No matter what app I use now for YouTube, I’m having issues with buffering. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? Has Google finally found a way to hamper non-Premium users?
No matter what app I use now for YouTube, I’m having issues with buffering. Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? Has Google finally found a way to hamper non-Premium users?
I wrote a bash script to check for updates to channels I like. It runs nighly via cron. If there is a new video it automatically downloads it using yt-dlp to my Jellyfin library. There is a yt-dlp flag that incorporates sponsor block. Since I download videos overnight large channels have already been included by sponsor block. So I get videos completely ad and sponsor free.
Everything is done behind a VPN. This approach allows me to completely bypass using a browser further protecting me from tracking.
When I wake up in the morning I have all the new videos from my favorite channels ad and sponsor free. I can watch from my computer, phone, or TV. If I’m away from my home network I use Tailscale to stream to my location.
The only downside I experience is not getting to watch the video until the day after upload.
God damn - I had this idea myself! Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ.
I was thinking of an additional step of having it transcode overnight to a more mobile phone friendly resolution, like let’s say 480p, as well as introducing a time to live (TTL) so that I don’t end up with an ever expanding YouTube library that never gets watched.
Actually I seem to recall there was a YouTube something (Youtube custodian? Something like that) that did all this for you directly. But I think I would like to try doing it as a cron job because it could run on low end hardware like a Raspberry Pi.