• For people with the spare energy and time: youtube-dl.
• For people with the spare money and time: Downie.
• For people with better things to do: YouTube Premium.
• For everybody else: crappy adverts.

bonus:

• For people who don’t want streaming to dictate their life: ignorant bliss.

@mcg Sure. If you have the time and energy, and sometimes even the money is a factor.

For me, it's also a matter of trust. I have memories of news regarding suspicious actors in the world of adblocking — how gross is it to claim to be offering a good service to counter a bad thing and then go ahead and do that same bad thing? — and find it to be exhausting. At least the Big Five are in enough of the media and civil spotlight that you can imagine they would be pressured into making good changes.

@SimonWoods l like YouTube-dl a lot, use it in school to show class videos without ads & network stutters. After reading your note I just made a 2 line AppleScript to use, run from FastScripts with a keyboard shortcut. Grabs the current url from safari & send it to YouTube-dl

@johnjohnston I rarely watch YouTube videos on YouTube. I use yt-dlp (youtube-dl fork) a lot, too. Got it on a Raspberry Pi (my file server), Shortcuts to SSH to it (from iOS, iPadOS and macOS) and launch yt-dlp with URL passed to it, and then served on AppleTV via Plex. :)

@rom …you what’s that now?

@UndamnedOne hahah TL;DR I run yt-dlp on a file server and feed it via Shortcut. :)

@rom is the shortcut in a shareable state?

@tuckerk the shortcut is just an SSH call to the Raspberry Pi (passing the URL to yt-dlp call using screen)

screen -d -m bash -c "/usr/local/bin/yt-dlp "URLs""

@SimonWoods +1 for “ignore links to youtube”

@rom Very nice. I used to have a folder in onedrive where if I put a txt file with an ID in it my home Mac would then d/l the video. I couldn’t get YouTube-dl to work in school. Then I found the proxy option 😂

@johnjohnston I also use this multi-(Apple)platform app called Play where I save YT URLs in when I am away from my home network.

When I get home, I run another shortcut that just runs through the Play list and call the yt-dlp shortcut for each one.