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Google is intentionally throttling YouTube videos, slowing down users with ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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I've started bulk downloading videos with yt-dlp and watching them locally. No ads or throttling to deal with.
If Google really wants to, they can crack down on
yt-dlp, and I assume that if enough people are using it, they're likely to do such a crackdown. Like, this works for the moment, but...I'm sure they could. Other methods will crop up. All else fails, I ditch YT altogether.
Virtual desktop program that watches videos and uses sponsorblock and adblock after the fact to pick it clean and re-encode it.
I'm that level of anal
I'm not really following video DRM, but my understanding is that Widevine won't run in a VM with a virtualized video card like that.
My ip was blocked a LONG time ago by google for using yt-dlp. Works with VPN but nothing else. Fun times. I think I only pulled a couple of videos off for archival services. On my own channel non-the-less.
You might try again. I was blocked for a couple weeks after I pulled a bunch of videos from a channel using
yt-dlp, and for a while YouTube required an account (which I will not get) from that IP. But a couple weeks later, things were working again.Ok cool! I updated yt-dlp via pip, and it looks like its working again. No warnings or anything. Awesome.
I'd just hop a vps around to different countries.
...I'd never do it here, admins, honest lol
It will happen eventually. All they need to do is start new/rotating keys on wildvine and put the ads at random times right in the stream, then disable fast forward if you use it to skip ads. It'll be a UX hit, so it'll need to be worth it to them.
In the end, they can't stop us from HDMI capturing and using comskip to detect / remove but there are a million ways to play tag between where we are now and that which don't require people posting videos to pirate bay :)
Look up HDCP.
There are HDMI splitter boxes you can get from China that conveniently strip out the HDCP.
They aren't fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.
Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade
it's not hard to do it yourself either
How would one DIY HDCP stripping? I've never looked into this.
Open PassDCP software is one method, or you can obtain a splitter that strips hdcp
theoretically anything is possible so what
Right. At the end of the bullshit, the content still plays to completion if the user hits play. We can script and Ai and remove ads all day long after a program snags the feed.
This is the way.
When YouTube wanted to throw me some entertainment and a couple ads, very conveniently, I was down for that.
Now that it's an all out technology knowledge battle - well, I'm quite good at that.
So I spend the time I would have laughed at their ad instead working around their bullshit.
I haven't seen an ad in years, but I still enjoy the same content. 🤷♀️
To me, it seems like they're working really hard, just to fail to serve me ads.
I would but my issue with that is that SponsorBlock doesn't work on downloaded videos.
Skytube has an option for clipping mid-video ads out of downloaded videos, if that helps.
I use SponsorBlock for more than just skipping sponsored segments. It's also useful for skipping intros, "like and subscribe" messages, and other general annoyances in most YouTube videos. Once you get used to it, you can't go without.
Same here. The SponsorBlock in SkyTube skips intros and "like and subscribe", too. Even in downloads.
Good to know, thanks.
DVRs are back in 2025. Who would have thought?
I’m new to yt-dlp. Care to share your flags? I’m a little confused on which ones I actually need.
I mean, you don't need anything; it'll work with no flags. I have these:
That'll just embed some useful metadata in the file.
Note that subtitles doesn't include automatic subtitles. For that you have to do --write-auto-subs in conjunction
Thanks.
EDIT: There isn't an
--embed-auto-subs, but there is a--write-auto-subs.Fixed thanks.
Also if you just want the audio to listen to (I like to do this with TTRPGs) you can do:
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio
Also works great in a pinch for getting sounds and music for FoundryVTT.
I'm pretty sure that it defaults to best quality.
goes looking at man page
So I think that it should normally pull down the best audio unless you get into some situation where YouTube doesn't offer a format that simultaneously has the combination of highest audio quality with the highest video quality; if it has to do so to get the highest video quality then, it'll sacrifice audio quality.
EDIT: Hmm. I could have sworn that there was more text about prioritizing relative audio and video quality at one point in the man page, but I don't see anything there now. Maybe it can just always get the best audio quality, regardless of video quality, can pull 'em entirely separately.
I'm a filthy Windows user that's too lazy to migrate my main PC to Fedora.
Multiple URLs can be separated by spaces. Put any URLs with ampersands in quotes or remove the ampersand and following arguments.
You can find a list of all the arguments on the yt-dlp github page
I like https://github.com/ArabCoders/ytptube gui. Only started using it yesterday, so far for indovidual videos. However it looks like it can also watch new videos being uploaded, thought not tried it myself.
Use docker compose for quick deployment
Me too. I'm up to 3TB locally. Had to do that slowly though. Hit some temp bans a few times.
I've been doing this with band love videos and storing them on a hard drive. One I love got taken down and almost lost a while back and it's made me paranoid ha