Comment by piyuv
2 months ago
I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting for download..” on my iPad. Same on iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself). Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c flash drive, and watched it from that.
Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel. Family members make good use of ad-free.
I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try.
I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.
This is exactly why Google is clamping down on running your own choice of apps on Android, as well as pushing things like remote attestation on both phones and browsers.
It's time to milk the entire userbase for every cent they can get out of them by any means necessary. The future is bleak.
> This is exactly why Google is clamping down on running your own choice of apps on Android, as well as pushing things like remote attestation on both phones and browsers.
Yes, Google is doing this; but I don't believe Google is doing it to squeeze an inconsequentially small boost in YT Premium subscriptions from former-account-sharers - I believe they're doing it because they want to demonstrate that YouTube is a "secure" platform for large, Hollywood-like, production studios to feel comfortable publishing first-runs of new TV content directly to YouTube - and those production companies are famously paranoid, luddite, and comically ignorant of cryptography fundamentals (i.e. they believe DRM can simultaneously allow legal subscriber Alice but deny evil pirate Bob from watching protected content when Alice and Bob are in-reality the same person (it's you, me, us!).
..and if not Hollywood studios, then certainly the major sports leagues. [The NFL's lawyers seem like real fun at parties](https://publicknowledge.org/the-nfl-wants-you-to-think-these...).
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They will probably start requiring SecureBoot as well. So at some point running Linux will also pose a problem. It's not impossible but the extra steps are a pain in the butt.
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I use yt-dlp inside of a-shell on iOS, then play files using VLC.
Doesn’t solve VLCs suckiness on iOS. No PiP support when it’s been in iOS for years now…
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i use this for things i repost on IG with commentary. i would rather not have a huge folder of downloads of random stuff i'm not even sure i want to revisit. (and i'm bad about clearing out space on my phone.)
Nice trick I'll have to try this. Thanks!
What shell app do you use?
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NewPipe is incredible. If Google ever stops signing apps like that, I'll be switching to a Linux phone.
I use another app from F-Droid called Skytube for occasional downloads. I like it.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.legacy.oss/
What do you mean by signing? Application signing on android is done by the developer, with their own key. Or by fdroid, in the case of apps built by fdroid in the default repository.
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as soon as they have a map app that works with car play i'm switching to linux phone.
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"If Google ever stops signing apps like that, I'll be switching to a LInux phone."
Is this another way of saying, "I will keep using it until it stops working"
Use Tubular, which is basically NewPipe with Sponsorblock. (And has really nice Android Auto support which I learned after a while)
>, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client.
NewPipe is so good and so useful. It can even play 4K and watch livestreams now.
Tangential.
The TIDAL app is absolute trash, it has this same issue all the time; not just that, but also, if a download fails it just hangs there and does not download the rest of the album/playlist.
Also, why would you want to download things in the first place? To watch them offline, right? Well, guess what happens when you open the app w/o an internet connection ... it asks you to login, so you cannot even access your music. 900k/year TOC genius work there.
The only reason why I haven't canceled is because I'm too lazy to reset my password in order to login and cancel, lol. Might do it soon, though.
When I try it for a month, the worst part.. your entire download queue fails forever unless you manually remove hundreds of items one by one
There is no way to remove the stuck item if it's been pull from streaming library or you in country that -- such traveling etc -- does not have r ights to it. You simply cannot open the track to undownload it
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One thing I like about Tidal though: you can download everything, DRM-free, using tidal-ng.
But with TIDAL I cut them some slack because they're not a multibillion dollar behemoth.
I do wish they'd improve their CarPlay search results though. I hate asking for a well known song and getting some obscure EDM remix.
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Premium subscriber here.
Download feature on iOS always works flawlessly whenever I need to hop on a long haul flight (several times a year).
I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.
The auto-dub feature is madness. I noticed it first a couple of days ago, I'm crossing my fingers that few authors choose to enable it, and that YouTube makes it easy to disable as a default in settings (not currently possible, you have to do it as you watch, every time).
I'm in a Spanish speaking country, but I want to watch English videos in English.
Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I want to listen to the original voices!
It is enabled by default. One creator of English language content had their video misclassified as Spanish and people were getting a machine English dub on an English video. Support to fix it appears to be a nightmare.
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I don't want it dubbed whether I speak the language or not.
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What about the auto translated titles? It also happens for chapters in the video...
Sames languages as you. It drives me nuts because the translations are almost always wrong.
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Comments are quite good at pointing out when the creator has accidentally left it on (it is of course enabled by default and authors have to actively disable it).
> Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I want to listen to the original voices!
The first time I saw this feature, it was on a cover of some pop song in a foreign language. Why on Earth... ?
It’ll be fixed when some product manager can offer it as a promotion project
I was talking to "my friend" about how I'm annoyed my calendar duplicates holidays because it imports from multiple calendars and he asked me "what value" would be provided if this was solved. Confused I said it pushes things off so I can't read events. He clarified he meant monetary value...
We're both programmers so we're both know we're talking about a one line regex...
I know quite a number of people like this and they're in high positions at big tech companies... doesn't take a genius to figure out why everything has such shitty user experiences and why all the software is so poorly written. No one even seems to care about the actual product they'll only correct you to tell you the product is the stock and the customer is the shareholder, not the user.
We fucked up...
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and removed when that person who is promoted doesn't work on it again
I wonder who got the idea at Youtube that forced auto-dub was a good idea. This shows how dysfunctional the management is. It's one thing to have assholes in your team, it's a different thing to not look at what they are doing.
I tried installing ReVanced recently. The configuration of the system (install a downloader/updater which then installs the app) was a huge turn-off. Why is it so complicated? Moreover, why not NewPipe or LibreTube?
When it was just YouTube Vanced they got DMCA'd for redistributing "stolen software"
So instead of "stolen software" they distribute "patches" and a patching framework.
Legally distinct and modding is a much grayer area.
It's code you run locally to company the file, change the bytecode and repack it.
I haven't used it myself, but my understanding was that revanced was patching the offical youtube app, while the other two are from scratch reimplementations. You wouldn't be allowed to distribute the full version of revanced, you can only distribute the patch.
Because no matter how much the YouTube app may suck in various ways, it's still vastly better than NewPipe and LibreTube in UX and much more enjoyable to use. So I'd rather use a patched version where the bad parts are removed over something like NewPipe which is just nowhere as polished.
Thanks for the recommendation.
I was using the browser feature that disables the mobile mode on smartphones.
The autodub feature should be disabled asap. Or at least have a way to disable globally on all my devices.
Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you were live-streaming and didn’t think to save a local copy or it impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.
Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded the audio locally at max quality. Back then, I think I already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url for the 720p version of the video.
When they recently insisted by email I download any videos before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).
Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with practically no customer service options, no real solutions besides cancel.
I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so it was a last straw.
Halfway ready to fist-fight whichever exec drove the death of Play Music. It was a very, very good application, which could have continued to function as such when the platform ended, but they wouldn't even let us have that. I still have them and refuse to uninstall.
>Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel.
Then I have good news for you! https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown
In fact, I've got an email from them about this already. My YT is still ad-free though, so not sure when it's going to kick in for real.
Ya I got this message when I was on vacation for a week. Seems a little messy on their part.
I’m another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my less technical family members, and to use their native iOS apps. If they really tighten the rules on Premium family sharing, I’ll drop the subscription in an instant.
I’m a Premium user and primarily watch on AppleTV. A little while ago they added a feature where if I press the button to skip ahead on the remote when a sponsor section starts, it skips over the whole thing. It skips over “commonly skipped” sections.
While it doesn’t totally remove it, it lets me choose if I want to watch or not, and gets me past it in a single button press. All using the native app. I was surprised the first time this happened. I assume the creators hate it.
ReVanced and other alternatives exist.
So long as they are broadcasting media to the public without an explicit login system, so as to take advantage of public access for exposure, it will remain perfectly legitimate and ethical to access the content through whatever browser or software you want.
After they blitzed me with ads and started arbitrarily changing features and degrading the experience, I stopped paying them and went for the free and adblocking clients and experience.
I may get rid of phones from my life entirely if they follow through with blocking third party apps and locking things down.
> ReVanced and other alternatives exist.
For now. I suspect this is the real reason Google is going to require a developer cert even for sideloaded apps: https://www.techradar.com/phones/android/google-will-soon-st...
the problem is, you cannot be sure what Google does if they catch you violating their ToS. They have killed off entire google accounts for YT copyright strikes with no recourse.
That's why I'm not using Google accounts for anything important, I left gmail in 2014 and I really advise everybody to do the same.
You never know when the hammer can drop.
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> ReVanced and other alternatives exist.
until next year, when google will require real name and address for dev of side loaded apps
I'm constantly baffled by how bad the implementation of YouTube Premium downloads is. Videos will buffer to 100% in a matter of seconds but get endlessly stuck when I hit the download button. Why? All the bytes are literally on my device already.
The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x. Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again, the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30 seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its claims in small text that downloads are good for a month without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30 minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone, defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet fully downloaded".
Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those don't have to be exclusive possibilities.
the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught in some kind of a-b testing
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Because they want to control the bytes on your devices.
Giving you the bytes would be easy, the hard part is preventing the free flow of information. And those bugs are the side effects.
Also a paying YT Premium subscriber. I live in a rural part of CA where there isn't much 5G reception. For extremely long drives in my minivan, I allow my toddler to watch Ms. Rachel on the screen via an HDMI port input from my iPhone. Youtube Premium videos have DRM that disallow downloads to play over HDMI, so I had to do what you did and add them as files locally to VLC and play them from there.
> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy
I recently got paused for "watching on another device" when I wasn't. I don't think that policy you mention is too far off.
I also have YouTube premium and watch mostly on my iPad and TV. YouTube constantly logs me out at least once per day. I notice because I’ll randomly start seeing ads again (I open videos from my rss reader, never their site). This never happened when I wasn’t on premium. I don’t get what they’re doing, but my impression after almost a year is that it’s only slightly less annoying than getting ads. At this point, I might as well not renew and just use ad block.
> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel
That's been a policy for a while, the sign up page prominently says "Plan members must be in the same household".
No idea if its enforced though.
I have 2 homes. Every time I "go up north" I have to switch my Netflix household and then back again when I return. This sounds like that won't even be possible.
If it works like Youtube TV you are given the option to switch household locations when you get the nag screen.
I'll admit to using yt-dlp to get copies of videos I wish to have a local copy of, which can't be taken away from me by somebody else, but I pay for premium because that pays for content I watch. If you don't pay for content, where's it going to come from? Patreon only works for super dedicated stars with a huge following.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t watch content that needs to be “paid for” in that way. e.g. The last several videos I downloaded for archiving were install instructions for car parts that were uploaded by the part manufacturer. (And that aren’t readily available through any other channel.)
YouTube’s “Download” is not really a download, it’s actually “cache offline” within YouTube app.
Lmao, people really should stop giving them money.
YouTube premium "download" is also just completely fake. Downloaded where? What file can I copy?
Files? What era do you hail from? Prehistory?
There are no files anymore. I mean, there technically are, but copyright industry doesn't want you to look at them without authorization, security people don't want you to look at them at all, and UX experts think it's a bad idea for you to even know such thing as "files" exists.
Share and enjoy. Like and subscribe. The world is just apps all the way down.
Ironically a very large chunk of youtube creators themselves need the ability to download real files so they can use segments in their own videos.
TikTok is very strange in that it actually does let you download real files.
I run into that download issue all the time. I need to pause downloading each video. Force close the youtube app. Then unpause the downloads to get them downloading again. It has been happening for years and is still unfixed.
I have the opposite problem... frequently streaming a video gets stuck buffering even on my gigabit fiber connection, but I can download a full max quality version in a matter of seconds.
I had a similar experience on YouTube Music. I discovered the message was misleading and I just had to enable downloads when not on WiFi
I am a premium subscriber so I can download via yt-dlp in peace without any errors or warnings.
We are not the same.
For now.
Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for offline downloads?
Why not use a non-chromium browser and help prevent Google from having larger control over the Internet?
We still need competition in the browser space or Google gets to have a disproportionate say in how the Internet is structured. I promise you, Firefox and Safari aren't that bad. Maybe Firefox is a little different but I doubt it's meaningfully different for most people [0]. So at least get your non techie family and friends onto them and install an ad blocker while you're at it.
[0] the fact that you're an individual may mean you're not like most people. You being different doesn't invalidate the claim.
Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
https://brave.com/transparency/
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> Why not use Brave
Reddit has the answer for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
I’m not using brave browser so did not know it could download videos
I’m using Brave, but didn’t know either :p
Nice, didn't know Brave could do that.
Brave is a series scam company.
What video did you watch?
Nintendo Direct. Download issue persisted with all videos though
[dead]
For anyone here who runs a startup, I propose two lifestyle benefits you should add:
1. Unlimited YouTube Premium
2. Unlimited drink reimbursement (coffee, tea, smoothies, whatever)
The psychological sense of loss from those two things would be larger than any 5% raise.
I don't like that math, rather have the 5% than $8k in perks.
The pitch is for the employer: This would likely be both cheaper and simultaneously stickier.
I personally wouldn't want to hire a startup employee who couldn't figure out how to install a browser extension. ;-)
You're assuming startups are all tech. At my job, tech is not even 1/3 of employees.
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Roku tho
ah yes, let me just install a browser extension on the kids ipad
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