Good YouTube/etc Channels worth watching

[lost weekend]

Does anybody bother to pay for youtube premium, alot of the channels I like don't get interrupted with adverts anyway.ive noticed after 5 am some of the things im watching or listening to get bombarded with ads every 10mins and unless you press skip on the first add it can carry on for 6 mins or so.

 

[Bleaney]

@F.U.B.A.R. was paying for premium at some point, not sure if he still is. But there is a supposed higher quality streaming option available too with Premium, but I'm not sure how significant or noticeable that is.

uBlock Origin Firefox extension add on will take care of all ads for free, and a VPN will take care of any age restriction or verification, if YT requires all of that now.

Very occasionally YT detects the blocker or the VPN and wont play a video unless you turn them off, but so far they have always been one step ahead of YT by the next day.

 

[Shambles]

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV.

I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

 

[lost weekend]

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV. I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV. I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV. I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV. I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

 

[lost weekend]

Sorry my Internet is crazy at the moment so not sure what happened there .
Just off topic if your into old retro tvs for gaming (I'm not a gamer) there's a cracking shop in Dundee that has lots of cool TV sets ,some built into units and some that look 1950s style .

 

[Shambles]

Sorry my Internet is crazy at the moment so not sure what happened there .
Just off topic if your into old retro tvs for gaming (I'm not a gamer) there's a cracking shop in Dundee that has lots of cool TV sets ,some built into units and some that look 1950s style .

That sounds great tbh. Not sure our budget would stretch but if we ever make it to explore Dundee (we will) I’ll be sure to check it out!

 

[TheOldHippiebilly]

 

[F.U.B.A.R.]

Does anybody bother to pay for youtube premium, alot of the channels I like don't get interrupted with adverts anyway.ive noticed after 5 am some of the things im watching or listening to get bombarded with ads every 10mins and unless you press skip on the first add it can carry on for 6 mins or so.

I do, and it's the only subscription worth paying for in my opinion.

I tend to only watch YouTube these days as my aging brain can't handle watching a full film, or even worse, an interminable series on Netflix.

The lack of adverts is liberating.

 

[Perkins : Reborn]

I had a dodgy WWE network account for a couple of years. I missed it when it was blocked. Apart from when my girlfriend would log in before me.

Now most of WCW is on Dailymotion (probably WWE too), and some on the Internet Archive too.

Yes, it's camp. Yes, it's childish, yes it's a soap opera for men. Yes, it's sleazy as fuck. But it's comfort viewing for someone whose teens were in the nineties.

 

[The dropper]

Stefan Milo is a great history channel that focuses on my favourite aspects of history: ancient civilisations and prehistory.

Very factual-based (none of that speculative stuff here) but not dogmatic. He asks the right questions regarding ancient cultures and archaeological finds, but leaves the answers open as we simply do not have the evidence yet to confirm… but he will explore such as we currently have in reasonable depth.

Truly fascinating stuff!

Cheers for this 1 shammy. I like him. He is great, even my stroppy teenagers are enjoying it. Winner

 

[lost weekend]

I do, and it's the only subscription worth paying for in my opinion.

I tend to only watch YouTube these days as my aging brain can't handle watching a full film, or even worse, an interminable series on Netflix.

The lack of adverts is liberating.

Yeh we've got pretty much every channel and tbh it's a total waste of money ,most of netflix documentaries are of poor quality and episode's are dragged out far more than necessary.
Youtube offers so much diverse material and its great to fall asleep to

 

[Shambles]

Art Deco is an excellent art channel. If you enjoy art you should enjoy this channel’s breakdown of various artworks.

This particular video is about an especially extravagant cat lady and 42 of her many, many (in the hundreds) feline companions. The artist spent three whole years getting to know each individual cat and its personality in order to capture their essence. He succeeded!

 

[TheOldHippiebilly]

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

Does anybody bother to pay for youtube premium, alot of the channels I like don't get interrupted with adverts anyway.ive noticed after 5 am some of the things im watching or listening to get bombarded with ads every 10mins and unless you press skip on the first add it can carry on for 6 mins or so.

