I started when a group I listened to removed all the content they had put up over the past year and said it was promotional material for their latest album which was garbage.
Ads have gotten so bad that any videos over three minutes have multiple ad breaks so watching longer music videos or sets are just completely ruined when watching on YouTube.
I wish there was a good set up for single watch videos since the ad algorithm tries to anticipate good places for breaks, which often times is right before punch lines to joke and when you skip over the ad they tend to put you back a few milliseconds ahead of where you stopped which can ruin jokes. I rarely watch for enjoyment (as opposed to learning) on a computer so I don't get the benefit of using an ad blocker like Ad Nauseam.
Theres tons of place without internet access, or I dont have a device with internet access.
Triply so if it's hosted by a corporation.
Looking at you, Microsoft. For all the good[0] things you're doing for developers using your platforms, I'm still angry at the way your documentation links rot. It seems that everything that ever linked to MSDN prior to ~2015 will now have their links redirected to 404 or "buy new Surface" page. Hell, plenty of internal links are broken too. It's particularly apparent when trying to read about C++ and COM (vs. C#/.NET, which seems to be MS's main focus).
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[0] - In a pragmatic, day-to-day dev experience sense. Explicitly not talking about wider ethical issues here.
1. I download whole channels if there's a series I want to watch.
2. I download music, since youtube is a really quite nice music library.
3. I download long videos before I watch it, because it's just more pleasant to rewind the thing when it's already on your SSD. Also, it won't freeze spoiling a beautiful scene because of some stupid WiFi problem.
4. Even if I don't download it before watching, I still use mpv to watch it, which uses youtube-dl internally, because mpv is a much nicer video-player than what you can have in a browser.
And I'm sure I forgot some important use-cases. Browsers are evil, js-apps are stupid, don't use them, if you can.
We maintain a central list [1] of content that various members have archived, such that when content is removed from YouTube, people can direct inquiries to contributors who have archived that content.
It's a small way to keep track of what things have been successfully archived, and occasionally direct efforts to preserve specific content.
mpv itself uses ytdl (or others) for accessing streming sites and will buffer the whole vid if you crank up cache settings like:
cache=yes
demuxer-max-bytes=5G
demuxer-max-back-bytes=5G
prefetch-playlist=yes
force-seekable=yes2) When Internet is flaky or doesn't exist. I've downloaded whole sets of tutorial videos for example to watch on a plane.
3) Stuff in 4K where my video player does a better job with hardware acceleration than my web browser does
I mean out of all the video I watch from the internet, 95% is streaming, but youtube-dl is for that other 5% that falls into the three categories above.
A great example I recently saw is someone extracting the audio feed and double checking the Doppler shift of a passing quadcopter to confirm a speed claim. It checked out and the math was included. Stellar comment. Harder to do if obtaining the video's data is made hard.
mpv --ytdl-format="best[height<=720]" "$URL"Watching many high res videos without destroying phone data plan.
It's a shame that the only video links on HN seem to be from Youtube.