Tangent: I'm expecting a kid, and time will come in couple years, when I'll want to show them kid videos. I fully intend to set this up as streaming from a library curated by my wife & me, populated with youtube-dl and through other means.
I know some people on HN have such setups; could you share recommendations for hardware and software stack? I suspect a Raspberry Pi may not be enough (having network and USB sharing capacity), especially if we want to simultaneously stream movies for ourselves. But I also don't want to turn it into some $1k+ server build, the way they do on /r/plex and elsewhere. Could anyone recommend a "compromise" setup, that would allow to comfortably stream HD videos to 2-3 devices simultaneously?
Whatever you do, keep the kids off youtube unless you want to deal with nightmares and other unpleasantness.
(I have a seven year old and a three year old)
In the end we just settled on netflix and the national broadcasting company (NRK), but I do have a synology nas with some stuff that I can stream to mobiles/ps4 via dnla or apps which would do most of what you want.
If you're in the United States, 90% of the population can receive the 24/7 PBS Kids channel over the air for free.
If you're worried about the quality of content from YouTube, or the chances that someone gaming the system dumps questionable content into your stream, it's worth spending ten bucks on an antenna. It's also good for supplementing your child's YouTube viewing when YT starts showing the same stuff over and over.
Not in the US; unfortunately, I don't think Poland has a dedicated government channel for kids.
Still, I want to make it video-on-demand, but with content fully curated by us - to avoid age-inappropriate content, ads and recommendations. There's no way I'm going to let my kid touch raw YouTube in the next decade.
It may not be much help, but I've found minidlna to be a reliable, simple, lightweight media server on my LAN. I expect it could run well on a low-power device. Any DLNA/UPNP device can stream from it.
I don't have much to add, other than I have had some good results with using the application "4k video downloader" to grab playlists on youtube. I'm not a fan of the generic name, but it does what it sets out to do and is fairly cheap. I'm sure everything can be done with youtube-dl, but I don't have a ton of experience with that.
I am able to get most of the videos downloaded and converted using that application. Sometimes I have to go and manually get a couple of videos that failed to download, but the app has served me well.
Agreed! What I have found is that most legitimate popular YT kids content (Blippi, Pinkfong, etc.) is also available repackaged and included in Amazon Prime. I've been using that for most kids content instead, as it's not just sponsored toy unboxing crap and I don't need to worry about weird auto-playing recommendations or commercials.
Have you used YouTube Kids in the last ~6 months? They made a lot of changes and enabled a mode where only human-vetted videos from topics/creators you select can play. I don't have kids but had assumed that problem was largely addressed.
No it has not. An average person wouldn’t have time to tweak the unknown changes thrown by unknown developers at them for their kids viewing experience. Nobody should trust the YT for kids because their primary motivation is not kids safety or education. When my daughter uses PBS Kids or Khan Academy Kids, I don’t have to worry about what they are throwing at her (relatively). YT on the other hand is a pure disaster waiting to happen to parents, if they don’t know (I was in that boat for some time).
How does one report videos to Youtube that violate their policies and actually get them to do something about it. It appears one can talk about the Holocaust not being real / that people don't get killed in mass shootings in the United States all they want and keep their monitization / Superchats.
What's the problem with videos like you mentioned?
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down?
If somebody writes on their blog that they don't think the holocaust is real, should their blog get taken down, or is there something different about it being a video?
In my opinion, YouTube has gone much too far towards the side of taking down videos rather than leaving them up. We don't need to be calling for them to be even more strict with removing videos that people don't like. If you don't like it, you don't have to watch it.
If your goal in taking down conspiracy theory videos is to kill the conspiracy theory, I think that may actually be counterproductive. If the video stays up and everyone laughs about how stupid it is, nothing bad happens. If the video gets taken down then it just provides them an opportunity to shout about how they're trying to spread the truth but they're being silenced by the establishment.
The counterargument here is that "everyone" doesn't laugh about how stupid these videos are. Many people do, maybe most people, but some go, "Well, yeah, it's kinda crazy and stupid, but it makes you think." Fringe ideologues may upload videos to YouTube in part to hear themselves speak and to preach to the choir, but they also expand their audience and reach.
Do you think all videos in which people are wrong about things should be taken down??
Suppose Video A posits "your computer has a little gremlin inside of it and you should shove an oatmeal cookie into the CD slot at least once a month to keep the gremlin happy" and Video B posits "the Jewish-controlled mass media is conspiring to make us believe school shootings are a real thing and you should stockpile weapons for the coming race war." They are both technically "videos in which people are wrong about things," but isn't there a qualitative difference between those two things? Don't you think it's defensible for YouTube to take down Video B without taking down Video A?
I think that videos that say kids didn't die in school shootings should not be allowed to make money off of said videos especially when they try to get people riled up to harass the survivors and their parents.
Furthermore I expect Google to apply their policies evenly which they don't. If violations of Google ToS are reported they should be taken care of don't you think.
It isn't like you can actually debate them on their channels either as they delete comments that don't support them the vast majority of time.
> You seem to be against people putting out content that don't align with your views
Not GP, but I see this a lot as a retort to people who make the claims they did and I tend to call BS on it.
I strongly suspect there is an extremely broad library of "content that doesn't align with their views", including an extremely broad spectrum of political views, they would have zero issues with on YouTube.
Somehow, climate denialism, antivax content (and other health hazards), holocaust denial, general nazi shit etc are consistently not part of that.
Now GP can come in, correct me and tell me that they want everything they ever would disagree with off Youtube for good. But somehow, I suspect they won't.
So, tangential to your post but, tell me: why is it that there's such a consistently-easy-to-define line for content that a lot of people think should be kept off various platforms, and why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content, rather than a staunch defender of free speech.
I ask this knowing full well there are many people I hold in very high esteem, who legitimately do defend extremely vile shit they disagree with, based on free speech principles. Most of those people I personally know work at the EFF and I've never heard them say much about deplatforming nazis. (could it be because free speech is a government thing, not a youtube thing …)
> why the hell is it that, whenever I see someone defending such content, it's almost always someone who belongs in the category of people who believe in said content
Since nobody here has given any indication that they believe in these ideas, it's probably because you simply assume that anyone defending it believes in it.
Possibly also because the concept of not wanting to take down objectionable videos is a "weird" idea, and people who are willing to take weird ideas seriously probably have lots of other weird ideas.
I helped contribute to that article, feel free to ask any questions!