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.
>Scrubbing in mpv is instantaneous for me for local files
Yes, I agree that scrubbing in mpv or vlc is "instantaneous" but Youtube's web ui is even more hyperfast "instaneous" than mpv.
>There is also a solution for generating thumbnails[1], though I had some issues with it, and didn't end up using it.
For me, using an offline tool like thumbfast to generate timeline previews defeats the purpose of using Youtube's pre-existing timeline thumbnails that Google's datacenter already generated. Let me explain...
>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,
I'm guessing it's a difference in usage pattern. I'm often browsing a bunch of Youtube videos as a research tool. Like a "visual wikipedia" for various topics (especially DIY tutorials and products research). I want to jump in and out of videos fast. Downloading videos with yt-dlp to play in mpv isn't the workflow here. That's too slow and cumbersome. Instead, I'm sampling a bunch of videos and maybe a few of those will be ultimately be downloaded. E.g. Preview/scrub fragments of 10 related videos, read some viewer comments, scan some transcripts, etc... and eventually only yt-dlp 2 of them. This is why "mpv yt-dlp with workarounds" is not an acceptable substitute for using Youtube's web ui.
My only usage of YT is queing up videos for short-term playback. So I browse a feed of my subscriptions in Piped, drag links of videos I'm interested in to a text file, and run a small script on my HTPC to download them with yt-dlp in parallel, and add them to a playlist. With a fast connection, it only takes a few minutes to download even dozens of videos at a time. Then I serve the videos on my LAN over HTTP with nginx, and watch them on any of my devices using any media player that can stream HTTP, which is usually mpv.
I started a project some time ago to make this fancier, but honestly, this workflow does 90% of what I need, and I'm too lazy to change it.
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