I had a Youtube Subscription mainly for using Youtube Music since last year. I used to be on Newpipe before that. However, the mobile app always made be feel uneasy. From not being able to choose system wide video quality for all Youtube videos at once[ seriously, there is like 'High' or 'Data Saver' only and explicit options are available per videos only ] to Youtube nudging me to purchase/join a Youtuber's membership channel really irked me [I just paid you, Youtube ; why are you constantly asking me to pay more for something I don't want? Why can't I disable those notifications ?]
I have some time remaining on my subscription but converted to Tubular [Newpipe fork with Sponsorblock] simply because it doesn't treat it's end users like trash. Even for YTM, I switched to Revanced version which offered endless customization. I could hide useless stuff like cast, share buttons to even functions in the Account tab. The granular control was so much that I was able to get a simplistic neat looking UI setup.
In the transition, I understand, I lose some of my playlists [under a throwaway Google account since I don't wish to risk my main one getting banned] but I understand that the only true way anyone controls their music[or any form of data is by truly owning them and streaming services don't allow that]. It might sound stupid, but I have been downloading music from Soulseek for some time and now just plan to transfer some of my favorites over to the SD card.
It was never a money problem. It was an experience problem. I paid money to Google and all I got was Shorts, Games and other stuff I didn't wanted. I never got customization or fine grained controls. The open source community offers that. Sorry for the long rant.
I love YouTube, but the site often annoys me in many ways. On my computer I use
newsboatalong withyt-dlpto download all the videos I want to watch offline. This way, I can watch content without dealing with any of the site's frustrations....I used to have a similar setup but had it stream directly into MPV using the ytdl hook. Do you have it download the videos into a cache automatically and then load from file later and if so, how did you set that up?
Forgot to mention that
mpvis how I actually watch the videos. Newsboat downloads a list from each channel kinda like an RSS feed. I can then select any video & download it by pressing a keybinding. It's been a while since I last had to actually set this up, but off memory, here's some quick info....The file
~/.newsboat/urlscontains URLs similar to the one below. Just replaceCHANNEL_IDwith the actual channel ID. You can find the channel ID in the URL of the channel's page..With the URLs in place you can edit your newsboat config file to set up a key binding for downloading videos using
yt-dlp. It should be as simple as adding something like the following to the config..This binds the
dkey to useyt-dlpto download videos.