That’s the idea I’ve got lately. I used to have Spotify through a community that’s been taken down; NewPipe/PipePipe has problems 5 days every month. I found a great site to watch shows with good CC thanks to this community, and a few days ago half the servers weren’t working anymore, and the ones that are still working are slow, like unusable.
Is it just all a big coincidence, or is trying to make people exhausted a tactic?
Not for Youtube at least. They actively try to degrade performance for Ublock Origin users by refreshing elements that force ublock into a death loop that ends with exceedingly high CPU/RAM usage that potentially crashes your browser. At that point, I would say it goes beyond annoyance and into malicious activity.
But its not hacking when google does it.
I skip all that and use NewPipe and yt-dlp
So that’s why my browser keeps crashing
I’ve found that I can simply open a new tab for YouTube every so often, and close the old one. Perks it right up. Don’t even have to close the whole window.
Huh, guess that’s why I’ve never had this problem, I do this before I play any videos!
Even though prices are stupid atm, this is your push to finally spin up a local jellyfin instance. You can run this off an old laptop and an external drive. It won’t be fantastic but it will work and you can look and giggle at the IP holders wringing their hands not knowing how to actually stop piracy. Hell, my entire docker stack (minus plex) is just on a pi. Starting off it’s not too expensive. The expense hits when you turn it into a full blown hobby and you are looking at homelab setups ontop of your htpc setup.
Buy a used workstation off someone who sells getting rid of it. Probably can get one for 20€, if not even free.
If you want more space buy an HDD for some 50-100€. Such setup will easily last you 10-15 years with little maintenance.
Short answer: yes
Long answer: yeah
It sounds like you are ready to learn about self-hosting your own media and using services like Jellyfin and Navidrome to access your media.
They’re consolidating their marketshare and decreasing cost through every method available to increase revenue. All the avenues of piracy have just become the lowest hanging fruit now that these companies aren’t growing anymore.
You have a dedicated community of people who love sticking their fingers in the eyes of giant media conglomerates in their free time vs massive media conglomerates funneling millions of dollars into nullifying that work via DRM, code changes, etc.
Its an uphill battle, but it comes with the territory.
It’s been a constantly evolving war for a long time. I used to be able to just copy files from one floppy to another and that’s it. Then came some protection and we had to copy the whole disk nibble by nibble.
Any company being pirated will fight back eventually. You just have to keep up and deal with it. Or the alternative is paying money with no guarantee the service will hold up its end of the bargain anyway.
