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I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting fo

by piyuv 1y ago

I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting for download..” on my iPad. Same on iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself). Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c flash drive, and watched it from that. Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel. Family members make good use of ad-free.

beerandt 1y ago
Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with practically no customer service options, no real solutions besides cancel. I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so it was a last straw.
- underlipton 1y ago
  Halfway ready to fist-fight whichever exec drove the death of Play Music. It was a very, very good application, which could have continued to function as such when the platform ended, but they wouldn't even let us have that. I still have them and refuse to uninstall.
masklinn 1y ago
Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you were live-streaming and didn’t think to save a local copy or it impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.
- hmstx 1y ago
  Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded the audio locally at max quality. Back then, I think I already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url for the 720p version of the video. When they recently insisted by email I download any videos before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).
shantara 1y ago
I’m another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my less technical family members, and to use their native iOS apps. If they really tighten the rules on Premium family sharing, I’ll drop the subscription in an instant.
- al_borland 1y ago
  I’m a Premium user and primarily watch on AppleTV. A little while ago they added a feature where if I press the button to skip ahead on the remote when a sponsor section starts, it skips over the whole thing. It skips over “commonly skipped” sections. While it doesn’t totally remove it, it lets me choose if I want to watch or not, and gets me past it in a single button press. All using the native app. I was surprised the first time this happened. I assume the creators hate it.
cactusplant7374 1y ago
Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for offline downloads?
- piyuv 1y ago
  I’m not using brave browser so did not know it could download videos
  - QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
    I’m using Brave, but didn’t know either :p
- pcdoodle 1y ago
  Nice, didn't know Brave could do that.
- godelski 1y ago
  > Why not use Brave browser Why not use a non-chromium browser and help prevent Google from having larger control over the Internet? We still need competition in the browser space or Google gets to have a disproportionate say in how the Internet is structured. I promise you, Firefox and Safari aren't that bad. Maybe Firefox is a little different but I doubt it's meaningfully different for most people [0]. So at least get your non techie family and friends onto them and install an ad blocker while you're at it. [0] the fact that you're an individual may mean you're not like most people. You being different doesn't invalidate the claim.
  - cactusplant7374 1y ago
    Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://brave.com/transparency/ https://brave.com/transparency/
femtozer 1y ago
I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.
- piyuv 1y ago
  It’ll be fixed when some product manager can offer it as a promotion project
  - ChocolateGod 1y ago
    and removed when that person who is promoted doesn't work on it again
  - godelski 1y ago
    I was talking to "my friend" about how I'm annoyed my calendar duplicates holidays because it imports from multiple calendars and he asked me "what value" would be provided if this was solved. Confused I said it pushes things off so I can't read events. He clarified he meant monetary value... We're both programmers so we're both know we're talking about a one line regex... I know quite a number of people like this and they're in high positions at big tech companies... doesn't take a genius to figure out why everything has such shitty user experiences and why all the software is so poorly written. No one even seems to care about the actual product they'll only correct you to tell you the product is the stock and the customer is the shareholder, not the user. We fucked up...
    - fragmede 1y ago
      What did you tell him was the monetary value? Let's say there are like 5 holidays per year that result in days where some people have holidays but others do not, so business meetings happen that day that get missed. Let's say you have a 100 million people using this calendar software. Let's say 0.5 percent of those are in the executive class. Furthermore, let's say 10% of them miss a meeting due to this UI issue. That's 50,000 missed meetings. If we handwave that each of those meetings could have resulted in $10 million deals for their company, this UI bug is costing customers half a trillion dollars! So, after estimating the number of ping pong balls that fit on a 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp and put that on your promo packet. Half a trillion dollars!
ac29 1y ago
> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel That's been a policy for a while, the sign up page prominently says "Plan members must be in the same household". No idea if its enforced though.
- phkahler 1y ago
  I have 2 homes. Every time I "go up north" I have to switch my Netflix household and then back again when I return. This sounds like that won't even be possible.
  - ewoodrich 1y ago
    If it works like Youtube TV you are given the option to switch household locations when you get the nag screen.
beala 1y ago
I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try. I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.
- moralestapia 1y ago
  Tangential. The TIDAL app is absolute trash, it has this same issue all the time; not just that, but also, if a download fails it just hangs there and does not download the rest of the album/playlist. Also, why would you want to download things in the first place? To watch them offline, right? Well, guess what happens when you open the app w/o an internet connection ... it asks you to login, so you cannot even access your music. 900k/year TOC genius work there. The only reason why I haven't canceled is because I'm too lazy to reset my password in order to login and cancel, lol. Might do it soon, though.
  - galaxy_gas 1y ago
    When I try it for a month, the worst part.. your entire download queue fails forever unless you manually remove hundreds of items one by one There is no way to remove the stuck item if it's been pull from streaming library or you in country that -- such traveling etc -- does not have r ights to it. You simply cannot open the track to undownload it
    - lawgimenez 1y ago
      Also tried Tidal once with their trial, tried playing some music videos and it was just straight up blurry throughout. Not once did the music video played HD.
maplethorpe 1y ago
What video did you watch?
- piyuv 1y ago
  Nintendo Direct. Download issue persisted with all videos though
meindnoch 1y ago
>Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel. Then I have good news for you! https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown In fact, I've got an email from them about this already. My YT is still ad-free though, so not sure when it's going to kick in for real.
- pixl97 1y ago
  Ya I got this message when I was on vacation for a week. Seems a little messy on their part.
yolo_420 1y ago
I am a premium subscriber so I can download via yt-dlp in peace without any errors or warnings. We are not the same.
- a96 1y ago
  For now.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
