As I Mourn What Used To Be "Youtube"

sundialsvcs · 02-15-2022, 08:34 PM

Not very long ago, you used to be able to recall the most memorable moments of the memorable motion pictures of your past. You were able to fairly-reliably search for these moments on ... in particular ... "Youtube.com."

"Now, try again." Go ahead, try it.

'Nuff said.

enigma9o7 · 02-15-2022, 09:48 PM

Youtube seems to be working from here...

frankbell · 02-15-2022, 10:01 PM

Youtube works for me, also, but the number of advertisements has become quite distressing.

Now, a longish video (say, 10 or 12 minutes for me) will be preceded by two or three ads and sometimes be interrupted to display another ad halfway through, not to mention more ads at the end.

Youtube's gone the way of television. Back when I was a young 'un, an hour-long TV show was 55 minutes show, 5 minutes commercials. Not it's 44 minutes show, 16 minutes commercials.

Also, I always turn of "autoplay" because I want to pick my own viewing because your algorithm is annoying thank you very much, and, after a day or two or three, Youtube turns it back on and I have to turn it off again.

Indeed, my latest Firefox upgrade included an invitation to install an add-on, "RegretsReporter," to tell Youtube not to show me videos like this one you just forced on me. I accepted the invitation, but haven't used it yet, probably because I keep autoplay turned off.

slac-in-the-box · 02-15-2022, 10:40 PM

It seemed that the increased ads everywhere roughly correlated with the loss of net neutrality: coincedence?

frankbell · 02-15-2022, 10:50 PM

I don't know that it has anything to do with net neutrality.

I think it has more to do with greed.

slac-in-the-box · 02-15-2022, 11:51 PM

I suppose big advertisers savvied up and took it over with cash... and some privately owned sites with established names and traffic cashed in... probably just coincidence then.

But in general, and not just on youtube, the content I'm after has been and still is deeper burried, under more and more of these distractive advertisments, or right there, but with distractive advertisments on all the borders--btw, thanks LQ for not going that route.

So I tried to get some solace and looked at the dawn's stars, and saw 47 sattelites in convoy formation, one after the other, like looking at some far away interstate (that was actually november year before last, but it made quite an impact, seeing these trains, that I guess are more visible before they're full altitude, and next day I read they had been recently launched)...

I got worried the sky was gonna follow the internet, and I wouldn't be able to point out polaris to my son, without thousands of santas and their reindeers or whatever they end up naming these trains, distracting all we viewers from the solace there, like internet content getting obscured by ads--or why do they need them in convoy formation? the star wars project?

So those are the trains of thought when contemplating youtube obfuscation and I wonder if they crash into one another could they cancell each other out like inverted waves, and if they do, would I delete my own drivel beore I post it?

cwizardone · 02-16-2022, 01:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankbell

Youtube works for me, also, but the number of advertisements has become quite distressing.

Now, a longish video (say, 10 or 12 minutes for me) will be preceded by two or three ads and sometimes be interrupted to display another ad halfway through, not to mention more ads at the end.

Youtube's gone the way of television. Back when I was a young 'un, an hour-long TV show was 55 minutes show, 5 minutes commercials. Not it's 44 minutes show, 16 minutes commercials.......

When visiting youtube.com I use Vivaldi as it has a built-in ad-blocker that cuts through most of youtube's nonsense.
You are lucky to get 40 minutes of a TV show today and that includes the credits on both ends. I was watching a TV show from the mid/late '80s the other day and it was 46 minutes and a several seconds. "They" are also now producing fewer episodes per season. OTOH, British TV series are often, at least what I've seen, only 8 or 10 or 12 or so episodes per season, but they run a full 60 minutes to 90 minutes each (I don't know how much advertising was included in the original broadcasts).
I don't begrudge anyone a profit, but corporate greed is completely out of control and has become, IMHO, the very root of many of our societal problems.

ondoho · 02-16-2022, 02:18 AM

I watch youtube videos every day but never visit the site.

