Way back in the day working in an Apple Store Genius Bar, this is what we used in the workroom when we needed to keep a computer working continuously (say, to reproduce a problem)
Yeah that Switzerland to Italy train ride video got me into them. They're really beautiful and calming.
But I've stopped because I can't find a way to use them anymore. They're not interesting enough to watch directly. Multitasking doesn't work unfortunately so I just end up listening to the sound of the train and not watching. It's kind of like having an air conditioning unit in your window plus occasionally squeaky distracting train horns when coming out of a tunnel.
Also the ones of the Titanic sinking in real time, although they are “only” around 2 hours 45 minutes, they have the same feels as the absurdly long ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGKpT1oGAnQ
"Across all these videos and many other silent blank ones, every viewer seems to have their own use case. The most common, by far, is to use these videos as a way to simply keep your device on. “I keep this playing overnight so that my laptop doesn’t shutdown while downloading games,” one commenter wrote. “I have to keep this open on my phone because it’s broken and will not turn back on if it turns off,” another said. "
I think the author is taking too many of those comments seriously when they're likely just Reddit style jokes trying to outmeme each other. I don't believe the explanation that someone would actually pay a video instead of changing the settings to disable turning off the screen. Serious platforms and software also prevent autosleep when downloading large games (or have an obvious switch for it)
Well, stop disbelieving, I know in-the-flesh at least one person who does this more or less constantly.
She doesn't like how her aged macbook behaves when it screenlocks, and she refuses to adjust the auto-screen-lock settings, and refuses to let me change them for her. She streams, not black screen, but youtube videos, 24/7. Sometimes videos she once liked, sometimes videos she aspires to watch, sometimes videos she is watching, sometimes "soothing music". Sometimes she leaves them playing audio, but if there's a reason to stop the audio, she doesn't stop the video, she doesn't change to a silent video.... she presses the mute button on the keyboard. That way her computer won't sleep. If she doesn't want video AND doesn't want audio? (such as if I'm visiting and the videos are bothering me) No problem, press mute, and turn the laptop to face the wall.
She is using a shared internet connection with several other apartments, too, so she's actively degrading the experience of other people when she's doing this.
This irrationally bothers me, so I ask her to stop. She won't. I have learned to cope.
This is a person who gets annoyed if I leave a 15W light on, in one of the cheapest electricity markets in the world (well under 10c/kWh).
If I try to ask why she's doing this, she immediately gets confrontational. But, again, it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it, and I'm fairly confident she could do it herself anyway.
Thank you for listening. Apparently my learning-to-cope is not 100% effective.
> it's not because of tech illiteracy, because she refuses help with it
That is still a big sign of tech illiteracy imho. It can be uncertainty about the outcome of changing the settings combined with the fact playing YT videos all day is not too inconvenient for her. You know changing the settings is not a big deal, but someone who sees it as a semi-magical box that sometimes throws random error messages?
I also knew a person who refused to reboot her smartphone in order to fix the problem that it couldn't reliably receive SMS anymore. It had an uptime well over 6 months. The reason? She didn't know the PIN code anymore and didn't want to bother trying to find out. Well, until she bought a shiny new phone that is.
Find something you agree upon. You could appeal to her energy saving mindset.
For example mention how much power an always on computer is drawing and say that videos use CPU which ramps up the wattage and usage. Bright monitors use more energy than dim ones etc. Sleep mode vs always on.
If you want to go even further you could mention the carbon footprint of youtube and internet servers but this is pushing it a bit.
Sometimes we need to accept insanity in our friends and partners. My wife does stuff that I used to hate but now I just accept that’s how she does that particular thing. As a society I think we care too much about people doing certain things the right way.
a good example of this is having a massive number (50+) of tabs open in your browser ... I think that's completely unusable, but I've worked with other techies who do this, and also seems to be a common thing here on HN. Another example is having tons of stuff all over your desktop.
Ahaha, you think 50 is massive? I have over 20 browser windows open, and several of those windows have literally hundreds of tabs. At various times when I've done an actual census (usually before my every-few-years purge) I've had 700 to 1500 tabs. I'm not saying you should like it or emulate me or whatever, but I can't understand what you could possibly be thinking when you say it's "unusable".
Of course, many people use browsers that can't handle it. That would make it literally unusable.
I've just tested letting a Youtube video play on my M2 Macbook Air.
At 25% screen brightness, it uses around 4 Watt.
At 50%, around 6 Watt.
At 100%, around 11 Watt.
The person in question is unlikely to have a modern computer, but letting a video play all the time could technically still be using less power than the light.
