Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.

Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos..

Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.

> how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos

The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.

YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.

A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.

I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.

Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.

Us not having the right seems a little extreme. What if I close my eyes and block my ears during evey ad? Do I not have the right to use YouTube then?

Maybe they'll come up with a solution that requires you to turn on your camera while on youtube so that they can detect if you have your eyes and ears unblocked during ads. Blocked-eyes-blocked-ears detected = popup that pauses the video and asks you to unblock before continuing.

This is an actual black mirror episode