Only hardcoded ads for me.

sundialsvcs · 02-16-2022, 07:15 AM

The "uBlock origin" filter, with all filter options turned on, stops these and all other advertisements cold.

But now, fairly specific searches are now flooded with useless recent content.

boughtonp · 02-16-2022, 07:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankbell

Now, a longish video (say, 10 or 12 minutes for me) will be preceded by two or three ads and sometimes be interrupted to display another ad halfway through, not to mention more ads at the end.

uBlock Origin will remove all such adverts when playing videos in-browser.

Or you can download the videos with Youtube-DL or yt-dlp and use your media player of choice.

boughtonp · 02-16-2022, 07:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sundialsvcs

But now, fairly specific searches are now flooded with useless recent content.

The on-site search has been useless for some time now.

Have you tried the Videos tab of a regular search engine?

teckk · 02-16-2022, 08:19 AM

I haven't watched youtube vids in a browser for 14-15 years. I never see youtube ads. I used to use youtube-dl for it, then yt-dlp (which works well). Then I made for myself ut-dlp. But yt-dlp works just fine.

Make a little bash script, copy the ut url and paste into the script. Log all of your videos, etc. Only one more step.

Example:

Code:

agent="Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/602.1.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14A403 Safari/602.1"

#player="mpv"
player="mplayer"

while :; do
    clear
    options="Quit Search Formats Watch Listen Download GetURL ClearLog"
    select opt in $options; do
    case $opt in
        Quit) clear; exit;;

        Watch) read -p "Enter/Paste Utube video URL: " view	
            ut-dlp --user-agent "$agent" -q -f 18 "$view" -o - | "$player" -
            break ;;
        
        Listen) read -p "Enter/Paste Utube audio URL: " aud
            ut-dlp -q -f 140 "$aud" -o - | "$player" -
        break ;
        
<snip>

You can search youtube by 3 or 4 different parameters.

Code:

"&search_sort=video_date_uploaded"
"&search_sort=video_view_count"

You have to use the correct user agent and header for that to work now. Which will get you results more like you are wanting.

You can also search youtube from google. From a date range also.

Once again, a little bash script. Example:

Code:

#Google search url
url="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:youtube.com"

while :; do
    #Get inputs
    read -p "Enter/Paste utube search words (big+red+truck): " search_words
    read -p "Enter dates (after:2020-05-01 before:2020-07-30): " date_range

    #Make url for search
    goog_url=""$url"+"$search_words"+"$date_range""
    
    <snip>

And that will spit out youtube search results in google.

Example:

Code:

url="https://www.google.com/search?q=site:youtube.com"
search_words="poison+frogs"
date_range="after:2021-05-01 before:2022-02-01"
goog_url=""$url"+"$search_words"+"$date_range""

echo "$goog_url"
https://www.google.com/search?q=site:youtube.com+poison+frogs+after:2021-05-01 before:2022-02-01

https://www.google.com/search?q=site...ore:2022-02-01

Edit:
Forum!!, stop altering my urls.

rokytnji · 02-16-2022, 11:30 AM

I was thinking it must be a LFS or Gentoo thing. Then saw all the distro replies.

Not sure what movies you are missing.

https://ibb.co/YW4vML1

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...+from+the+1950

Posted by a member who has the youtube movie button on his roku tv.

rtmistler · 02-16-2022, 11:51 AM

Every time I decide to try to use YouTube to watch a feature film or old series, there's a problem. Such as it's not the movie I wanted, or it is but it is dubbed in a language I don't know, or it's "weird" like screwed up speed, resolution, screen size, etc.

Too much trouble.

Yeah there's a lot of ads. They seem to not care that they've never had any effect on my buying mannerisms.

fatmac · 02-16-2022, 12:30 PM

Recently, I think Mozilla & Youtube have been 'at war', one day I'd try to view a video & there would be no sound, next day it'd be there again, & then it wouldn't - this had been going on for at least the last month or so - there's nothing wrong at my end/nothing has changed - extremely frustrating!

Adverts I skip, else I go look at something else instead.