[izacus]

So now there's YouTube app (which doens't allow me to listen to a talk offline on an airplane or background or pay for YouTube Red), YouTube Music app (which I'm not allowed to use at all), YouTube Gaming (which has an UI and UX build by a madman). Then there's AndroidTV version of YouTube app which has severe feature limitations and probably some others as well. I don't really like to be negative, but it doesn't seem that Google has any idea what to do with YouTube or any interest of expanding it to EU and the rest of the world. Not to mention the rampant catastrophe that's ContentID police system that's benefiting only large corporate abusers with no recourse.

So I wonder, will I perhaps be able to watch talks and other videos on an airplane now using YouTube Go? Which subset of functionality will work on this soon-to-be-abandoned app? Does it even address any of the issues that content creators, Google and us users have with the platform?

[gue5t]

Try youtube-dl (before the international copyright police C&D it). I'm sure there's an app wrapper that can handle intents (NewPipe? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12591466), and then you can open the videos in the VLC app.

The owners of YouTube do not have it in their best interest to provide you with flexible, no-nonsense tools.

[sergiotapia]

`youtube-dl` is a national treasure. No other tool (except maybe MPV) has made it's way into my day to day usage in years.

[gue5t]

mpv is the gold standard in video players. I use both constantly.

[personjerry]

What's the difference between mpv and vlc?

[tripzilch]

It has better performance on my old laptop, especially when I hook it up to a 1080p screen. Seeking is more instant. It starts much quicker.

It's more minimal in the interface (basically full-screen with a bunch of kbd shortcuts) but has all the features I need (including playback speed), and even some that are not in VLC--for instance, VLC has a key to advance 1 frame ('e', IIRC) and mpv can step both ways (with ',' and '.').

A few downsides: it doesn't seem to have playlist functionality (not that VLC's playlist UI is that great, but it works). to load a subtitle file, you either need to specify it on the command line or it needs to match the filename exactly, in VLC you can just drag'n'drop any subtitle onto the player to load it or use an Open File dialog. mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).

On the whole, I use mpv for almost anything. Indeed in combination with youtube-dl, I've made an alias for `youtube-dl <URL> --exec "mpv --fs --fs-screen 1 {} &"`, which starts the player immediately after download, full-screen, on the second (big) monitor. I still use VLC whenever I want to watch multiple short videos in a playlist. And of course VLC on Android because it's really for both video as well as playing music--although I feel there should be a better musicplayer, one that allows me to browse my collection through the file system instead of tags (which VLC does) but has a real smooth UI to manage playlists (which has been clunky in most Android players I've tried).

[Nadya]

>mpv immediately exits when the video is finished playing which is actually nice sometimes, but also can be annoying if you wanted to rewind the last 10 seconds or something or if you seek forward too quickly (maybe mpv has a setting for this though).

There is a setting for this called "After Playback". By default it is "close" but you can also "play next" (video in the folder, useful if shows are organized by folder and by episode) and other options, including "do nothing" or "play from beginning".

I'm at work so don't remember exactly where to change this setting.

[justifier]

From the readme:

> A not too crappy GPU. mpv is not intended to be used with bad GPUs. There are many caveats with drivers or system compositors causing tearing, stutter, etc. On Windows, you might want to make sure the graphics drivers are current, especially OpenGL. In some cases, ancient fallback video output methods can help (such as --vo=xv on Linux), but this use is not recommended or supported. (o)

Whereas VLC has a similar option but it's sort of an afterthought and you have to activate it, from the wiki:

> The VLC media player framework can use your graphic card (a.k.a. GPU) to accelerate decoding of video streams depending on the video codec, graphic card model and operating system.

(o) https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/README.md

(i) https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_GPU_Decoding/

[Nadya]

In addition to what others have already said, VLC also has a bug with certain graphics cards (I want to say Nvidia?) - resulting in washed out/off-color video. It can be "fixed" with great-but-not-quite-perfect accuracy [0].

[0] https://wiki.videolan.org/VSG:Video:Color_washed_out/

[sergiotapia]

`mpv movie.mp4` and boom - you're watching the video with no cruft. Not rebuilding font database and other bullshit you don't care about. It runs really well on older hardware.

[mynameislegion]

More tools along the same lines: cclive get-flash-videos iview-cli nomnom pafy svtplay-dl quvi nicovideo-dl WWW::YouTube::Download

[toomanybeersies]

Wow, cheers for that.

I was looking for a youtube video downloader a week or two back, but was really struggling to find one that wasn't spamware.

[yellowapple]

There's also a Greasemonkey userscript called "YouTube Center" (https://github.com/YePpHa/YouTubeCenter/wiki) that I've found to work pretty well for an in-browser tool.

