I had a Youtube Subscription mainly for using Youtube Music since last year. I used to be on Newpipe before that. However, the mobile app always made be feel uneasy. From not being able to choose system wide video quality for all Youtube videos at once[ seriously, there is like ‘High’ or ‘Data Saver’ only and explicit options are available per videos only ] to Youtube nudging me to purchase/join a Youtuber’s membership channel really irked me [I just paid you, Youtube ; why are you constantly asking me to pay more for something I don’t want? Why can’t I disable those notifications ?]

I have some time remaining on my subscription but converted to Tubular [Newpipe fork with Sponsorblock] simply because it doesn’t treat it’s end users like trash. Even for YTM, I switched to Revanced version which offered endless customization. I could hide useless stuff like cast, share buttons to even functions in the Account tab. The granular control was so much that I was able to get a simplistic neat looking UI setup.

In the transition, I understand, I lose some of my playlists [under a throwaway Google account since I don’t wish to risk my main one getting banned] but I understand that the only true way anyone controls their music[or any form of data is by truly owning them and streaming services don’t allow that]. It might sound stupid, but I have been downloading music from Soulseek for some time and now just plan to transfer some of my favorites over to the SD card.

It was never a money problem. It was an experience problem. I paid money to Google and all I got was Shorts, Games and other stuff I didn’t wanted. I never got customization or fine grained controls. The open source community offers that. Sorry for the long rant.

  • Raccoonn@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Forgot to mention that mpv is how I actually watch the videos. Newsboat downloads a list from each channel kinda like an RSS feed. I can then select any video & download it by pressing a keybinding. It’s been a while since I last had to actually set this up, but off memory, here’s some quick info…

    The file ~/.newsboat/urls contains URLs similar to the one below. Just replace CHANNEL_ID with the actual channel ID. You can find the channel ID in the URL of the channel’s page…

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

    With the URLs in place you can edit your newsboat config file to set up a key binding for downloading videos using yt-dlp. It should be as simple as adding something like the following to the config…

    macro d set browser “yt-dlp %u”; open-in-browser ; set browser “xdg-open %u”

    This binds the d key to use yt-dlp to download videos.