[ladams]

This has been my conclusion. I've spent the past few weeks polishing my yt-dlp scripts. Honestly, the experience of being able to watch any video I want offline and buffer-free is way better than the default YouTube experience. Sometimes I miss the comments section, but it is probably better for me that I don't have access to that.

[ehnto]

I wonder if there is a market for a youtube downlod only mirror that creators can opt into, for this use case. Concurrent bandwidth requirements could be lower and no need for streaming tech. The service probably couldn't legally download from youtube and re-host, but if you made a desktop app that uploads to YT and the mirror service at the same time and mirrors the YT video ID on the mirror, that could be attractive to users.

All that said, how would such a service sustain itself? Probably ads. So really, same boat, different captain. I don't know.

Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

[chii]

> Would you pay a subscription to be able to download your YT video queue?

aka, buy youtube premium?

[F-W-M]

You build it around torrents and might earn the maintenance costs back with some non-intrusive ads.

[treyd]

It would be interesting to retrofit ActivityPub post feeds around mirrored YouTube videos.

[archargelod]

Grayjay[0] for android does this with their 'Polycentric Id'.

All videos from multiple platforms supported by the app have a special comment section only available through grayjay. Functionality is still pretty limited, but it's refreshing to write a comment and know that it won't be picked up by a bot and shadow-banned/deleted without reason.

0 - https://grayjay.app/

[gary_0]

Yep, a while back I grabbed yt-dlp and I've been going through my bookmarks and locally archiving useful (or nostalgic) YouTube videos. My 8TB hard drive beats Google's enshittification.