Youtube
Youtube is a hellhole.
Channels
Music
They don't usually last forever, but Youtube has some real treasure troves.
- Xearching For Sounds
Full albums of 80s J-Pop, city pop, (mostly Japanese) jazz, and generally stuff you don't see elsewhere. Real good. Has some looong mixes too I haven't gone through. - Vinyl and shellac by Starday
Mostly 20s–50s American music. I particularly like going through the singles. - Flavi-chan samurai music investigator
A bit like Xerching: lots of good album uploads, mostly Japanese. - Eric Rhodes II
Hasn't updated in months, but has full albums of 80s rarities from all over.
Sequel channel to Eric Rhodes, which's mostly bass covers, but has a few interesting album and bootleg uploads. - Music for empty rooms
Single songs. Rare jazz, soul… - Inheritance Bloodtype B Legends - Official -
J-pop stuff off the telly. - Terminal Passage
Mostly smooth jazzy funky instrumental stuff? - yaoiboi92
Rare stuff, a lot's pretty mid, but worth a shot. - MrRevisorn
Good mixes/playlists. - nattligatoner2
Rare tracks, synthy. - DiscoSegreta
Euro Disco, mostly Italian.
Privacy
Tips to make Youtube less shit:
- Don't use an account. If you want to follow channels you can us RSS. Google obscures the feed URL, but I use youtube-rss-finder to put a little button in the Address bar.
- Some people use this kinda thing to set it up so their computer downloads videos they want to watch, so they can watch them offline.
- Use a container in Firefox, and don't store cookies.
- Automatically wipe all the other stuff it stores on your computer with cookie-autodelete, this way you'll avoid it's recommendations.
- Use a browser plugin like blocktube so you can block whichever channels you choose from being shown to you.
Sharing
To make a video URL start at a particular time you can define it in minutes and seconds by adding &t=XmYs
to the end, where X is the minute and Y is the number of seconds, for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRTSSzccALA&t=1m0s
Tools
- Yt-dlp - Great tool for Grabbing YT vids is various formats, or just grabbing the audio.
Clients
Youtube's got comepletely unusable for me now. Dunno what combination of Firefox and ad-blocker settings it is, so I've started using Freetube for watching videos. It works with redirect add-ons so that videos always open in the program, and you can block channels. On Android I've been using Pipepipe, switched to it after Newpipe stopped working and was taking to long to release the fixed version.
Other ones I've seen, some I've tried:
- YAYC - https://yayc.stream/ https://github.com/yayc-stream/yayc - haven't tried.
- Freetube - Electron. Can block. Can't sign-in, so no watching stuff that needs age verification. Not hideous.
- Pipe Viewer - https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer - CLI and GUI.
- PlasmaTube - https://github.com/KDE/plasmatube
- GTK Youtube Viewer
- Minitube - https://flavio.tordini.org/minitube - UI is annoying. Didn't play videos when I checked.
- Some Android ones