I will never pay for youtube. To block ads you want to install an add-on for firefox called uBlock Origin. To auto-skip the paid promotion inside of the actual videos you'll want to install something called Sponsorblock. To fix a lot of horrible things about youtube itself install the add-on "Enhancer for Youtube". That will make it bearable again. I can't remember if it's Sponsorblock or Enhancer but one of them gives you a new UI option that will skip directly to the relevant point in the video. So those long drawn out 15-30+ minute videos that could have been a 2 minute video are no longer annoying. You can jump right past all the padding the uploader did in an attempt to game the ad system and get to the relevant part you want.

Of course that auto-skip with sponsorblock relies on someone having watched the video first and marking the relevant sections. But someone usually does that within 10 minutes of a video going up.

Google will try to break your browser from time to time by inserting a 5-10 second pause and pretending the video won't load due to an issue on your end. Simply click pause/play and it'll work 9 times out of 10. The 10th time you can refresh the page and it'll work every time.

I also use yt-dlp combined with mpv to stream youtube videos directly to my media player. You can follow channels with RSS feeds. That way you can subscribe and follow them without giving the channel's owner a subscription. I try to feed google as little data as possible about my habits and I don't want most of the people making videos making money off of them. Since that's the main reason youtube (and the greater internet) got ruined in the first place.

For interesting stuff I like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@MrMBB333

He does a daily space weather report and lots of people send him clips of strange weather, UFOs and misc. stuff they've spotted. The daily space weather reports are worth spending 5 minutes on. He's getting kind of annoying lately because he's started doing live streaming and asking for money. But his regular videos are still as good as ever.

 

[Bleaney]

YouTube Premium is overpriced imo. Yes the ads are irritating but not such a big deal to be worth nearly twenty quid a month - even though we watch more YouTube than anything else on TV.

I guess if you’re watching on a 4K TV it may be more worthwhile to get the streaming quality bump, but we peasants at Chez Sham are still watching on an ancient 720p hand-me-down TV so makes no difference to us.

Sorry to keep harping on about it, but installing the uBlock origin browser extension could not be any easier, and it is fantastically effective.

I think it works best with Firefox, it connects and links up very easily with no issues.

It's only taken me about 4 years to realise that I could also install that combination on my phone, after unnecessarily suffering adverts and pop ups for years. And when you're a late adopter of the smart phone, they can often cause confusion or catch you out, ime. It was only when I got this pop up on my phone the other day saying "your phone is infected with a virus! Install anti virus immediately, as your security is at risk" and I fell for it. Although, in my defense, I was completely fucked at the time.

The next day, when my head was a bit clearer, and I was more able to think properly, I later found out that it was probably merely a pop up, and that finally prompted me to look for solutions on my phone, and to discover that I could use the same Firefox and uBlock origin combination that literally stops all adverts and pop ups from appearing on my computer.

 

[lost weekend]

I will never pay for youtube. To block ads you want to install an add-on for firefox called uBlock Origin. To auto-skip the paid promotion inside of the actual videos you'll want to install something called Sponsorblock. To fix a lot of horrible things about youtube itself install the add-on "Enhancer for Youtube". That will make it bearable again. I can't remember if it's Sponsorblock or Enhancer but one of them gives you a new UI option that will skip directly to the relevant point in the video. So those long drawn out 15-30+ minute videos that could have been a 2 minute video are no longer annoying. You can jump right past all the padding the uploader did in an attempt to game the ad system and get to the relevant part you want.

Of course that auto-skip with sponsorblock relies on someone having watched the video first and marking the relevant sections. But someone usually does that within 10 minutes of a video going up.

Google will try to break your browser from time to time by inserting a 5-10 second pause and pretending the video won't load due to an issue on your end. Simply click pause/play and it'll work 9 times out of 10. The 10th time you can refresh the page and it'll work every time.

I also use yt-dlp combined with mpv to stream youtube videos directly to my media player. You can follow channels with RSS feeds. That way you can subscribe and follow them without giving the channel's owner a subscription. I try to feed google as little data as possible about my habits and I don't want most of the people making videos making money off of them. Since that's the main reason youtube (and the greater internet) got ruined in the first place.