That's insane to think about. Extrapolating down to 0% brightness means the actual compute required to manage the network connection and decrypt and render the video, plus anything the OS is doing in the background happens in maybe 2 watts?! With 2 watts you could power a fairly dim LED lightbulb or perform the equivalent of thousands(?) of man hours of hand computations.
Trying to come up with post-facto explanations which arent your true reasoning in order to manipulate your partner's behavior is a huge red flag. If you follow this sort of advice in your own relationship it is very likely going noticed and dissolving trust in your relationship.
Using a different then my own true reasoning is completely normal, and everybody does this. One adjust your reasing to the understanding of the other person for example. Moreover, there is like a miles wide gab between rhetoric and manipulation.
It is perfectly fine to present alternative reasonings to convince someone of something as long as you don't pretend that reasoning is the basis of your own position.
Just for those reading, you can turn this on in Mac by just running the `caffeine` command in the terminal, or using hammerspoon, which will add a nice little button for it to your taskbar.
I use that on my work computer because it doesn't allow changing the lock duration.
Even if I spend too long in the bathroom it will go to sleep with the maximum lock time settings, and my amazing Mac crashes if it has external monitors plugged-in when it goes to sleep.
I'm also not at all surprised that people are tech illiterate to the point that they don't know how to change basic settings. My girlfriend sure as hell wouldn't for example.
If they're using a Mac that doesn't allow changing the screen lock duration, that Mac likely has MDM software installed that controls which apps they can run. I don't know if Caffeine is on that list.
They do block software and even specific websites, but I just checked and the website for Caffeine is not blocked actually.
They are really not restrictive overall, especially for software engineer's computers, but I would still have imagined that a tool which allows us to bypass some restriction specifically put in place would be blocked.
I guess since that security can be defeated by a long YouTube video they didn't see the point.
No, not really. The fast lock is to prevent a lackadaisical attitude toward security from enabling Evil Maid attacks; not to restrict what you can run on your device. (Source: I had this policy foisted on me on both desktop and mobile when I worked for IBM.)
It fits the level of computer expertise I expect from a general YouTube commenter, and I suspect there's a string of replies to the comment telling them there's a better way to do it and that subthread has reached Godwin's law.
No, Godwin's. Whenever I end up reading YouTube comments I'm shocked at how quickly seemingly well intentioned replies end up in 50+ comment flame wars.
I do seriously occasionally play videos to keep my device awake - local mkvs on repeat though, not the consuming internet bandwidth type. Usually when leaving some janky update apps (hi Garmin) that really need to keep working for hours and don't care about keeping the PC awake. When twiddling with sleep settings I sometimes don't set them up right and playing a video in VLC always works.
On Windows I've been using "Don't Sleep" [1] and have now switched to "PowerToys Awake" [2] for one-click sleep prevention. On macOS I've used Caffeine [3] for that purpose. KDE on the other hand already has a built-in check box to prohibit sleeping in the power/battery control applet.
There seems to be quite a market for this teeny tiny tools.
Caffeine is actually built into macs. You can just run ` caffeine` on the command line. I like to use hammerspoon to control it though, which adds the exact same icon to the taskbar, but I have one less thing to install.
I've tried changing the settings, but it's confusing. Am I trying to stop my laptop from "locking", "sleeping" or "hibernating"? It's not clear to me which thing it's doing. Maybe it's doing one thing some of the time, and the other thing the rest of the time. And even now that I think I've set it to do none of these things, the screen still disappears and I have to re-enter my password within 5 minutes. So either the settings don't work, or the UI is too confusing for me to figure out what's the right thing to do. Either way, putting a YouTube video on is much easier.
I was at a hotel once and the TV remote died at night. There was no way to turn it off and it was really bright. I streamed a video of just black with no audio till morning.
I have taken to unplugging TVs in hotel rooms as it has become more difficult to figure out how to shut them off entirely. Some will leave a blue or red LED on all night when I would prefer darkness. Also, it is really hard to tell what the TV or any boxes attached to it might be doing as far as listening or watching.
For me, it’s alarm clocks. Simpler to just unplug than to make certain someone didn’t set an alarm that’ll wake me at 3 in the morning (plus I no longer have the annoying light in the room).
It's just easier to play the video than change settings. I've never managed to change settings on Windows in a way that KEEPS THE THING ALWAYS ON. now I have a fake USB mouse jiggler.
I was in a cafe the other day that had some sort of "HD views of Italy" on a big TV on a loop. Except they didn't quite have enough bandwidth, so every now and again it would visibly buffer.