[rasz_pl]

it hasnt been updated in a while and is mostly broken now :(

"Download YouTube Videos as MP4" on the other hand has active dev, https://github.com/gantt/downloadyoutube

[Endy]

I just like pwnyoutube.com, honestly.

[ljk]

https://www.pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=[link]

also works

[quirkafleeg]

What am I missing here?

I paste a Youtube link into one of the hundreds of Google results for "Youtube downloader" and I get a bunch of clear Google video download links in various formats.

I paste a URL into "PWN Youtube" and I get this (buried in a mass of other text I don't care about, hard selling me to spam the site on FB/Twitter/Friends):

    Download this video as FLV or MP4 files
    Use one of: Peggo | Telecharger(warning) | SaveFrom
        9xbuddy(warning) | File2HD (?) | Dirpy(warning)

If I have to jump through another hoop of visiting some other dodgy website - some literally have warnings next to them (!) - to eventually get a download link, what's the point of "PWN Youtube"? Why don't I just use the dodgy sites directly (or, even easier, use their bookmarklets)?

> This website is not affiliated with YouTube.com "YouTube" is a copyright of YouTube, LLC.

Probably shouldn't be using the word/trademark in its domain name then.

[ljk]

good point; i've been using that link for a long time so it's second nature to me to ignore the warnings

[est]

That's the outside view. For a inside view, it's pretty much résumé-driven development. Everyone in the team wins.

And offline stuff won't happen on the main Youtube app because politics.

[izacus]

But the offline stuff is already in there and implemented. For some reason outside US we're just not allowed to use/pay for it.

[krisroadruck]

Im uh... not sure what you are on about with the red and download bit. Im a youtube red subscriber, and I can download videos for offline viewing in the youtube app. It also indicates that I am a red subscriber in it.

[Ph0X]

I think he's referring to the fact that Youtube Red is not available in every country yet.

I think each of these address a very different problem, and completely disagree with him. Trying to bundle all of these things into one big app will just make the app bloated and development painful. Youtube at this point has many different uses (average length videos, live streams, music/audio) and trying to have a one size fits all app is not necessarily the right way to go.

Youtube GO is meant for people who live in areas with poor connectivity. Again, having them download a big 100mb bloated app is not the right solution. On the other hand, people with LTE don't care about the download size and locally sharing videos, so why put that in the same app? Same thing with trying to put Chatting/Livestream notification into the Youtube app, or trying to hack a music player into it.

[elmigranto]

I know! Google should make a separate app for each channel :)

[izacus]

> Im uh... not sure what you are on about with the red and download bit.

"YouTube Red isn’t available in your country." Which of course somehow has to mean I'm not allowed to watch non-monetized videos offline.

[jwr]

And none of these apps allow me to speed up video lectures (1.25x, 1.5x, 2x).

Plus, the "main" YouTube app still insists on displaying a small video with tons of crap around it, so that I have to hunt for the tiny and easy to miss "full-screen" button. I clicked on the video to, you know, watch video, not read the captions under thumbnails from all the other videos YouTube thinks I might want to watch.

[Pxtl]

You also forgot the YouTube kids app, which provides no way to filter it more granular than the expected age target so if you downloaded it to let your kids watch a certain show it doesn't matter they'll be on unboxing videos, hacked pirate content, and weird homemade animations in no time.

[digi_owl]

I suspect the problem is big media rather than Google.

[izacus]

Somehow Apple and some other companies manage to handle that way better, including offline downloads for content and the ability to give them my EUR.

Google on the other hand refuses to even show us Podcasts category on Play music. Podcasts.

[fpgeek]

You're comparing apples and oranges. Apple doesn't provide anything like YouTube. If they did, they would have similar issues - there are all sorts of legal and business constraints associated with that kind of service.

A more appropriate comparison would be comparing the iTunes movie and TV store with Google's equivalent (Google Play Movies & TV):

* Both have movie purchases in over 100 countries. Apple has TV purchases in 6 countries [1]. Google has them in 8 [2]

* Both allow offline download of purchased videos. Google also allows downloading purchases to SD cards (less relevant for Apple).

* Google has a web-based player for purchased videos. Apple doesn't, AFAIK.

* Apple has carrier billing in 6 countries [3]. Google has it in 45 [4]. Google also allows you to use PayPal in a number of countries.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204411

[2] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2843119?hl=en

[3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205102

[4] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/2651410?hl=en

[Sargos]

Apple doesn't have anything like YouTube.

And Google Play which is Google's equivalent of Apple's iTunes does allow offline downloads and does take your money.

[haldean]

There's a podcasts section in the Google Music Android app; what are you referring to?

[izacus]

The fact that there is no podcast section my Google Music Android app. Google managed to region lock podcasts.

[fma]

I use Tubex to listen to YouTube in the background. It's free. Not sure about the other features.

[cosarara97]

Youtube web on firefox for android allows it too. Funny that the mobile browser version works better than the app.