For interesting stuff I like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@MrMBB333

He does a daily space weather report and lots of people send him clips of strange weather, UFOs and misc. stuff they've spotted. The daily space weather reports are worth spending 5 minutes on. He's getting kind of annoying lately because he's started doing live streaming and asking for money. But his regular videos are still as good as ever.

It's strange I used to have an old ipod and maybe because it couldn't update anymore I never got any ads atol but when I bought a new one the first thing I noticed was how different the layout of youtube was and the amount of ads .

 

[Shambles]

Sorry to keep harping on about it, but installing the uBlock origin browser extension could not be any easier, and it is fantastically effective.

I think it works best with Firefox, it connects and links up very easily with no issues.

It's only taken me about 4 years to realise that I could also install that combination on my phone, after unnecessarily suffering adverts and pop ups for years. And when you're a late adopter of the smart phone, they can often cause confusion or catch you out, ime. It was only when I got this pop up on my phone the other day saying "your phone is infected with a virus! Install anti virus immediately, as your security is at risk" and I fell for it. Although, in my defense, I was completely fucked at the time.

The next day, when my head was a bit clearer, and I was more able to think properly, I later found out that it was probably merely a pop up, and that finally prompted me to look for solutions on my phone, and to discover that I could use the same Firefox and uBlock origin combination that literally stops all adverts and pop ups from appearing on my computer.

Yeah, I use that combination on the PC, but almost always watch on TV via Firestick these days. There probably is a way to block ads but am so used to it by now I just tune out tbh.

 

[Bleaney]

Yeah, I use that combination on the PC, but almost always watch on TV via Firestick these days. There probably is a way to block ads but am so used to it by now I just tune out tbh.

I recently had to buy a new SMART TV after my old TV died on me. When I heard about all the adverts that you could not avoid on these new smart TVs, even on menu screens, plus the likely impossibility of uninstalling iplayer (I don't watch BBC or pay the TV licence) I never connect the TV directly to the internet, nor even ever set it up for use that way. I just connect my PC direct to the TV with a HDMI cable, and stream everything that way, or watch downloaded box sets from my PC, when it comes to evening viewing, and time to chill out in front of a nice big screen.

I get no buffering errors or anything like that when streaming through the TV and so can use firefox and uBlock Origin to avoid youtube ads with no issue. But the mistake I keep making is having too many youtube internet tabs open, which Win 11 cannot cope with without freezing. And that's just like any more than 8 tabs or so when you switch to TV it can freeze up. It may be time to start looking into switching to a Linux distro, those are so much less bloated, without all sorts of unwelcome and unnecessary b/s, leaving far more RAM available for having multiple tabs open without issue. IIRC Ubuntu could cope with a huge amount of tabs and it never froze.

I'm just trying to look into whether there are screen and sound recorder facilities available on Linux, I'm sure there must be. The only good thing about Win 11, is that a pretty good one is built into the o/s, and I find it a useful feature. But anytime I try using that while streaming on the TV it completely crashes and freezes everything up, leaving no alternative apart from a reboot..

I probably am losing some speed and reliability and limiting the amount of tabs, by not connecting the TV direct to the internet and not using the TV's menu, but imo I'm gaining by avoiding all the ads and spyware that these new TVs come bundled with. Not to mention all the ads on youtube, which drove me insane.

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

It's strange I used to have an old ipod and maybe because it couldn't update anymore I never got any ads atol but when I bought a new one the first thing I noticed was how different the layout of youtube was and the amount of ads .

It's impossible to block ads in the apps. The older versions of the official apps worked for awhile but they're slowly phasing them out as they add more and more stuff to youtube trying to push people into paying.

I recently had to buy a new SMART TV after my old TV died on me. When I heard about all the adverts that you could not avoid on these new smart TVs, even on menu screens, plus the likely impossibility of uninstalling iplayer (I don't watch BBC or pay the TV licence) I never connect the TV directly to the internet, nor even ever set it up for use that way. I just connect my PC direct to the TV with a HDMI cable, and stream everything that way, or watch downloaded box sets from my PC, when it comes to evening viewing, and time to chill out in front of a nice big screen.

