If you’re on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
Freetube is great but it’s also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won’t resume. Then it says “reload” and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn’t work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it’s more susceptible to breakage which is why I’m currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
In Freetube, reload is ctrl-R on Linux and Windows, and cmd-R on Mac. I have experienced the fact that if you leave a video paused for a long time (hours) then you need to refresh. If you have history active, after refreshing the video will resume from where you left, which by the way is better then actual YouTube where it will often resume from an earlier timestamp. I have not experienced the other issues you mentioned.
Yeah I learned that when I looked up the issue number, very disappointed that it’s Ctrl+R instead of the canonical reload button for the last 30 years (F5). :(
Since you knew Ctrl+r you wouldn’t experience those issues. That’s a side effect of “reload” without a reload button.
It’s a bit of a faff, but I use FreeTube to grab the URLs which I then drop into a yt-dlp command that I use to download my subscriptions to watch on Plex on my Apple TV. Works a treat, though I wish I could get Plex to display them properly.
Why not just use tubesync? There’s another one like youtube archivist or something as well. If you already have a Plex server you probably have the skills to set it up.
https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
Here’s the other that I’m aware of https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
I found tubesync kinda needs to be run on vpn if you don’t want YouTube to ban you during the initial sync, I assume the same is true for archivist. Works fine after that first sync tho (I’m actually using as an archive since people tend to take their stuff down once they change hobbies for some reason, so I literally was archiving whole channels).
Yeah, I’m aware of both of them but have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to get them to work. I’m fairly new to Linux, and the instructions for both seem to assume a certain amount of expertise.
Oh, and as I type this I’ve remembered that I did manage to get one of them to work, but something to do with the way it downloads the videos means that you need to install a Plex plugin of some description because Plex won’t recognise the metadata or some shit.
So for the time being I’m happy enough to fanny about with my manual method. Between my wife and I it takes up about ten minutes every couple of days, and that’s ok.
