Yep, I never let YouTube recommend me content, because it's all highly-polished monetized garbage. They've made it purposely difficult to find videos uploaded by normal people. I used to watch this random lady with a pet squirrel who made videos with her phone, it was so fun to watch. Once it all became monetized, that got buried. It's to the point that most of what you see on the front page, you could just as well be watching cable TV. It's so bad.
I feel like an old man saying this, but it seems there are a lot of younger users who got sucked into the YouTube algorithm and see this all as normal or even good. That's why you get weird accusations of "stealing" content or not supporting "creators," as if it's my job to subsidize some rich person's hobby. The entire reason I liked YouTube is it was a free forum where users could share random videos with each other. If it's not that anymore, then it can die for all I care -- I don't want it.
I finally got around to trying it, and I've realized that the "open with" option is absent from the right-click menu for some reason. I'm trying to find out why, but so far no luck. I checked the registry key, and it's intact and should be giving me the option. I hate Windows.
Edit: So after a lot of searching, I discovered that I must have had Notepad++ set up wrong, because I found a registry entry from Notepad++ in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ .bat
I didn't want to just delete the value, so I ended up uninstalling Notepad++ from my PC entirely, and the "open with" option returned, and the registry entry disappeared. Notepad++ is a popular app, so I feel like a lot of the people I found by searching who have the same problem might have this app installed with the registry entry to remove "open with" from the .bat file extension specifically. I knew something was up because I tested other files on my PC, and "open with" was still there. So frustrating, but your solution works now! Thanks!
Also, you might have to go into filter lists in the uBO dashboard and make sure you've checkmarked everything.
I'm not sure what can be done about a fire stick. I'm lucky because I have a mini PC connected to my main TV that runs Linux so I can use that to stream whatever I want. It's one of the best setups I've ever had for entertainment. I just got one of those cheap wireless keyboards with a trackpad for $10 from newegg, and Linux Mint has a setting to make the UI more usable from a distance.
I do use a Roku sometimes when I travel for work, and I just deal with the ads, so if there's a way to make something like a fire stick or roku work with a custom OS, that would be nice, but I'm not aware of anything.
Edit: Just noticed u/viking@infosec.pub has information about smarttubenext. Might look into that.
Revanced is quite the pain to set up, in my opinion, and the Revanced forums aren't super helpful. The developer refuses to publish a useable guide.
I switched to NewPipe x Sponsorblock, and that one was maybe 20 seconds of downloading and installing, not counting tweaking the settings to my liking. It's been much more stable for me. Revanced always crashed for me at exactly 3 hours of continuous use, which was a problem since I use those 8-hour ambient sound videos to help me sleep.
There's also LibreTube, but that one can be a lot more finicky, and you have to manually switch the instance, which becomes a pain in the ass after a while.
I'd rather watch non-monetized channels using an adblocker. The entire attraction of YouTube for me was that it was a platform where regular people could share random videos for free. If that's not what it is, then I'm not interested.
If YouTube had an option to filter all monetized channels from my feed, then that would be the most moral course of action, since I could simply not watch those -- quite bluntly, awful -- videos.
how much actually ends up in the creators’ pockets
For most, very little. For the big ones, millions of dollars, and I always resent people lecturing me about "morals" because I'm not willing to subsidize a rich person's hobby.
Regular perople aren't making anything from YouTube, only the ones who had the capital to invest in their channels upfront. I don't feel compelled to pay for any of that, and I'd just as soon have their content filtered from my feed if it's immoral not to want to see ads.
The channel I use most often is Audible Anarchist, and I really don't think they give a fuck if I use an adblocker or even Piped to watch their videos.
I totally agree with you about Windows. Even Microsoft's forums are generally unhelpful if you don't want to use their OS they way they think you should use it. I'm gradually switching to Linux and will not be using Windows 11. Whatever minor conveniences I may miss out on are worth moving to an OS built with users in mind and with a friendly community of people who are actually helpful.
The benefit is I don't have all my content in one instance. Also there are a few communities I like that might not be federated with a specific instance, but are on another. There's been some talk about beehaw leaving the fediverse, and if it does I'll follow, but I'll probably check this account from time to time.
To me, the benefit of the fediverse is no advertising and no monetization or artificial promoting of posts.
I just used it. It was easy enough to edit/remove metadata, which is all I want to do for now. It reminds me a bit of a Windows 95 era app, which is the time period when I became acclimated to Windows software.
Anyway, it took just a few seconds to do what I want to do. I'm still quite baffled why removing/editing metadata in a mp4 is unsupported in Windows. It seems like such a basic thing.
I'll try this, thanks! It's really surprising though that you can't just delete the metadata like you can with a normal file. Is there something unusual about mp4 format that disallows this?
Haven't heard of either one of these, thanks! Musicbrainz Pickard looks pretty intuitive based on the screenshots, and I like that it's also available for Linux. I'll try that one first.
Yep, I never let YouTube recommend me content, because it's all highly-polished monetized garbage. They've made it purposely difficult to find videos uploaded by normal people. I used to watch this random lady with a pet squirrel who made videos with her phone, it was so fun to watch. Once it all became monetized, that got buried. It's to the point that most of what you see on the front page, you could just as well be watching cable TV. It's so bad.
I feel like an old man saying this, but it seems there are a lot of younger users who got sucked into the YouTube algorithm and see this all as normal or even good. That's why you get weird accusations of "stealing" content or not supporting "creators," as if it's my job to subsidize some rich person's hobby. The entire reason I liked YouTube is it was a free forum where users could share random videos with each other. If it's not that anymore, then it can die for all I care -- I don't want it.