For anyone here who runs a startup, I propose two lifestyle benefits you should add: 1. Unlimited YouTube Premium 2. Unlimited drink reimbursement (coffee, tea, smoothies, whatever) The psychological sense of loss from those two things would be larger than any 5% raise.
- whatshisface 1y ago
  I personally wouldn't want to hire a startup employee who couldn't figure out how to install a browser extension. ;-)
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    You're assuming startups are all tech. At my job, tech is not even 1/3 of employees.
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Browser extensions are not meant for the technical crowd, they're meant to be installed by all users of the browser. If someone is not bright enough to figure out how to install a browser extension, or change a lightbulb, or refill the ice tray, tech worker or not I don't need them in my startup.
  - nharada 1y ago
    Roku tho
  - posterguy 1y ago
    ah yes, let me just install a browser extension on the kids ipad
    - whatshisface 1y ago
      FYI for next time you're buying, you can install Firefox on Android, although this is perhaps threatened by Google's planned changes to user's ability to install software.
hysan 1y ago
I also have YouTube premium and watch mostly on my iPad and TV. YouTube constantly logs me out at least once per day. I notice because I’ll randomly start seeing ads again (I open videos from my rss reader, never their site). This never happened when I wasn’t on premium. I don’t get what they’re doing, but my impression after almost a year is that it’s only slightly less annoying than getting ads. At this point, I might as well not renew and just use ad block.
stronglikedan 1y ago
> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy I recently got paused for "watching on another device" when I wasn't. I don't think that policy you mention is too far off.
observationist 1y ago
ReVanced and other alternatives exist. So long as they are broadcasting media to the public without an explicit login system, so as to take advantage of public access for exposure, it will remain perfectly legitimate and ethical to access the content through whatever browser or software you want. After they blitzed me with ads and started arbitrarily changing features and degrading the experience, I stopped paying them and went for the free and adblocking clients and experience. I may get rid of phones from my life entirely if they follow through with blocking third party apps and locking things down.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  the problem is, you cannot be sure what Google does if they catch you violating their ToS. They have killed off entire google accounts for YT copyright strikes with no recourse.
  - realusername 1y ago
    That's why I'm not using Google accounts for anything important, I left gmail in 2014 and I really advise everybody to do the same. You never know when the hammer can drop.
    - bornfreddy 1y ago
      This. I simply don't understand why some people rely on Google given the risk level, impact and their no-recourse-except-maybe-public-shaming policy.
    - Akronymus 1y ago
      Yeah, same. I still have a gmail account that just forwards emails, and I update the email on services as they come on. Being on your own domain for email is just better.Though, I use a service provider to handle the mail server itself
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Google doesn't capriciously deprecate things in a short amount of time. When they sunset features, there's plenty of warning. They'll tell you that there's a hammer, that it's going to drop on you in 6 months, which is plenty of time for you to get out from under it. Which, I mean, I'd rather there not be a hammer, but it's not like they're gonna announce on a Friday that they're shutting down Google Keep on Monday and I need to wreck my whole weekend in order to save all my notes.
paxys 1y ago
I'm constantly baffled by how bad the implementation of YouTube Premium downloads is. Videos will buffer to 100% in a matter of seconds but get endlessly stuck when I hit the download button. Why? All the bytes are literally on my device already.
- jerf 1y ago
  The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x. Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again, the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30 seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its claims in small text that downloads are good for a month without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30 minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone, defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet fully downloaded". Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those don't have to be exclusive possibilities.
  - knome 1y ago
    the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught in some kind of a-b testing
    - jerf 1y ago
      They flop back and forth at a high frequency though. I can hit all three cases in five minutes and it's been like that for months. Also there is never a sensible reason to offer video speeds as a combo-box popup of all options from .05x to 4.00x. It's like three times the vertical size of my screen.
N0isRESFe8GXmqR 1y ago
I run into that download issue all the time. I need to pause downloading each video. Force close the youtube app. Then unpause the downloads to get them downloading again. It has been happening for years and is still unfixed.
dostick 1y ago
YouTube’s “Download” is not really a download, it’s actually “cache offline” within YouTube app.
- johnisgood 1y ago
  Lmao, people really should stop giving them money.
some-guy 1y ago
Also a paying YT Premium subscriber. I live in a rural part of CA where there isn't much 5G reception. For extremely long drives in my minivan, I allow my toddler to watch Ms. Rachel on the screen via an HDMI port input from my iPhone. Youtube Premium videos have DRM that disallow downloads to play over HDMI, so I had to do what you did and add them as files locally to VLC and play them from there.
fragmede 1y ago
I'll admit to using yt-dlp to get copies of videos I wish to have a local copy of, which can't be taken away from me by somebody else, but I pay for premium because that pays for content I watch. If you don't pay for content, where's it going to come from? Patreon only works for super dedicated stars with a huge following.
- Marsymars 1y ago
  I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t watch content that needs to be “paid for” in that way. e.g. The last several videos I downloaded for archiving were install instructions for car parts that were uploaded by the part manufacturer. (And that aren’t readily available through any other channel.)
ajjahs 1y ago
[dead]
icelancer 1y ago
YouTube premium "download" is also just completely fake. Downloaded where? What file can I copy?
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Files? What era do you hail from? Prehistory? There are no files anymore. I mean, there technically are, but copyright industry doesn't want you to look at them without authorization, security people don't want you to look at them at all, and UX experts think it's a bad idea for you to even know such thing as "files" exists. Share and enjoy. Like and subscribe. The world is just apps all the way down.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Ironically a very large chunk of youtube creators themselves need the ability to download real files so they can use segments in their own videos. TikTok is very strange in that it actually does let you download real files.
loganlinn 1y ago
I had a similar experience on YouTube Music. I discovered the message was misleading and I just had to enable downloads when not on WiFi
hamandcheese 1y ago
I have the opposite problem... frequently streaming a video gets stuck buffering even on my gigabit fiber connection, but I can download a full max quality version in a matter of seconds.

