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Sometimes I think I made the right decision to just get a huge harddrive and download all my favorite entertainment in drm free format. Movies, music, games, books. I saw this coming a mile away a decade ago. The only thing that will really hurt me is if/when Steam inevitably goes full corporate cucks and starts going hard on the DRM locking down my library.
Ditto. I’m Canadian so our media libraries typically have sucked compared to the US. Back 10-12 years or so ago I remember Netflix making comments online about looking into blocking Canadians from using vpn’s, DNS services and the like to access American Netflix.
Like…motherfuckers I’ve been pirating since June 1, 1999 when Napster came out, and several years earlier if we wanna count a wall of VHS recordings as piracy. I cancelled that day, and set up Plex. Now a decade+ and 30TB later I haven’t had to worry about it for a second, and neither have over a dozen of my close friends lol.
Yep. I’m 100Tb deep into that rabbit hole.
Can you save your steam games on a hard drive? I’m really interested in this possibility,I would also like to preserve some of my games on MY hardware
Yes you can install steam games on an external drive or seperate partition, but it still requires you to sign into account to access them, and if you try to say play the same game on two different computers at the same time with the same account steam will force you to close one of them. I recommend buying games off GOG when you can since they are truly DRM free you may not get cloud saves or workshop content but you aren’t being bossed around by steam either.
You don’t really have to be connected to steam because they actually allow DRM-free games iirc. Obviously it depends on the game.
GOG actually changed that policy to some degree. I don’t think it’s a guarantee that all GOG games are DRM free.
There are many DRM free games on steam. Not quite as good as gog of course.
I love my Plex library. I use YouTube Music because I think it’s more convenient and fair for the price. It’s one service for basically all music. Movies and shows, on the other hand, is an absolute cluster fuck. I’m perfectly happy to pay for good content, but I’m not okay with paying for 10 services where the content keeps shifting and disappearing and being retroactively edited so as not to offend “modern audiences.”
Valve turned me from gaming pirate to VERY solid customer. Spotify turned me from music pirate to customer. I am patiently waiting for the visual media industry to pull their heads out of their asses.
If you have enough technical computer knowledge to put commands in a terminal I highly recommend you check out and install Youtube-dlp (yt-dlp) I am an avid hoarder of music on my mp3 player and love being able to download a whole playlist from youtube (and other sites like bandcamp, soundcloud, vimeo, ect) and have it auto convert to music format and optionally number them in playlist order, with one command. It works with windows and most operating systems.
The best part is that theres no illegal activity involved. It uses the same technologies and rules a web browser uses to download and stream stuff normally.
I appreciate that, but unless you can automate it through an iPhone app, I’m not interested. My life is complicated enough and I want my music access to be seamless.
There are many websites that exist that act as web front ends for youtube-dl/dlp you may want to give consideration to such as https://youtubemp3free.com/en/ Unfortunately these tend to be very slow to convert as they have a lot of people using them all the time.
Many invidious instances/websites offer video+audio format download functionality. If you don’t know what invidious is its a free and open source front end/scrapper for youtube that usually offers a better user experience than youtube premium. Here is a list of all public instances, vid.puffyan.us is my go-to but is currently having rate-limiting issues for being too popular so the vid download function is broken. However I managed to get another instance, https://invidious.slipfox.xyz/feed/popular to download a vids audio in .mp4 format.
There is also piped, similar to invidious in spirit and function but is built with different video extraction technology under the hood, based off the very popular NewPipe app and developed by the same team. Here is a list of public piped instances. piped.video is the most popular instance and you have probably seen a lemmy bot in the comments provide a piped alternative link whenever someone links a youtube url. Download is also hit or miss youll have to try a few piped instances yourself to find one that works probably.
Unfortunately your options are rather limited because IOS is so locked down. If you had said android instead I could offer you more and much better options but well it is what it is. I hope that you at least try out some invidious or piped instances and find one you really like.
If you want to be sold a little bit more on using invidious or piped, here is louis rossmann talking about why he ditched yt premium for it and why he recommends his viewers do the same regardless of his ‘loss’ in ad revenue
Thank you very much :)
You’re welcome! 😎