What The Internet Did to Garfield is… an experience. I watched this across three sessions and it’s a deep dive (and I mean center of the earth deep) into the Garfield comic and his relationship with Jon.
I found it fascinating and weird as any good exploration into a long-running creation can be. It goes to dark places but the creator hides the worst of it in an effort to stay monetized on YouTube and because some thing don’t need to be shown it’s not graphic.
Tag: YouTube Page 1 of 2
I saw Mike over at Initial Charge link to Listenbox Turns YouTube Channels Into Podcasts. This is a neat idea and something I’ve been doing sparingly with longer-form Youtube content that is mainly audio.
However, I don’t need to pay a subscription for another thing in my life I’ll use on occasion. So I tweaked my Youtube-dl setup to pull audio from Youtube videos instead of the video itself.
First, I have to thank Jason for his youtube-dl setup which I replicated in a container on my server at home. He’s updated his configuration to support M1 Macs and some fancy iPhone shortcuts.
I have mine running on Ubuntu sitting in a container in proxmox in my office.
I’ve created a small shell script called music.sh. The contents are below, which I’ll explain.
# YTDL-Music Playlist - Audio Only - Goes to Music folder
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl \
--extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --ignore-errors \
-o "/mnt/Youtube/Music/%(title)s.%(ext)s" \
--download-archive /var/www/video/music.txt \
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9C818BCBDA822A24The first line is a comment reminding me of what this is and does.
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl – The location where I have youtube-dl installed.
--extract-audio – Downloads only the audio and discards the video.
--audio-format mp3 – Sets the format to MP3 for compatability.
--embed-thumbnail – Embeds the thumbnail from the Youtube video. Sometimes useful, sometime not. But it’s nice to have some kind of artwork on the file.
--ignore-errors` – Skips errors like if a video is removed or not able to be downloaded for some reason.
-o "/mnt/Youtube/Music/%(title)s.%(ext)s" – The -o stands for output and tells youtube-dl where to save the file. In my case, I have it saved to my NAS mounted through NFS at /mnt/Youtube/Music.
The title and extension are pulled right from an example output. I don’t know what the lowercase s means. I just used it because the examples showed it.
--download-archive /var/www/video/music.txt – I write a log of everything I download so if I delete it after watching it, it doesn’t get pulled back down every single time. The file logs the youtube ID as opposed to the title or something human-readable but it’s better than nothing.
Finally, the URL links to the Youtube playlist where I want to download from. This makes triggering the downloads as simple as adding a file to that playlist and letting youtube-dl do the rest.
How does youtube-dl know to check the list for new videos? I have a cron job set to run the script every 10 minutes. So anything newly added to the playlist will get downloaded.
*/10 * * * * sh /var/www/video/music.shOnce I download the audio, it gets picked up by Plex. Plex is set to watch that folder and add new content it finds to the library as audio. So I can download music, podcasts uploaded to Youtube, or technical shows where the content is largely audio.
It works well other than the hiccups any self-hosted setup can run into and it costs my nothing additional since I’m already paid for the computer and pay for the electricity/internet anyway at home.
In this recent TED Talk, lawyer, musician, and technologist Damien Riehl talks about the rapidly diminishing number of melodies available to songwriters under the current system of copyright. In order to help songwriters avoid these melodic legal landmines (some of which are documented here), Riehl and his pal Noah Rubin designed and wrote a program to record every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody and released the results — all 68+ billion melodies, 2.6 terabytes of data — into the public domain.
We are running into this with our podcast. When I take our show, add video to it and upload it to YouTube, we inevitably get hit with some copyright claim.
Often for innocuous audio behind something that, if removed, would have no bearing on what’s being said. It’s a bit of sad music. Or a guitar riff that meanders on.
We aren’t at the level of making any money off YouTube, but if we were, it would give me a strong reason not to upload the show to their service.
I subscribe to a number of YouTube channels. I like to queue up the videos I want to watch all at once. Then I go back and reorder and watch them. As you may know, YouTube loves to auto-play every single video you open.
I’ve stopped Flash from auto-playing on the Google Chrome browser already. But YouTube uses HTML5 video when Flash isn’t available. So they play anyway.
Until now!
So if you’re tired of videos bleating in the background without your consent, we’re completely with you! 🙂
That’s why we’ve created a Chrome plugin to help you stop HTML5 videos from playing. The videos will auto-pause right after page load. Buffering will start anyway.
This plugin works flawlessly with YouTube. I can open 10 videos and while they buffer in the background, not a single sound comes across my headphones because nothing is playing.
When I’m ready to play them, I press play and they’re already pre-loaded.
This is (so far) the best superheroine movie of the year.
Featuring:
Taylor Swift
Selena Gomez
Kendrick Lamar
Lena Dunham
Hailee Steinfield
Serayah
Gigi Hadid
Ellie Goulding
Martha Hunt
Cara Delevingne
Zendaya
Hayley Williams
lily Albridge
Karlie Kloss
Jessica Alba
Ellen Pompeo(Luna) & Mariska Hargitay(Justice)
Cindy Crawford
With props to Tomiwa Aina’s comments for the list. Click through to get the timestamps and links to each appearance.