ragebutt

It’s been ages since I just used yt-dlp so I’m not sure

Tubearchivist has a chrome/firefox plugin for this that makes it a lot easier. You visit youtube while logged in and configure the extension to be able to see your instance of TA, then it just copies your cookie at a set interval.

It’s handy because depending on things your cookie can become stale very quickly. Google does a ton of a/b testing so there’s no “definite” info, I’ve had cookies work for months then all of a sudden need a new one for each download. Others appear to have had similar experiences. Depends on if you’re in the “testing” group ig. Some also suggest that heavy usage can create problems but i have like 8,400 videos in my TA instance and problems seem random

A cookie is generally only required if the video requires you to be logged in though, like a video marked as sensitive or whatever

Another fun issue is proof of origin tokens. These rotate far more often than cookies. Luckily as of now you can generally download videos without them but there are certain things that youtube has already locked behind this. Like if you try to download a video that has subtitles (especially fancy vtt ones with positioning, colors, etc) you’ll often find English doesn’t appear as an option for download unless you supply a pot. If you really get into it there are dockers that can supply pot tokens regularly when a download is initiated.

Google will continue to take steps to lock out people that don’t engage in their ad tracking bullshit. Just means it gets a bit more confusing

Quit youtube because you don’t want to support google or quit youtube because you use it problematically

The latter is just stop using it of course. Raise the bar to entry; delete the apps, redirect the website in hosts, delete your account, etc. all of these are easily defeated of course but a big part of changing bad habits like this is introducing a response delay so you have a better shot at controlling impulsivity.

Find replacements for it. Youtube in a problematic sense is often a function of escape so look at that and find alternatives. Eg if you’re browsing because you’re anxious and doing mindless scrolling feels like it blocks some of the uglier thoughts find more activating behaviors that are probably less immediately rewarding and engaging, but potentially more activating in the long run. Eg practicing a hobby may not feel as activating in terms of mood, especially initially, because youtube is a dopamine machine, but practicing guitar can become activating if you’re interested in it and stick to it. And if you focus on the sense of accomplishment part it may become more activating; where youtube for 4+ hours might make you feel like “what the fuck am I doing with my life” practicing piano for 4+ hours might get you to achievable and noticeable progress at a skill (“now I can play [x], cool”

If it’s to just get away from google look at what some have said already like peertube. If you self host you can get tubearchivist going; it’s a bit of a headache but then you can add channels and playlists there, let it monitor and download additions to them, and watch them locally. Take googles bandwidth and give them nothing in return (at least until they finally figure out a way to permanently break yt-dlp)

They won’t do that because it’s expensive and free software generally doesn’t have the budget to do this

I don’t know why you think the “just works” is any different from tunneling with a service. Your server is still opened to the internet through upnp with direct connections and through a tunnel to plex.tv when a direct connection is not possible. In fact plex is inherently less secure because their infra is both the encryption endpoint (as opposed to your client with Jellyfin and Tailscale or whatever) and their infra has been vulnerable in the past (like the massive breach in 2022).

Jellyfin with something like nginx and a vpn is open to the internet, yes, but a service that tunnels (like wireguard, Tailscale) bypasses this issue and it’s up to you to set it up as to your level of comfort

Plex is just easier but as with all things tech (especially those infected with VC dollars) “ease” translates to less secure and far more likely to exploit your data

Yeah obviously, you can also use Tailscale to tunnel to whatever service you want (including just to the server itself). But if you’re bothering to override remote plex access with all this I don’t know why you wouldn’t just pick the option that doesn’t harvest your data and increasingly treat its customers as hostile

Outside the network you still have to open your server to allow plex cloud to access it and potentially tunnel your traffic through plex.tv if a direct connection doesn’t work. This happens automatically but it does happen

With Jellyfin you just have to supply your own relay, like Tailscale or wireguard, which does require more setup but is completely free, means that you can stop your media traffic from being funneled through services that harvest your data (which plex absolutely does), and doesn’t go to shit if plex.tv goes down

Or head scale if you don’t want something you don’t control that requires an account with google/apple/microsoft

Basically all commercial dvds with the exception of stuff like some independent releases and essentially all blurays have copy protection (CSS for dvd and AACS for bluray, for bluray it’s built into the spec)

They’re both fairly trivially defeated (for dvd extremely so because CSS is completely broken, whereas br has key revocation so it’s technically a bit more complex though practically this doesn’t mean much)

I don’t know much about Germanys laws but iirc they are one of the places that takes piracy and torrenting more seriously, no?

Interactive media like menus is a nightmare to support. Kodi has some support but only on pc. Also to your last sentence it’s a grey area, if you rip the disk to any format you’re essentially violating copyright because making a copy requires circumventing encryption, which violates the dmca (assuming USA). Might as well just use makemkv then, unless you’re real serious about archiving literally everything

Why not both? I use kodi when possible because it runs circles around the mostly dogshit Jellyfin apps for various platforms. Jellyfin for kodi and the kodi queue sync plugin import my library and watch status. I still have the option to use Jellyfin apps or web on devices that can’t run kodi (or when remote) and as a result can have all of my media accessible from all my devices without needing multiple copies and centralized metadata administration

Person you responded to said av1, I didn’t mean to imply you did. HEVC is good balance and quicksync will handle it as you’ve said. 10th gen stuff will handle 4-5 at the expense of more power (but less than like a typical gpu build).

Last statement you made is critical - usage dictates build

Just as long as you’re fine with your media server absolutely eating power all the time

Stop encoding in av1 and get a low power older intel chip around 10th gen or so with quick sync. Unless you have like 5+ users watching 4k media at the same time this will handle transcoding absolutely fine while using far less power than a dedicated gpu

For now. Their most recent round of venture capital was 40 million and that was like the 7th one. Those investors are gonna be demanding returns if they haven’t already and they will eventually push to monetize as much as possible

If plex works for you now then sure, don’t fix what isn’t broken. Jellyfin isn’t going anywhere and is just getting better, if anything holding off on migrating just increases the chances that migrating will be smoother. But guarantee you that in a certain amount of time plex will fuck over their customers