My local ISP recently installed fibre in town, which freed us up from the horror that is 700kbit WiMAX connections. The sales rep came round and enthusiastically encouraged us to upgrade to an "up to 100mbit" plan, which turned out to be shared with the entire town.

Yep.

So in practice we get about 1mbit for international traffic, though national traffic is pretty fast at 8-25mbit. Google and Akamai have servers in Madagascar so Google services are super fast, Facebook works great and Windows updates come through fairly quickly, but everything else sorta plods along.

Spotify, Netflix and basically anything streaming are out, but YouTube works perfectly, even in HD, as long as you immediately refresh the page after the video first starts playing. It seems that the first time someone loads a video, it immediately gets cached in-country over what I can only assume is a super-secret super-fast Google link. The second time, it loads much quicker.

This is great in the office, but if you want to load up some videos to take home (internet is way too expensive to have at home) you're going to want to download them. I'm a big fan of youtube-dl, which runs on most OSs and lets you pick and choose your formats. You can start it going, immediately cancel and restart to download at full speed, but you have to do it separately for video and audio and it's generally pretty irritating. So here's a bit of bash script to do it for you!

First install youtube-dl and expect if you don't have them already:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl expect

Then add something like this to your ~/.bashrc:

yt()
{
expect -c 'spawn youtube-dl -f "bestvideo\[height<=480\]/best\[height<=480\]" -o /home/user/YouTube/%(title)s.f%(format_id)s.%(ext)s --no-playlist --no-mtime '"$1"'; expect " ETA " { close }'
expect -c 'spawn youtube-dl -f "worstaudio" -o /home/user/YouTube/%(title)s.f%(format_id)s.%(ext)s --no-playlist --no-mtime '"$1"'; expect " ETA " { close }'
youtube-dl -f "bestvideo[height<=480]+worstaudio/best[height<=480]" -o "/home/user/YouTube/%(title)s.%(ext)s" --no-playlist --no-mtime $1
}

Run bash to reload and use it like yt https://youtube.com/watch?v=whatever

The first two expect commands start downloading the video and audio respectively (I limit mine to 480p or below video and the smallest possible audio, but feel free to change it), killing youtube-dl as soon as they see " ETA " which appears once downloads start. The third command downloads the whole thing once it's been cached in-country.

The reason we include the format ID in the filename for the first two commands is because when downloading video and audio together, youtube-dl adds the format code to the temporary files as title.fcode.ext. When downloading just video or just audio, these aren't included by default. By adding these ourselves, the third command will resume downloading from the existing files and remove them automatically after combining them into one file.

I like to include --no-mtime so the downloaded files' modification date is when they were downloaded, rather than when the video was uploaded. This means I can easily delete them after a month with a crontab entry:

0 21 * * Sun root find /home/user/YouTube/ -type f -mtime +31 -print -delete

Ignore the running as root bit, it's on a NAS so everything runs as root. Woo.