content: How you can get a better viewing experience while screwing Youtube Hey everyone, I know we've all been censored by some combination of Youtube / Google / Facebook / Twitter at this point. I kept seeing a lot of videos & creators get taken down, and using Youtube downloader sites was a pain in the neck and wouldn't work for batches of videos. I wanted something simple I could use to backup large playlists easily. youtube-dl (https://youtube-dl.org/) is open source software that the RIAA has DMCA'd off of github recently. It's command line only at this point, but it's relatively simple to setup (guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfUUZvybPY) and it works on a variety of video sites, even some NSFW ones (/hint). Anyway, since we know more censorship is coming and more of our content creators are going to be de-platformed, you can use this to backup everything to an external hard drive or your PC.  For example, Demolition Ranch is a gun channel that could be deplatformed. I like their videos and want to save them for posterity. I'd get a playlist URL (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUBvc7pmUp9wiZIFOXEp1sCg). This contains 436 videos. To download all of these, I'd run youtube-dl, select video, paste the URL, confirm, and hit enter. Now it'll download all 436 videos in sequence to my specified downloads folder. The URL should have "playlist" or it won't work. If the channel doesn't have any playlists, you can go to their video list and click "play all", then rightclick the playlist name on the next screen eg. "Uploads from DemolitionRanch" and you'll get a playlist URL of all of their uploads.  If your internet has an issue, you run out of storage or something, just hit enter after you've fixed the problem and it'll keep downloading from where it left off. As another exmaple, if you wanted all of Louder with Crowder's podcasts, you'd paste his podcast playlist url (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6hxPYWD50&list=PL3e1orPYt_4YwSmw1vhXbxfm4fHZdlCkP) and it'll download about 245 videos for you.  If you really want to be clever and have some programming skills, you could probably use RSS feeds or API calls to automatically alert your computer that it needs to downloads your favorite channels every time they upload a new video, and then you can watch everything you enjoy without ads or ever visiting youtube. Whatever you do though, don't set your download filepath to "/dev/null" (Posix) or "nul" (Windows), because then the videos will be downloaded but won't actually be saved to your device. While this avoids storing anything on your hard drive, it's a huge waste of Youtube's bandwidth and that costs our friends over there money.