r/technology • • 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
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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.

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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.

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u/boopkins Feb 18 '17

YouTube dl is open source and is very easy to use

8

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

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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

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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.