by piyuv 1y ago

beerandt 1y ago

Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with practically no customer service options, no real solutions besides cancel. I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so it was a last straw.

underlipton 1y ago
Halfway ready to fist-fight whichever exec drove the death of Play Music. It was a very, very good application, which could have continued to function as such when the platform ended, but they wouldn't even let us have that. I still have them and refuse to uninstall.

masklinn 1y ago

Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you were live-streaming and didn’t think to save a local copy or it impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.

hmstx 1y ago
Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded the audio locally at max quality. Back then, I think I already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url for the 720p version of the video. When they recently insisted by email I download any videos before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).

shantara 1y ago

I’m another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my less technical family members, and to use their native iOS apps. If they really tighten the rules on Premium family sharing, I’ll drop the subscription in an instant.

al_borland 1y ago
I’m a Premium user and primarily watch on AppleTV. A little while ago they added a feature where if I press the button to skip ahead on the remote when a sponsor section starts, it skips over the whole thing. It skips over “commonly skipped” sections. While it doesn’t totally remove it, it lets me choose if I want to watch or not, and gets me past it in a single button press. All using the native app. I was surprised the first time this happened. I assume the creators hate it.

cactusplant7374 1y ago

Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for offline downloads?

piyuv 1y ago
I’m not using brave browser so did not know it could download videos
- QuantumNomad_ 1y ago
  I’m using Brave, but didn’t know either :p
pcdoodle 1y ago
Nice, didn't know Brave could do that.
godelski 1y ago
> Why not use Brave browser Why not use a non-chromium browser and help prevent Google from having larger control over the Internet? We still need competition in the browser space or Google gets to have a disproportionate say in how the Internet is structured. I promise you, Firefox and Safari aren't that bad. Maybe Firefox is a little different but I doubt it's meaningfully different for most people [0]. So at least get your non techie family and friends onto them and install an ad blocker while you're at it. [0] the fact that you're an individual may mean you're not like most people. You being different doesn't invalidate the claim.
- cactusplant7374 1y ago
  Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://brave.com/transparency/ https://brave.com/transparency/

femtozer 1y ago

I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.