Someone I know wanted to have a movable white rectangle on the screen to cover up things (for a presentation). They had a creative solution: open a “10h white background” video and used Firefox's picture-in-picture feature. Unfortunately, the recommendation algorithm picked up on this, and started recommending a bunch of similar videos...
Yes! I just realized I can queue up a silent track so it won't matter (much) anymore that my car ignores auto-play settings! I can't tell you how frustrating it is that I just want silence in my car sometimes but invariably a stupid podcast starts playing every time.
I realized what it was because of the reply comment but I clicked it anyways because I am on Mozilla Firefox and by default YouTube videos don't autoplay.
iirc Google Chrome has some bizzare byzantine(?) rule engine that determines whether a website is allowed to autoplay and I suspect (with no evidence) that the rules are set up so YouTube can autoplay videos without prompting the user.
The begining of a Star Wars The Force Awakens review - it'a not done yet, but I believe it lasts about 12-13h at this time.
He also has a response to a hbomberguy video (that's also an analysis of Dark Souls 2) that lasts something like 10h, and multiple 3+ hours reviews of games and movies.
Pretty crazy that it's entirely scripted and is carefully edited - for 10+ hours!
I knew whom you were talking about before even clicking the link. It’s excellent. But I’ve lost all hope we’re going to see another episode of this. :)
I really thought this going to be about the folk, making 8-24 hour long video game reviews and retrospectives, ie. the likes of Noah Caldwell Gervais, Joseph Anderson, PatricianTV, Private Sessions, Whitelight, Liam Triforce, Chris Davis, i am error, and NeverKnowsBest
Other comments appear to consider anything over a single hour unrelateably long, nevermind for scripted content...
I've come across across him, yeah-- I might have a problem :p
Was just focused on folks making content in that 8-22hr range (with one exception :p), otherwise I could include:
KingK, Mandalore, Daryl Talks Games, RagnarRox, Adam Millard, Chariot Rider, HBomberGuy, SuperBunnyHop, Lambhoot, GManLives, GrimBeard, ThorHighHeels, Nerrel, MathewMatosis, WillLovesVideoGames, Writing on Games, Game Makers Toolkit, and (duh) Jacob Geller
>"Across all these videos and many other silent blank ones, every viewer seems to have their own use case. The most common, by far, is to use these videos as a way to simply keep your device on. “I keep this playing overnight so that my laptop doesn’t shutdown while downloading games,” one commenter wrote. “I have to keep this open on my phone because it’s broken and will not turn back on if it turns off,” another said.
>There are also a surprisingly large number of times when you might want your device on but the screen off. “I use this so I can have music open on another tab at night and have this open so the screen with the music on it wont shine so bright in my room,” one commenter wrote on a two-day-long video of a blank black screen. “I use this every night, put on a podcast and q this to come on next,” said another. “Unironically useful for avoiding screen burn in,” another wrote. “Big thanks <3.”"
This is a very interesting situation. Like the video of someone recording the MAX captchas with their phone instead of using the built in screen recording, my first reaction to these is "thee tech illiterate people! There is a _right_ way to do these things built into the OS!" But on reflection, if it works for them then it seems fine (I guess you could argue that it was using electricity or bandwidth). If anything it seems like a failure of the OS companies to make it clear that the OS can already do all these things.
If only there was proper UI for these things. These days, even simple things like copy paste are being made harder and harder to discover, rather than have 1 standard way of doing it that works anywhere.
If people are able to figure out how to use youtube videos to achieve what they want, they for sure would be able to do things if only the options were actually there in UI's, but options are being left out more and more to make things "slick".
Regarding audio/video/brightness: this used to be super easy with analog volume dials, and screens with on/off button where your computer wouldn't (and shouldn't imho!) know that your monitor is off. I also really wish monitors with analog brightness adjust would make a return, these types of monitors don't exist for 20 years now, but I rarely adjust brightness on monitors due to the lack of that since brightness is usually deeply hidden in the menu now (somehow monitors with extremely bad quality built-in speakers that you'd never want to actually use, have easier shortcuts for audio volume than brightness)
Largely irrelevant, but that volume control works on connected devices as well. I plug my speakers into my monitor rather than directly into my computer so that the sound goes through the HDMI port. Much handier for my laptop, I only need to plug in one thing instead of 2.
> Like the video of someone recording the MAX captchas with their phone instead of using the built in screen recording, my first reaction to these is "thee tech illiterate people
Take phone out, record button, stop button, share button, select twitter/youtube/instagram/..., enter title/text, done.
