YouTube artificially slows down video load times when using Firefox

• mpv_thumbnail_script

  6 249 4.6 Lua

  A Lua script to show preview thumbnails in mpv's OSC seekbar, sans external dependencies (fork) (by marzzzello)

I implemented downloading of youtube thumbnails for one of these scripts.

https://github.com/marzzzello/mpv_thumbnail_script

• yt-dlp

  2,360 70,636 9.8 Python

  A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader

  

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• misc

  1 17 8.8

I think you have simply been lucky, the full story is that uBlock Origin and Youtube have been tying to outpatch the other, with uBlock rolling out a bypass to the filters every one-two days since late October (https://github.com/stephenhawk8054/misc/commits/main/yt-fix....).

Depending on if you've set up uBlock to auto-update and when you've watched youtube relative to when the block filters got updated you might just not have been hit with the latest detectors while they were active. Personally I know I got the "accept ads or leave" modal with firefox + uBlock, locking me out completely on one of my devices.

• mpv_sponsorblock

  15 518 0.0 Lua

  mpv script to skip sponsored segments of YouTube videos

• uosc

  48 1,392 9.3 Lua

  Feature-rich minimalist proximity-based UI for MPV player.

Most of those features are available in OSS tools as well. And for those that are not, there are alternative solutions that might take a bit of work to implement.

I'm not claiming that the OSS tools have feature parity with 1st party frontends, or that they won't require some sacrifices, or effort adjusting. I just think that the trade-off of losing some of the convenience in return for not being tracked and manipulated is well worth it to me, though I can see how it might not be worth it for others.

I do actually think that OSS tools provide a better UX. I can download the media and consume it offline, using any player of choice, on any device, at any time. I find YouTube's recommendations a nuisance, and I can turn those off in Invidious and Piped. Scrubbing in mpv is instantaneous for me for local files and even those served on the LAN, though there is a slight delay when playing directly from YT. There is also a solution for generating thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and didn't end up using it.

At the end of the day, it's a personal choice depending on what you value most, and I'm not trying to convince anyone my choice is inherently better. Thanks for providing your perspective.

[1]: https://github.com/tomasklaen/uosc

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

Suggest a related project