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I did the same because I wanted to consume podcasts with the screen locked and not have adds. But the download speed for me is pretty good. Downloading a 2.5h podcast in 480p (which has the same audio quality as 1080p IIRC) takes less than half a minute.

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Is there really not a audio only version of the podcasts your interested in. i.e. the classic rss feed of audio files.

It's such a shame what has happened to podcasts

You can download only the audio using youtube-dl.

Sure, and I can rip the audio off the DVD for Gone With The Wind, but that wouldn't make it a podcast.

Why would they not allow audio-only downloads?

This is the main reason why I use NewPipe rather than pay YouTube's ransom. Although I have a high bandwidth plan, I just don't like wasting bandwidth and disk space for video data I'm not actually looking at with my eyes. Most of the time I pop on some intellectual content and listen to it, and the video is often unnecessary. Just give me the damn audio and I'm good. YouTube seems to think this isn't a concern, and maybe it isn't if I forced it to download the 140p version of the video, but that's still a clunky solution. Or maybe the execs think that providing audio downloads lets people "steal" music.

Afaik using the 144p version would be terrible, as YouTube couples the audio bitrate to the video resolution.

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