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I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year wor

I have YouTube premium and download everything that I like. A home NAS is extremely handy like that. Mine is not even 10TB and I still have more than a year worth of watching. Also it's not illegal because I don't distribute anything. I use a local website run by volunteers that ask permission of publishing houses before putting every scanned & OCR'd & spell-checked book in their online library. Again, not illegal, there's a clause for distribution when you work in something like a library capacity. I use a Twitch client to watch stuff ad-free because I don't use it so often so as to get premium. Or I just download the stream after it ends. Tough luck, Amazon, no money from me. YouTube's service is better anyway. --- The "Black Mirror"-ization of our economy has a very predictable ending but the execs are trapped in a bubble of yes-people and have no clue how the world out there works -- thus everything will continue going exactly as predicted by many. One part of the populace will remain in the bubble but there will be a lot of others -- like you and me -- that will do their own media collection and consumption, grow part of our own food, repair our own tech, craft items to use around the house etc. Corporations know no mercy and they will not stop however. They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. But they won't ever get to that point in the first place and will inevitably fail. Normal people can be swayed only so far. That's the part that they are missing -- which is quite puzzling to me, not like it's hard to figure it out. But I made my peace with the coming events. It's like watching an avalanche: you have a pretty good idea what it does and how far it will go and the damage it will inflict but physics doesn't care that you watch and know what will happen -- the event will happen regardless. The future is this: extreme segregation. Kind of like the big COVID-19 divide that happened even between people in the same family. That will keep happening in other areas of life. It's how people are. C'est la vie.

mumblemumble 4y ago
> I have YouTube premium I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  SponsorBlock helps but yeah, it can't cover everything. Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts. And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).
- rocmcd 4y ago
  WTF is up with Nord? I always felt that VPNs were a pretty niche tech tool, but I see those ads freaking everywhere. Are there that many people that use VPNs that warrant the ad investment?
  - wswope 4y ago
    It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.
    - Theodores 4y ago
      That is a really good point. Furthermore, it is marginal cost for the content creating peoples. They just have to read the script and roll the supplied graphics. If they get $1 from total sales then it is worthwhile if you are only getting 2K views. Maybe these VPNs offer a minimum fee and then commission on top so that there is always a payday, albeit small. None of them seem to record bespoke content where they demo the VPN for real or show how it works. The message has pivoted to getting content from region locked services such as Netflix. With car insurance (the last time I was watching TV, some years ago) they had rather silly 'meerkats' with Russian stereotype characters selling the insurance, with the people collecting the fluffy toy versions of the 'meerkats'. If you renew your insurance every year you get another 'meerkat' and soon the goal is to collect the set. Often it is the company that pays the insurance but the employee gets the 'meerkat', maybe to post to eBay... My niece's inheritance is mostly 'meerkat' toys and a few empty beer bottles. I am holding out with OpenVPN on a VPS until cuddly toys get given out with VPNs and they are advertised in every YT show with AI generated cuddly toys with AI accents.
AstralStorm 4y ago
Unfortunately your downloads are either not actually legally owned by you, just licensed, and potentially subject to DRM in some cases. Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.
- pdimitar 4y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. Yep I know but enforcing this requires a game of whack-a-mole with tens of millions of moles to whack. I wish them luck. It's a thin ice, obviously, but let's also recognize the fact that they forced us to walk on ice in the first place. They made up the rules. Had there been any sanity in these people left a lot of money would have never been expended in making examples out of regular Joes and Janes.
NalNezumi 4y ago
> They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. Welcome to life: https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E
88840-8855 4y ago
Can you be so kind and explain the setup behind the youtube-NAS bridge? Are videos being downloaded automatically? Are subtitles added to the local files? Do you have to manually select all videos you want to archive/safe on your NAS? What NAS do you have?
- pdimitar 4y ago
  I might have misled you about the complexity of my setup, sorry. I didn't even setup something like FreeNAS or something. I just setup ZFS and enabled SMB and NFS on top of it. This is on a spare computer that I've setup with Linux. Then I've setup `cron` tasks that run various scripts that just download various YouTube playlists -- hand-picked and curated by me. Nothing you'd call an intelligent software. Just hand-picked places on YouTube to monitor and sync once a day. It's only automatic insofar as `cron` executes `yt-dlp` with a bunch of URLs.