piyuv 1y ago
It’ll be fixed when some product manager can offer it as a promotion project
- ChocolateGod 1y ago
  and removed when that person who is promoted doesn't work on it again
- godelski 1y ago
  I was talking to "my friend" about how I'm annoyed my calendar duplicates holidays because it imports from multiple calendars and he asked me "what value" would be provided if this was solved. Confused I said it pushes things off so I can't read events. He clarified he meant monetary value... We're both programmers so we're both know we're talking about a one line regex... I know quite a number of people like this and they're in high positions at big tech companies... doesn't take a genius to figure out why everything has such shitty user experiences and why all the software is so poorly written. No one even seems to care about the actual product they'll only correct you to tell you the product is the stock and the customer is the shareholder, not the user. We fucked up...
  - fragmede 1y ago
    What did you tell him was the monetary value? Let's say there are like 5 holidays per year that result in days where some people have holidays but others do not, so business meetings happen that day that get missed. Let's say you have a 100 million people using this calendar software. Let's say 0.5 percent of those are in the executive class. Furthermore, let's say 10% of them miss a meeting due to this UI issue. That's 50,000 missed meetings. If we handwave that each of those meetings could have resulted in $10 million deals for their company, this UI bug is costing customers half a trillion dollars! So, after estimating the number of ping pong balls that fit on a 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp and put that on your promo packet. Half a trillion dollars!

ac29 1y ago

> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel That's been a policy for a while, the sign up page prominently says "Plan members must be in the same household". No idea if its enforced though.

phkahler 1y ago
I have 2 homes. Every time I "go up north" I have to switch my Netflix household and then back again when I return. This sounds like that won't even be possible.
- ewoodrich 1y ago
  If it works like Youtube TV you are given the option to switch household locations when you get the nag screen.

beala 1y ago

I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try. I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.

moralestapia 1y ago
Tangential. The TIDAL app is absolute trash, it has this same issue all the time; not just that, but also, if a download fails it just hangs there and does not download the rest of the album/playlist. Also, why would you want to download things in the first place? To watch them offline, right? Well, guess what happens when you open the app w/o an internet connection ... it asks you to login, so you cannot even access your music. 900k/year TOC genius work there. The only reason why I haven't canceled is because I'm too lazy to reset my password in order to login and cancel, lol. Might do it soon, though.
- galaxy_gas 1y ago
  When I try it for a month, the worst part.. your entire download queue fails forever unless you manually remove hundreds of items one by one There is no way to remove the stuck item if it's been pull from streaming library or you in country that -- such traveling etc -- does not have r ights to it. You simply cannot open the track to undownload it
  - lawgimenez 1y ago
    Also tried Tidal once with their trial, tried playing some music videos and it was just straight up blurry throughout. Not once did the music video played HD.

maplethorpe 1y ago

What video did you watch?

piyuv 1y ago
Nintendo Direct. Download issue persisted with all videos though

meindnoch 1y ago

>Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel. Then I have good news for you! https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown In fact, I've got an email from them about this already. My YT is still ad-free though, so not sure when it's going to kick in for real.

pixl97 1y ago
Ya I got this message when I was on vacation for a week. Seems a little messy on their part.

yolo_420 1y ago

I am a premium subscriber so I can download via yt-dlp in peace without any errors or warnings. We are not the same.

a96 1y ago
For now.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

For anyone here who runs a startup, I propose two lifestyle benefits you should add: 1. Unlimited YouTube Premium 2. Unlimited drink reimbursement (coffee, tea, smoothies, whatever) The psychological sense of loss from those two things would be larger than any 5% raise.

whatshisface 1y ago
I personally wouldn't want to hire a startup employee who couldn't figure out how to install a browser extension. ;-)
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  You're assuming startups are all tech. At my job, tech is not even 1/3 of employees.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Browser extensions are not meant for the technical crowd, they're meant to be installed by all users of the browser. If someone is not bright enough to figure out how to install a browser extension, or change a lightbulb, or refill the ice tray, tech worker or not I don't need them in my startup.
- nharada 1y ago
  Roku tho
- posterguy 1y ago
  ah yes, let me just install a browser extension on the kids ipad
  - whatshisface 1y ago
    FYI for next time you're buying, you can install Firefox on Android, although this is perhaps threatened by Google's planned changes to user's ability to install software.

hysan 1y ago

I also have YouTube premium and watch mostly on my iPad and TV. YouTube constantly logs me out at least once per day. I notice because I’ll randomly start seeing ads again (I open videos from my rss reader, never their site). This never happened when I wasn’t on premium. I don’t get what they’re doing, but my impression after almost a year is that it’s only slightly less annoying than getting ads. At this point, I might as well not renew and just use ad block.

