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Digital TV broadcasts are wicked annoying

posted 6 months ago by MaximRecoil (4618)
4 replies | jump to latest

Channel 5 here usually comes in perfect with more than enough signal strength to be glitch-free. But of course, tonight, when I actually wanted to watch something that was on (Jesse James [1939]), within 5 minutes I started seeing/hearing video/audio glitches, and instead of clearing up after a few minutes, it just kept getting worse until I turned it off about 20 minutes into the movie.

So I downloaded it from YouTube - https://youtu.be/fARf-aNNiv4 - and I'm re-encoding it now to a format that my Blu-ray player can understand, and I'll watch it glitch-free on my TV. There's a high-bitrate 1080p torrent for that movie which would be suitable for watching on my projector, but its availability is only 0.981, which means that unless a seed appears (unlikely), the most I can download is 98.1% of it. There may be other sources out there but I'm not going to bother looking; this YouTube one will be good enough for my 32" CRT TV; at least as good as the low-bitrate 480i one that channel 5 is broadcasting right now, but without any reception issues.

Analog TV broadcasts weren't perfect, but they never glitched. If the signal was weaker than usual, the picture would have a little extra noise in it, but it was still perfectly watchable, and the audio was never affected at all unless the signal was so weak that there was no picture to see anyway. It seems that "progress" in the 21st century can never come without regression being inextricably tied to it.

[–] parkerbot (9094) 6 months ago

What do you use to download movies from YouTube and does it edit out the commercials?

[–] MaximRecoil (4618) 6 months ago

I've never seen commercials on YouTube, since I've been using an ad blocker since long before YouTube started inserting commercials, and long before YouTube even existed, for that matter.

In any case, the commercials aren't part of the videos on YouTube. YouTube has it set up so that you get redirected to a commercial at certain points, and then redirected back to the video, so when you download a YouTube video there's nothing to edit out, because the commercials were never part of it to begin with.

I use yt-dlp.exe to download videos from YouTube, and it works on many other sites. It's a command-line tool. For a basic download using defaults (which will just download the highest resolution stream available), just put yt-dlp.exe and ffmpeg.exe in a folder, the open a command prompt (cmd.exe) in that folder and type:

yt-dlp.exe https://youtu.be/fARf-aNNiv4

And press enter.

There are other ways too, i.e., various websites and browser plug-ins that can do it, some better than others. Yt-dlp.exe is the best IMO, because the developers stay one step ahead of YouTube's ongoing attempts to block or slow downloads down to a crawl, plus it has a lot of options. For example, you can download an entire playlist automatically by adding --yes-playlist to the argument, and many other things.

[–] parkerbot (9094) 6 months ago

Thanks - I will check it out.

[–] Keelai (34864) 6 months ago

I agree. My reception on some channels messes up each time a car or truck passes by which is frequent. I prefer analog.