mumblemumble 4y ago

> I have YouTube premium I do, too. And every month I spend a little bit more time fast-forwarding past people awkwardly dropping pitches for NordVPN into the middle of their videos.

pdimitar 4y ago
SponsorBlock helps but yeah, it can't cover everything. Rarely a problem for me though, I quickly filter out the sellouts. And it's still worth it for the occasional how-to video because part of the time I truly get helped. I can stomach some promotion (but like you I do dislike it).
rocmcd 4y ago
WTF is up with Nord? I always felt that VPNs were a pretty niche tech tool, but I see those ads freaking everywhere. Are there that many people that use VPNs that warrant the ad investment?
- wswope 4y ago
  It’s economics: much like with car insurance, the market is a zero-sum game because the quality providers all more or less have equivalent levels of service - thus advertising becomes the most effective way to capture revenue, because prospective buyers don’t generally have complete enough information to e.g. assess a firm’s “operational excellence” or technical qualities on their own.
  - Theodores 4y ago
    That is a really good point. Furthermore, it is marginal cost for the content creating peoples. They just have to read the script and roll the supplied graphics. If they get $1 from total sales then it is worthwhile if you are only getting 2K views. Maybe these VPNs offer a minimum fee and then commission on top so that there is always a payday, albeit small. None of them seem to record bespoke content where they demo the VPN for real or show how it works. The message has pivoted to getting content from region locked services such as Netflix. With car insurance (the last time I was watching TV, some years ago) they had rather silly 'meerkats' with Russian stereotype characters selling the insurance, with the people collecting the fluffy toy versions of the 'meerkats'. If you renew your insurance every year you get another 'meerkat' and soon the goal is to collect the set. Often it is the company that pays the insurance but the employee gets the 'meerkat', maybe to post to eBay... My niece's inheritance is mostly 'meerkat' toys and a few empty beer bottles. I am holding out with OpenVPN on a VPS until cuddly toys get given out with VPNs and they are advertised in every YT show with AI generated cuddly toys with AI accents.

AstralStorm 4y ago

Unfortunately your downloads are either not actually legally owned by you, just licensed, and potentially subject to DRM in some cases. Same with the books. The library asking permission is actually good and what may make it legal. However, that is called a license and may have serious limitations.

pdimitar 4y ago
Thanks for the clarification. Yep I know but enforcing this requires a game of whack-a-mole with tens of millions of moles to whack. I wish them luck. It's a thin ice, obviously, but let's also recognize the fact that they forced us to walk on ice in the first place. They made up the rules. Had there been any sanity in these people left a lot of money would have never been expended in making examples out of regular Joes and Janes.

NalNezumi 4y ago

> They will keep changing the narrative ad infinitum until everyone is dependent on them at birth. Welcome to life: https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E https://youtu.be/IFe9wiDfb0E

88840-8855 4y ago

Can you be so kind and explain the setup behind the youtube-NAS bridge? Are videos being downloaded automatically? Are subtitles added to the local files? Do you have to manually select all videos you want to archive/safe on your NAS? What NAS do you have?

pdimitar 4y ago
I might have misled you about the complexity of my setup, sorry. I didn't even setup something like FreeNAS or something. I just setup ZFS and enabled SMB and NFS on top of it. This is on a spare computer that I've setup with Linux. Then I've setup `cron` tasks that run various scripts that just download various YouTube playlists -- hand-picked and curated by me. Nothing you'd call an intelligent software. Just hand-picked places on YouTube to monitor and sync once a day. It's only automatic insofar as `cron` executes `yt-dlp` with a bunch of URLs.