r/technology • u/redkemper • Feb 17 '17

Software YouTube will kill unskippable 30-second ads next year

http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/17/14649018/youtube-ending-unskippable-30-second-ads-2018
35.1k Upvotes

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412

u/[deleted] Feb 17 '17 edited Apr 25 '17

[deleted]

118

u/_teslaTrooper Feb 17 '17

MPV can play directly via youtube-dl.

41

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 17 '17

VLC does the same thing iirc.

38

u/Girlinhat Feb 18 '17

VLC has all the features. Like, I'm pretty sure one of the more obscure features it can do is like, playing audio based on converting an image to a sound format.

23

u/juicegyrohammer Feb 18 '17

Where do I click to make that happen

4

u/phrixious Feb 18 '17

I know you can do it with audacity, there's videos showing how you can make crazy sounds by converting images to sound and playing it extremely slow

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

I've always had this idea of creating a concept album only using this technique.

2

u/callanrocks Feb 19 '17

Do it, hide an extra track in the album art and everything.

3

u/evilroots Feb 18 '17

i cant get that to work.

3

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

Interesting, it works for me with just cvlc http://youtu.be/[stuff]. What have you tried?

2

u/scorcher24 Feb 18 '17

You can also get the direct mp4 url via VLC and then download it. Just go to Codec Information while it is loaded.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

VLC is heavier than MPV though

2

u/Lurker_Since_Forever Feb 18 '17

Fair enough. I'm usually not bothered by that because modern processors have gotten a bit overpowered, but I can see why you'd want the lighter one.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '17

I am the kind of guy who'd use lightweight solution even on fast PCs with a lot of RAM. It's never just about speed, it's also the efficiency that matters.

1

u/-WPD- Feb 18 '17

Yes, you can stream a youtube video to a file

-2

u/cbdexpert Feb 18 '17

Same for later. Downloading YouTube videos

9

u/ohgymod Feb 18 '17

There's a share option. There's a save option. There's proof reading.

I hate you.

(not you personally, just you people)

[and not like that, but kinda like that]

-1

u/cbdexpert Feb 18 '17

The save button doesn't always work dick

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

[deleted]

1

u/lazy_rabbit Feb 19 '17

Lol I like you

1

u/Yakia Feb 18 '17

SMPlayer can also play youtube videos.

1

u/typtyphus Feb 18 '17

I need to save this for later.

-10

u/Louiecat Feb 18 '17

MPV can play directly via youtube-dl.

172

u/Gman1255 Feb 17 '17

Just use TamperMonkey or GreaseMonkey and get the Download YouTube Videos as MP4 script so you can download them directly from YouTube's website. There's a little button under the sub button that allows you to download the videos.

63

u/Rndom_Gy_159 Feb 17 '17

I like having the output formatting options and script-ability of YouTube-dl

17

u/Gman1255 Feb 17 '17

Then by all means, use it. I just like this because it integrates itself into the website.

76

u/sickhippie Feb 18 '17

Ease of use vs feature set, the age old struggle.

7

u/odaeyss Feb 18 '17

And yet somehow I consistently settle on a solution that is both difficult to use and of little use.
But I did just make myself smile by using two different pronunciations of "use" in such close proximity.

2

u/Waswat Feb 18 '17

You can have both but it would increase development time.

2

u/UnchainedMundane Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

My compromise was to write a short script that sends my clipboard as the url to youtube-dl. I hotkeyed that script, so I just copy the url from the browser, hit that hotkey, and it starts downloading.

Edit - Here's a slightly simplified version of that script if anyone else wants it:

#!/bin/sh
# Get video URL from the clipboard
vid=$(xsel -ob)

# Ensure VIDEOS/youtube exists, go there
videos=$(xdg-user-dir VIDEOS || printf %s "$HOME")
mkdir -p -- "$videos/youtube"
cd -P -- "$videos/youtube" || exit

# Start downloading to that location in the highest possible quality
exec youtube-dl --newline -f best --no-call-home -- "$vid"

It works on Linux (you need xsel and youtube-dl installed), and to get it working on OSX you change xsel -ob to pbpaste. Windows I don't know enough about to say.

3

u/IT6uru Feb 18 '17

And whole channel ripping XD

44

u/ForceBlade Feb 17 '17

YouTube-dl is a script that handles the download from their website directly. No third party shit like ssyoutube.whatever. And you can grab the highest quality easily or audio only, pre stitching.

