Ask HN: What's the big deal about YT-dl when streaming has replaced downloading?
Back in the day, we had thumb drives, external hard drives, internet download managers, torrent websites, video player software, and ways to download yt videos for later use.
But now there's barely any need for those as streaming has pretty much replaced the old mediums of acquiring and consuming video. But having a look at youtube-dl's repo, there's more than 109k stars, which shows how popular the thing is. Even a DDG bug that would exclude youtube-dl from the search results received so much attention by HN.
Still though, I don't understand why downloading from yt is so important nowadays. To be clear, I'm not asking whether it's ethical or not. I'm asking why do people need to download stuff in the first place?
58 comments
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You can also watch it in a proper player that gives you more control over playback than what the JS from google gives you.
You can watch it anytime, anywhere, even when you are somewhere without an internet connection.
You can watch it on any device capable of playing the content, whether or not those devices can access youtube directly and/or can stream from youtube.
You can transcode it for playback on another device that is unable to play the original file.
You can watch as much as you like, pause, take breaks, jump backwards, forwards, go into slow-motion, do frame steps, all without google recording your every interaction with the video.
As with downloading music: that's exactly my question. Why would people download and play music like 10 years ago while there are numerous streaming services out there?
'Gone with the Wind' pulled from HBO Max until it can return with 'historical context' - https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/media/gone-with-the-wind-hbo-...
Amazon vanishes 1984 from citizen Kindles - https://www.theregister.com/2009/07/18/amazon_removes_1984_f...
Netflix solved most of the problem, it was paradise (aside from licensing issues that may mean that you can't watch some stuff in your country)! But... Thus came greed.
And all of the sudden, you need 10 subscriptions to access it all. And not everyone has that money. Actually, most people don't. So you... Choose? You either watch Disney stuff or the other stuff... But Game Of Thrones? Oh now you're on HBO... But no, you need HBO MAX as well... Oh...
So that's the story of how I rediscovered Jellyfin, sonarr, radar, etc... I can have it all and it's free.
It's sad that piracy is the best and most reliable way to consume media, but here we are.
If it wasn’t infeasible to download all of TNG, voy, and ds9 to my iPad, I would in a heartbeat.
The problem is, YouTube and others will remove music from time to time. All of a sudden a song you liked but didn't bother to check what it's called is gone and you don't even know it's gone. At some point you remember something about it but you can't find it anywhere.
It's like a piece of memory has been removed from your brain but you have some residue left, "was it real or was it a dream? I can't remember".
I do not have constant internet access. Furthermore mobile internet is very expensive. I can just run a bash script on my terminal emulator that checks if I'm on a known wifi network and runs my downloads and copies them to proper folder.
This way I can listen to music without the internet and/or without requiring that i leave my screen open and on the youtube app.
Evidence: Myself, who downloads things.
With downloaded video you can play back with better control, look at individual frames, edit, remix, etc.
Most of the time I use to be free from distraction.
I have fast internet, but battery consumption of tabs and mobile is too high for my comfort with data/wifi turned on.
I download 4k/2k videos for anything super interesting and >= 30 minutes and watch them later.
Some episodes of some podcasts are super worth it to keep in your hard disk.
I also download and save Chopin and Bach playlist to device and then later play them for long hours.
Videos disappear a lot on YT. Interesting videos that I saved on "Watch Later" disappeared quite a few times.
Also I think that the streaming mentality treats content as something more disposable and constantly changing. Why would someone want to download something when it'll soon get old?
I think that disposable content is a waste of time. Downloading makes more sense when the content has higher value as a work and is more permanent
But of course, it makes more sense from a business standpoint to make people pay for access as opposed to ownership
Before that, when streaming was a practical option, I tried revisiting some videos I had already watched, only to be find they had been taken down. This happened often enough to be annoying.
So, everything gets saved to local storage, and eventually to on-site and off-site backups.
Too many forces want to change history, gaslight the masses and disinform them.
For example, how long do you think this video will be around: https://youtu.be/jiBXmbkwiSw
Not for long, that's for sure.
More generally, I've learned the hard way to never trust that any content on the internet will stay up forever. If something is important to you, back it up, sooner rather than later. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is great but it does not backup everything!
I tend to save something if I find it interesting and it is something that isn't exactly a copyrighted piece.
I prefer written material for the ease of searching, but there are some things video is really good at, like showing how to make a fire.
I don't need to download. I prefer it to subscribing (with money and/or data) to a streaming service.