by? AND, also you have sometimes vdeos that get edited. Like there was a really nice cafe ambiance and because some losers complained about being in the video, the uploader replaced it with a audio-only version. So tldr when you see a video you REALLY like, you should DL it asap. You never know when it gets deleted.

foxfluff 5y ago

I mostly use it to work around crappy youtube's buffering. Download a video and you can watch it without hiccups. It's also handy for saving music that you want to listen to without being deliberately interrupted and paused by youtube. I.e. it's all to work around youtube's crappiness.

m-p-3 5y ago

Where I live for some reason YouTube Kids is not available, which means that YouTube is effectively not available on my kids device. A workaround for me is to grab the videos and put them on my Plex server, which at the same time allows me to curate what they can listen to. And since Plex allows me to locally sync content to the tablet, at works quite well for road trips too without requiring a data connection.

watwut 5y ago
YouTube kids is useless anyway, especially in non-English speaking countries. It has extremely limited content. And what it is completely missing are videos my kids watched that I was glad that they watched (as opposed to merely not minding) - crafts and ideas videos, not limited to but including minecraft inspiration videos, history for kids and other educational videos. Especially when not in English.

watwut 5y ago

so that you can use it as a podcast offline.

mdoms 5y ago

My personal use case is syncing my music to my Garmin watch. I'm a paid Youtube Premium member but Garmin only syncs with Spotify and some other small-fry services, not Youtube Music. So I use ytdl on a daily scheduled job to pull down every mp3 from my Workout playlist. These get automatically added to my watch when I plug it in for charging. I don't believe anything I'm doing is illegal, or if it is I doubt anyone would care. It's just a way for me to listen to the music I already pay for that works for me.