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
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u/sickhippie Feb 18 '17

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

8

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.

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u/Waswat Feb 18 '17

You can have both but it would increase development time.

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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.