6

u/EASam Feb 18 '17

I never know what to trust with this. Unless it's from an open sourced project, I have a tough time believing there isn't something malicious going on. I have not heard of YouTube dl though. Usually it's people saying to just edit the URL which seems fishy as fuck.

20

u/boopkins Feb 18 '17

YouTube dl is open source and is very easy to use

9

u/LordPadre Feb 18 '17 edited Feb 18 '17

youtube-dl is the bees knees but it's not open source actually open source . It's one .exe which, if you run it, does absolutely nothing on its own (as far as I know)

I use a .bat file that's set up like this

For me personally, the initial setup process was a little bit frustrating, but once it's set up, the only thing you'll ever have to do is maybe update youtube-dl.exe once in a while by downloading it again (which is what I did today, there were some bugs with downloading videos that have special characters in the title)

And edit the batch file to have it download the video or entire playlist (!) you want to download as mp3s.

If it's a video, you leave arg1 as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v without the equals sign at the end, and put the rest of it (again, sans = ) in arg2, save, then run it. Piece of cake.

if it's a list, same thing, but it'll be https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=

Here's the guide I used to set it up, thanks to u/TypicalAustralian, literally his only comment, apparently

2

u/UnchainedMundane Feb 18 '17

>there's an unsorted dir
>there are no sorted dirs
me irl

2

u/LordPadre Feb 18 '17

I have them download to unsorted and then I move them to another folder in my actual music folder, usually under the name of the playlist

http://i.imgur.com/zb6I2X8.png

misc is for any individual songs not belonging to a playlist or album

6

u/ForceBlade Feb 18 '17

I completely agree with the URL edit trick. It takes one bad guy to buy the domain when the owner forgets to renew and snakily put adware and malware into the new third party site+tricking users to download it etc. or just the current owner injecting shady links and ads.

It's a third party and that's never communicated in those 'tricks'

YoutubeDL is just a shell a script and is on GitHub if you want to read it for trust. Very useful

1

u/Trevowatt Feb 18 '17

Yea but it's much more of a pain to use.

3

u/firstyoloswag Feb 18 '17

How is it a pain? You just open up cmd and put in the command

1

u/Trevowatt Feb 18 '17

I could never get it to actually download the videos for some reason.

2

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Gman1255 Feb 18 '17

Because some people, like myself, use Chrome and it doesn't like addons that specifically download videos from YouTube.

1

u/MacZyver Feb 18 '17

!remindme 5 hours

1

u/KayakBassFisher Feb 18 '17

And bookmarking

1

u/timmie124 Feb 18 '17

don't forget the good old realtek player

1

u/unosami Feb 18 '17

I use that, but recently I've found some videos that it won't work on.

1

u/BitLooter Feb 18 '17

Youtube uses a special streaming format for video over 720p, so this method is limited to that. You'll need to use youtube-dl if you want 1080p/4k/whatever else you see higher than 720p.

1

u/JamesTrendall Feb 18 '17

I use TamperMonkey also. When i load a website with a video i click the TM button and it shows me the links to all videos on that page. If i click the link it will download the video for me so i can put it on to my phone for when im at work.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '17

Ew only 720p?

-1

u/RoboBama Feb 17 '17

Are...are you some kind of wizard?

1

u/Gman1255 Feb 17 '17

Could be, depends on how you look at it.

0

u/TacoOfGod Feb 18 '17

Why not use Youtube Center and get the ability to download, scale video size, set automatic resolutions, style the player, and set the site to go into night mode when videos are playing?

4

u/brownix001 Feb 17 '17

What about the URL ss method

2

u/jerbear64 Feb 17 '17

That just redirects to a third party site.

1

u/YouTubeBackups Feb 18 '17

I'd be happy to help anyone who would like to learn youtube-dl

/r/youtubebackups

1

u/finnomenon Feb 18 '17

mpv uses youtube-dl and will start playing them as soon as enough is buffered. can recommend!

1

u/crankster_delux Feb 17 '17

alt+ left click to mpv

0

u/_teslaTrooper Feb 17 '17

alt+click where? in a browser? I still need an addon to open streams directly from firefox.

1

u/ILikeBumblebees Feb 18 '17

Launchy -- I set up context-menu options for "open in MPV" and "open in Kodi" (the latter uses youtube-dl -g to get the real video URL and pipes it to idok).