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Comment by trilogic

2 months ago

No requirements for me. I don´t use YT at all :) There are plenty of better alternatives.

My brother sent me a long talk on YouTube and pleaded with me to listen to it. Watching was pointless the video was just talking heads sitting in chairs. However you can’t just play a video and turn off your phone while listening to the audio on headphones. The mobile browser sleeps and the audio stops. So I used yt-dlp to rip the audio and dropped it into my Plex server to listen to with Prologue. It wasn’t even about the ads, I just wanted to do some gardening and listen to something on headphones while I worked, without my phone screen on.

  • Firefox Mobile has an extension "Video Background Play Fix" to disable the Page Visibility API anti-feature.

  • on iphone, if you use youtube in the browser in stead of the app (as you should), then you can do background listening if you play the video, lock the phone, unlock the phone, play th video again, lock the phone, unlock the phone, resume play with the media controls, lock the phone.

I'm watching not youtube but video creators. There is no even worse alternative if person you want to watch doesn't publish video on other site.

Maybe, for watching "recommended" stream without any subscriptions there are alternatives (which? I cannot name good ones, anyway), but if you watch your subscription you are bound to platform which contain this subscription. And no, content creators are not interchangeable.

It's obviously not about YT the product, but about YT the content library. I don't think there are better alternatives to that content library.