phihag_

Yes, any operation is easy in 2^(2^n). For instance, take addition of two 128-bit numbers x and y (seen as 64-bit int arrays) on a 64-bit big-endian CPU:

  sum[1] = x[1] + y[1]
  sum[0] = x[0] + y[0] + carry from previous operation

In contrast, if you'd use 96 bits, you couldn't just use 64 bit integer operations. Instead, you'd have to cast a lot:

  sum[4..11] = *((int64*) x) + *((int64*) y)
  sum[0..3] = (int32) ( (int64) *((int32*) x) + (int64) *((int32*) y) + carry)

So you'd read 32 bit-values into 64 bit registers, set the top 32 bits to zero, perform the addition, and then write out a 32bit value again.

It gets much worse if your CPU architecture does not support the addition to 2^(2^n); if you were to use 100 bits, you'd have to AND the values with a bitmask, and write out single bytes.

So 128 is far easier to implement, faster on many CPU architectures, plus you get the peace of mind that your code works for a long time. For instance, let's assume the lower bound of 9 months per doubling (which is unrealistic as described in this article), then you're going to hit:

  50 bits (baseline from article): 2004
  64 bits: 2014
  80 bits: 2026
  92 bits: 2035
  100 bits: 2040
  128 bits: 2062

Now, what's the expected lifetime of a long-term storage system? It's well-known that the US nuclear force uses 8 inch floppy disks. Those were designed around 1970. So a lifetime of roughly 50 years is to be expected. For ZFS, that would be 2054. By this (admittedly very conservative) calculation, 128 bits is only barely more than required.

Why don't you get a passport, government ID, or driver's license? I'm honestly interested, if that's not too personal to ask.

Sorry! The problem is that our userbase is split about wanting the playlist or the video. You can create a file ~/.config/youtube-dl.conf with the content --no-playlist so that you don't have to type it out every time.

The problem is that this only works for some YouTube videos (for example it will fail for basically all VEVO videos), not to mention maintainability issues.

While -f 141 is of course perfectly fine, may I suggest -f bestaudio ? That should work fine for non-YouTube sites (soundcloud or so), and will get you a better version should YouTube one day add it. If you really prefer 141, you can also use -f 141/bestaudio to fall back to bestaudio if 141 is unavailable.