stronglikedan 1y ago

> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy I recently got paused for "watching on another device" when I wasn't. I don't think that policy you mention is too far off.

observationist 1y ago

ReVanced and other alternatives exist. So long as they are broadcasting media to the public without an explicit login system, so as to take advantage of public access for exposure, it will remain perfectly legitimate and ethical to access the content through whatever browser or software you want. After they blitzed me with ads and started arbitrarily changing features and degrading the experience, I stopped paying them and went for the free and adblocking clients and experience. I may get rid of phones from my life entirely if they follow through with blocking third party apps and locking things down.

mschuster91 1y ago
the problem is, you cannot be sure what Google does if they catch you violating their ToS. They have killed off entire google accounts for YT copyright strikes with no recourse.
- realusername 1y ago
  That's why I'm not using Google accounts for anything important, I left gmail in 2014 and I really advise everybody to do the same. You never know when the hammer can drop.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    This. I simply don't understand why some people rely on Google given the risk level, impact and their no-recourse-except-maybe-public-shaming policy.
  - Akronymus 1y ago
    Yeah, same. I still have a gmail account that just forwards emails, and I update the email on services as they come on. Being on your own domain for email is just better.Though, I use a service provider to handle the mail server itself
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Google doesn't capriciously deprecate things in a short amount of time. When they sunset features, there's plenty of warning. They'll tell you that there's a hammer, that it's going to drop on you in 6 months, which is plenty of time for you to get out from under it. Which, I mean, I'd rather there not be a hammer, but it's not like they're gonna announce on a Friday that they're shutting down Google Keep on Monday and I need to wreck my whole weekend in order to save all my notes.

paxys 1y ago

I'm constantly baffled by how bad the implementation of YouTube Premium downloads is. Videos will buffer to 100% in a matter of seconds but get endlessly stuck when I hit the download button. Why? All the bytes are literally on my device already.

jerf 1y ago
The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x. Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again, the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30 seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its claims in small text that downloads are good for a month without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30 minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone, defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet fully downloaded". Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those don't have to be exclusive possibilities.
- knome 1y ago
  the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught in some kind of a-b testing
  - jerf 1y ago
    They flop back and forth at a high frequency though. I can hit all three cases in five minutes and it's been like that for months. Also there is never a sensible reason to offer video speeds as a combo-box popup of all options from .05x to 4.00x. It's like three times the vertical size of my screen.

N0isRESFe8GXmqR 1y ago

I run into that download issue all the time. I need to pause downloading each video. Force close the youtube app. Then unpause the downloads to get them downloading again. It has been happening for years and is still unfixed.

dostick 1y ago

YouTube’s “Download” is not really a download, it’s actually “cache offline” within YouTube app.

johnisgood 1y ago
Lmao, people really should stop giving them money.

some-guy 1y ago

Also a paying YT Premium subscriber. I live in a rural part of CA where there isn't much 5G reception. For extremely long drives in my minivan, I allow my toddler to watch Ms. Rachel on the screen via an HDMI port input from my iPhone. Youtube Premium videos have DRM that disallow downloads to play over HDMI, so I had to do what you did and add them as files locally to VLC and play them from there.

fragmede 1y ago

I'll admit to using yt-dlp to get copies of videos I wish to have a local copy of, which can't be taken away from me by somebody else, but I pay for premium because that pays for content I watch. If you don't pay for content, where's it going to come from? Patreon only works for super dedicated stars with a huge following.

Marsymars 1y ago
I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t watch content that needs to be “paid for” in that way. e.g. The last several videos I downloaded for archiving were install instructions for car parts that were uploaded by the part manufacturer. (And that aren’t readily available through any other channel.)

ajjahs 1y ago

[dead]

icelancer 1y ago

YouTube premium "download" is also just completely fake. Downloaded where? What file can I copy?

TeMPOraL 1y ago
Files? What era do you hail from? Prehistory? There are no files anymore. I mean, there technically are, but copyright industry doesn't want you to look at them without authorization, security people don't want you to look at them at all, and UX experts think it's a bad idea for you to even know such thing as "files" exists. Share and enjoy. Like and subscribe. The world is just apps all the way down.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Ironically a very large chunk of youtube creators themselves need the ability to download real files so they can use segments in their own videos. TikTok is very strange in that it actually does let you download real files.

loganlinn 1y ago

I had a similar experience on YouTube Music. I discovered the message was misleading and I just had to enable downloads when not on WiFi

hamandcheese 1y ago

I have the opposite problem... frequently streaming a video gets stuck buffering even on my gigabit fiber connection, but I can download a full max quality version in a matter of seconds.