Yeah, it could certainly be better. However, I did find some interesting old videos from someone who posts infrequently, so there’s that.

I think it’s a shame that CGP Grey and Philip from Kurzgesagt both bailed early on. I never quite got why, but I guess Nebula for them was just canibalizing their lucrative youtube/patreon business.

Haven’t tried either one, I’ll give them a follow. Thanks!

Yeah, my understanding is that they blocked Brazil due to some stuff they disagreed with. They’re certainly a mixed bag.

As far as I can see, that platform uses crypto for payments, which could also act as a deterrent to some people.

I’m confused, what I’m hearing is:

• YouTube - don’t want because of ads and ownership by Google
• Nebula - don’t want because of required subscription
• Odysee - don’t want because of optional crypto payments
• Rumble - undesirables use/invest in the platform?
• PeerTube (not mentioned) - not enough content

That seems unreasonable to me. All three of those alternatives have no ads and have content that you would probably enjoy. You don’t need to use crypto to use Odysee. You don’t need to watch Andrew Tate or support JD Vance to use Rumble. You do need to pay for Nebula, but you can pay for a single month if you just want to try it out.

But at the end of the day, these alternatives need to get paid to survive. None of them are perfect, which is a big part of why I use Grayjay, which lets me sub to creators from all of them without having to see those services’ front pages. I pay for Nebula and I donate to creators I like at Odysee outside the built-in crypto system. I don’t like JD Vance, but I also don’t particularly care if we invests in Rumble, that really doesn’t affect me in any way. My goal is to reduce my YT use, and I’m not going to get there by continually moving the goalposts, so I decided to just pull the trigger and try them all out, and they’re fine.

I agree. Tech communities have a habit of drastically over estimating how much everyone else cares about the details of tech.

Even something as simple as PC gaming scares off a lot of people because of the perception that you need to be some kind of tech wizard in order to cobble everything together to make a game run. Actual cobbling together of software to pirate (no matter how simple it seems to people in the know) is just a bunch of technobabble.

I’m more and more inclined towards the idea of piracy myself as time goes on and media continues to shave itself down into more and more ridiculous, unrelated shards, that you have to subscribe to just to be able to SEE if they have what you want.

I don’t actively do it actively since I dont really know where to begin, and things I have found have been to sketch for me, or requiring memberships or even payments to join.

Almost as if it’s just people who already pirate talking to each other about how hard they are going to pirate. Meanwhile general audiences don’t care.

this isn’t quite true, we have seen an uptick in piracy over the last few years from the streaming service hyper diversion thats been happening for some time now.

It’s probably not a lot of people, but it is still happening.

I think it needs regulation, the whole streaming industry needs to be regulated! It can’t be that the competition is made using exclusive content and you have to live with privacy infringement tech to consume cultural art legally.

In my opinion, in a capitalist system, the market competition should be about delivering the content the best way, not about what content they deliver.

Right now, they can made the delivery as shitty as they want, because what takes them apart from competition is the exclusive content, not the tech.

“Give me a Python script using yt-dlp that I can run on a cronjob that will download the videos from any of my subscribed channels since the last time the script was run”

You can use the following Python script to download videos from your subscribed channels since the last run. This script uses yt-dlp and stores the last download timestamp to track new videos.

First, ensure you have yt-dlp installed:

pip install yt-dlp

Then, create a script called download_videos.py:

import os
import json
import subprocess
from datetime import datetime

# Configuration
last_run_file = 'last_run.json'
download_directory = 'downloads'

# Ensure the download directory exists
os.makedirs(download_directory, exist_ok=True)

# Load the last run time
if os.path.exists(last_run_file):
    with open(last_run_file, 'r') as f:
        last_run = json.load(f)['last_run']
else:
    last_run = datetime.now().isoformat()

# Update the last run time to now
current_run = datetime.now().isoformat()

# Command to get videos from subscribed channels since the last run
command = [
    'yt-dlp',
    '--download-archive', 'archive.txt',
    '--output', f'{download_directory}/%(title)s.%(ext)s',
    '--date-after', last_run,
    '--no-post-overwrites',
    '--merge-output-format', 'mp4',
    'https://www.youtube.com/channel/CHANNEL_ID',  # Replace with your channel URL
]

# Run the command
subprocess.run(command)

# Save the current run time
with open(last_run_file, 'w') as f:
    json.dump({'last_run': current_run}, f)

print("Download complete. Next run will check for videos since:", current_run)

Setting Up the Cron Job

1. Make the script executable:

   chmod +x download_videos.py
   

2. Open your crontab:

   crontab -e
   

3. Add a line to run the script at your desired interval (e.g., daily at 2 AM):

   0 2 * * * /path/to/python /path/to/download_videos.py
   

Notes

• Replace CHANNEL_ID in the script with your actual channel IDs or use a playlist URL if preferred.
• The archive.txt file keeps track of already downloaded videos to avoid duplicates.
• Adjust the paths to Python and your script as needed.

Well you know what they say “Great minds think quicker than mine and probably have already had that thought.”

They grew up before t9.

Isn’t it true tho? YouTube’s a privacy nightmare- they know everything about ur content preferences, ur political learnings, everything. Without a VPN + no account, say goodbye to any semblance of privacy.