Now count the steps on a PC. Especially if it's some other persons PC, not logged into your youtube account.
There was a Trans-Siberian railway video, of the full journey, from Moscow to Peking I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1504271 Unfortunately it is not online anymore?
Tip for those who are doing this (and wasting internet bandwidth) just to prevent their locked-down work machine from going to lock/sleep:
Open a PPT, F5 to enter slideshow mode, optionally press B to blackout the screen to prevent burn-in.
I made a small "screensaver" PPT that consumes very minimal resources (black screen with a small bouncing logotext), saved it a as a PPSX (so it launches in slideshow automatically and exits PPT when done), and added a shortcut to the PPSX file on my Win10 taskbar. One-click screensaver whenever I want to step away and an equally simple exit.
Many times I actually leave this running in background while I work on the laptop. This way even if I step away without doing my one-click routine (or get pulled into a phone call or start working on my other laptop), it still prevents lock/sleep.
Obviously this would be bad infosec practice at office or public place. But with WFH this keeps me healthy and sane.
When my partner used a 10+ hour pure white video as a desklight it felt like blaspheme to me. Same as turning to gpt4 to sort a small list of words. It is unholy.
(un?)fortunately h264 is doing far more than mpeg iframes. Each frame contains look back data to up to 16 other frames, and each frame is also divided into variable size blocks 4-16 pixels in dimension. This arbitrary blocking of the white frames likely what is consuming so much space.
If you encoded in mpeg I'm sure you would dramatically reduce the file size, but not as magically as you would think. It will still store a new white iframe every 16 frames by default, though many encoders will let you specify an alternative.
In theory I guess YouTube could spend n-times as much processing to encode each video in n formats to find the smallest for that particular video and serve that encoding, even doing so after a video reaches x views to cut out yy% of wasted computation, but then they would have to support n codecs on m devices instead of just 1.
We can assume the YouTube video encoders are descent, and they could likely encode such videos with one I-Frame only. Though they may use more I-Frame to make seeking faster.
I’m on mobile but I will check that later using yt-dlp and ffmpeg to list the I-frames.
Summary: these videos are used to keep devices on, queue silent content after podcast to fall asleep, provide background ambiance like fire crackling or soothing music, entertain pets, or avoid screen burn-in.
I've only watched one video longer than two hours and it took me two weeks. But I'm watching videos of more than one more often in just three sessions, as my English listening gets better and better.
Not sure if it was Rogan that created the fad, but it's getting very extended. Unfortunately, people appearing in those tend to think that it's OK to fill hours with "umm", "you know" and unintelligible ultrafast and inaudible circumlocution.
The genre of discussion videos that the likes of hbomberguy, Folding Ideas or ContraPoints produce are also often very long. Then there's stream archives, conference uploads, etc. So there's certainly been a few multi-hour videos I've watched.
In a similar theme, I was recently exposed to the masterpiece which is starwarswars.com the complete original extended trilogy of 6 films superimposed upon each other in simulcast.
It is at the same time an illustrative piece about modern cinematography, a nostalgia-inducing slideshow, and digital ADHD medication.
I was a bit mistaken - I didn't realize that there was an embedded video on that page so I clicked the link to "New YouTube Link" and that one was taken down. The embedded one still plays.
This channel is a treasure trove of long videos showing railway journeys in Europe, with an emphasis on the Balkans. https://www.youtube.com/@dulevoz/videos
It's only an hour, but I love this deep absurd analysis of a single Garfield comic. An hour long, set to the music of Kundun by Philip Glass. https://youtu.be/NAh9oLs67Cw
I do see the value of music to set up an environment for working, sleeping, or whatever you are doing. I'm not sure a single video is the best answer, but it at least is a plausible use case.
For all the videos that exist just as a joke, even though I have a few I truly laugh at, I find it difficult to believe anyone would actually watch the entire video. It counts as a view if you watched 30? seconds of it. So a 24 hour video with 40 million views likely just means that many people turned it on for a fraction of the time, laughed a bit, and turned it off.
> Thirty-five hours, 2.2 million views. Thirty-two hours, 2.4 million.
Maybe the author should point out that a view is not a start->end viewing. I can't tell if they have this misconception but this article may certainly imply start->end viewing to the reader.
On April Fools day, one of the woodworking channels I follow tried a "longs" format (3+ hours [1]) of unedited workshop time, including mistakes, failures, and frustrations. It's surprisingly refreshing to see that behind the otherwise abundant videos showing perfect projects, reality is the same for everyone, with its ups and downs.