New TVs will go behind your back and seek out an internet connection no matter what you do in software. What you have to do is open them up and yank the wire from the antennas to the TV's motherboard. They're usually flat antennas along the top of the screen and sometimes there is more than one. If you yank (or cut) the wire going to the antenna there will be no ill effects on the television itself and it can improve boot times because it won't sit there forever attempting to connect to any wireless AP in your general area.

But the mistake I keep making is having too many youtube internet tabs open, which Win 11 cannot cope with without freezing. And that's just like any more than 8 tabs or so when you switch to TV it can freeze up.

You want to get something called "Auto tab discard" for Firefox. It will force unload any tab you haven't viewed in the last 5 minutes or so and close tabs once you've opened 2-3 more tabs. You can keep tabs you want to remain in RAM loaded by right clicking on them and selecting to keep it for this session/always keep it. If a tab unloads you won't lose your place on the page. It'll jump directly to where you left off when the tab re-loads once you select it.

This won't prevent Firefox's memory leaking but it will cut down on it a lot. The important thing is it prevents tabs from running the background all of the time snooping on other tabs and what you're doing on your PC.

I also suggest taking the time to set-up a Jellyfin server. You can do it with a small PC/Pi with a bunch of storage space. Keep all your media on the HDDs on your server. Youtube channels can be followed via RSS feeds and auto-downloaded when a new one is uploaded to channels you follow. You can scrape entire channels to get the backlog of videos if you want them. On top of that you can keep a large collection of TV shows, movies and documentaries. Along with music if you want to do that to (I use mpd for that though).

It's basically your own private Netflix and you can share it with friends and family. You can also do Live TV this way if you want but you'll have to find an IPTV provider. There are some free ones but most people pay $2-$10 a month to subscribe to someone re-selling IPTV service. That way it's less likely to get taken down. I don't have it anymore but I was maintaining IPTV service on my server for a few years so my Dad and Grandmother could watch sports and live airings of reality TV shows.

You don't need a lot of storage for this. I haven't checked in awhile but last I did I was maintaining full seasons of 2,000+ TV shows in less than 2TB of storage space.

 

[lost weekend]

It's impossible to block ads in the apps. The older versions of the official apps worked for awhile but they're slowly phasing them out as they add more and more stuff to youtube trying to push people into paying.



New TVs will go behind your back and seek out an internet connection no matter what you do in software. What you have to do is open them up and yank the wire from the antennas to the TV's motherboard. They're usually flat antennas along the top of the screen and sometimes there is more than one. If you yank (or cut) the wire going to the antenna there will be no ill effects on the television itself and it can improve boot times because it won't sit there forever attempting to connect to any wireless AP in your general area.



You want to get something called "Auto tab discard" for Firefox. It will force unload any tab you haven't viewed in the last 5 minutes or so and close tabs once you've opened 2-3 more tabs. You can keep tabs you want to remain in RAM loaded by right clicking on them and selecting to keep it for this session/always keep it. If a tab unloads you won't lose your place on the page. It'll jump directly to where you left off when the tab re-loads once you select it.

This won't prevent Firefox's memory leaking but it will cut down on it a lot. The important thing is it prevents tabs from running the background all of the time snooping on other tabs and what you're doing on your PC.

I also suggest taking the time to set-up a Jellyfin server. You can do it with a small PC/Pi with a bunch of storage space. Keep all your media on the HDDs on your server. Youtube channels can be followed via RSS feeds and auto-downloaded when a new one is uploaded to channels you follow. You can scrape entire channels to get the backlog of videos if you want them. On top of that you can keep a large collection of TV shows, movies and documentaries. Along with music if you want to do that to (I use mpd for that though).

It's basically your own private Netflix and you can share it with friends and family. You can also do Live TV this way if you want but you'll have to find an IPTV provider. There are some free ones but most people pay $2-$10 a month to subscribe to someone re-selling IPTV service. That way it's less likely to get taken down. I don't have it anymore but I was maintaining IPTV service on my server for a few years so my Dad and Grandmother could watch sports and live airings of reality TV shows.

You don't need a lot of storage for this. I haven't checked in awhile but last I did I was maintaining full seasons of 2,000+ TV shows in less than 2TB of storage space.

Yeh I never had the app ,still don't just go through Google search