You can always roll your own instance if you have the hardware to spare. I don’t recommend hosting on a VPS as that defeats the purpose of self-hosting as you’re hosting on someone else’s computer at the end of the day and that’s no different than signing up for an existing public instance and posting there, other than you’re paying for that VPS.

You also can’t download them without JS, most alt front-ends are broken, and Google is pushing their own AI slop now.

How long before Widevine enters the picture and alt front-ends and downloaders are killed off entirely, you’re forced to watch YT only through the official client on approved software/hardware if you want full quality (like Netflix), and even competing platforms are stamped out by the ability to mirror YT content over being taken away by that DRM if it’s actually implemented?

I also wouldn’t be surprised if Google straight-up made YT a paid service that you had to have Android-dev-style verification to create anything on, successfully turning it into the Netflix clone they so desperately want it to be.

I wonder if these guys somehow have something to do with the DRM lockdown that ATSC 3 is trying to pull for OTA broadcast TV as well.

To directly quote the HydrogenAudio KB article on Opus:

• 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent speech plus moderately good stereo music
• 40kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, fairly good stereo music
• 48kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, reasonable music

You’re getting basically transparent speech at a bit over half the bitrate of 80kbit/s MP3 or less, and even with music, Opus like I said is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s according to the same KB article I’m quoting, while MP3 needs 320kbit/s CBR for transparency for music, although if I’m transcoding FLAC files to Opus, I normally just max out the codec at 510kbit/s where MP3’s transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s is also the bitrate it maxes out at.

The only good reason IMO why one should use MP3 in 2025 when better codecs exist, both lossy and lossless, is when the device they’re targeting is so old or crappy that it can’t support anything better than MP3.

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A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice

• Opus would have MP3 beat for speech at lower bitrates as per the HydrogenAudio KB, Opus is transparent for speech at 32kbit/s with stereo speech being transparent at 40kbit/s. Beyond that, a typical bitrate for Opus audio on YT is something like 150kbit/s and that codec is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s. Point being if one works in spoken word and they want to save as much space and bandwidth as possible while still sounding reasonable, 40-48kbit/s Opus would be the ideal audio codec for that as it would give transparent speech at half the bitrate of the 80kbit/s MP3 that’s quoted here.

I thought PeerTube ditched WebTorrent and switched full-time to WebRTC a while back.

It’s a figure of speech to mean you don’t trust something or someone’s products.

You still have alternative platforms to Big Tech though, PeerTube and Odysee like have been mentioned umpteen times in this thread and on Lemmy at large, and not to mention Lemmy itself, and Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bsky among others.

I don’t know about the OP, but Google admitted recently to breaking the open web. By their own admission, and their own words, Google is against an open web. https://lemmy.org/post/1689081

It’s probably more about control than security. Mandate JS, force people to watch their shit on their proprietary front-end.

I bet ad blockers and even manually blocking related cookies in FF browsers are probably going to break the site and force Chromium browser use too.

It’s Google, I wouldn’t trust them any further than I can throw their Pixel phones. They straight-up admitted recently to breaking the open web, they’ll do anything.

Tartube uses yt-dlp, until Google implements real DRM ala Widevine on YT, which I fully expect them to if they’re locking things down this drastically, I mentioned how you can get yt-dlp working again-for now.

Yeah, the lockdown is a YT thing.