Oldest one that comes to mind is the epic sax guy on repeat. There was also Fukkireta x9, which someone managed to preserve a snippet with annotations hardcoded in the image.
This is only 1 hour 42 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAA_yWX8ycQ, but I could watch it all day. It was released as marketing for the Detective Pikachu movie and is a "Leak of the full movie by R Reynolds".
Its terrifying to see two of the main reasons are from people who do not know how to adjust their lock times & sleep mode on Windows / iOS. We're going to be teaching kids how to use a computer the same way we taught the elderly in the early 00's.
> people who do not know how to adjust their lock times
I've seen developers at FAANG companies using the background video trick - because corporate managed devices came with an unmodifiable lock/sleep time.
And if school-issued laptops were even more locked down, with even more boneheaded defaults - that would hardly surprise me.
I was working at Microsoft when Windows Phones were a thing. They gave everyone on the team a very cheap phone with the expectation that we were to dogfood the latest phone OS on it. They tracked our usage hours to make sure we were using them.
One of my teammates just put on (IIRC) a 72 hour long black screen video and reset the video back to the beginning when he left in the evenings.
It needed to be 72 hours long because he didn't want to come in on the weekends to reset it.
Going? This is already a thing; a lot of kids aren't tech savvy at all, except when it comes to hacking Minecraft or running a VPN on their phones to try and evade their home internet's content filters.
Anyway, it reminds me of the very popular Caffeine app for MacOS, which prevents the device from going to sleep. Used by a lot of developers (at the time) as well, so it's not just kids.
I do have to say, since I’ve been to macOS Ventura, and having to deal with the new Settings UI, I cannot for the life of me remember exactly how to find sleep settings. I have to desperately hunt for it every time. Is it under battery? Is it under screensaver? Is it under general? I honestly can’t even tell you.
I’m making an absurdly large generalization here, but I’m feeling like kids are having less curiosity for specifically the devices they own. As things get more integrated into their lives, it’s become a lot of more a utilitarian tool, rather than something worth digging into to see how it does those things.
Not to say that setting a single screen lock time setting is the pinnacle of curiosity, but it’s reflection of the banal utilitarian way they look at devices. “It does what it does”
I know my way around my devices and I still open 24 hour timers all the time. It's 100% reliable and a temporary solution. I can't really say the same for various 'caffeinate' programs I've tried over the years.
He's got all the gear, full face helmet, elbow pads, arm pads, knee pads, gloves, full suspension, disc brakes, and he's carrying his bike over terrain like this??
A personal favorite of mine is 10 hours of procedurally generated Djent [0], a style of progressive heavy metal. It makes excellent background music.
As an anecdote, I've used several of these white-noise-black-screen videos as a sleep aid while I needed my phone's screen "off" and I didn't have other options.
The music is the generated part. The video is visualizations on the music. The channel author describes the process [0], but the whole channel is worth checking out.
One of my all time favorites, and one I often use to sleep is this one that uses Blade Runner samples and sounds: ASMR Cyberpunk Future City Aerial Sound Music Ambience 7 Hours 4K - Sleep Relax Focus Chill Dream -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yttvb9ByOtY
When I'm traveling and in apartments that don't have cable television, I use these super long videos to keep the TV on and make it look like I'm home. I wonder how many other people doing the same and driving up views.
FTA: "to trick your parents into thinking the computer’s off so you can play games without having to reenter the password" -- seems to cover it to me, no?
The 10 hour black video at least wouldn't use much bandwidth, assuming it's encoded well. Hopefully not too much power to decode it on the computer side for playback either.
The YouTube algorithm actually values videos higher that people watch for a longer time, so there is an incentive for the creation of this kind of content
You say this as if shorts represent some systemic shift in attention spans or even anything more than a binning of the existing short-long distribution. But is there evidence for it? Has the distribution of video lengths ever been anything other than a possion random variable?
There are some long videos which are insanely useful. Example: This runs for twentyfour hours - a full day - and has changed many lives forever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAITcNt710 [1]
[1] tl;dr/spoiler: Harvard CS50 – Full Computer Science University Course (uploaded by freecodecamp)
Washington DC - Seattle full trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizGoYFVdzQ
All PS2 games ever released https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixeRUJQ5yPc (and they have a video for every single major console too)
Switzerland to Italy through the Bernina pass train ride https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw9qiV7XlFs
Tokyo subway Yamanote line full loop (even though it's only 1 hour long) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khmuMY6fLaw
Tokyo highway trip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F-hrZKXM-k