Can’t confirm that. In the 90s encodings were a nightmare. ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15, CP1252, IBM850, … If you tried to build a website with an upload form, you’d get the most bizarre encodings and there was no way to reliably distinguish them. I’m not an English native, my world is full of umlauts and s-z ligatures. Things got A LOT better in the last years, thanks to Unicode encodings.

These errors were much more common before Unicode encodings were in broad use. Unicode pretty much solved this.

I just wrote down simplified versions of my scripts. Then I clicked the wrong button to exit the markdown preview and now it’s all gone. I’ll have to drink a beer now, sorry. If you have any specific questions, I’ll answer them gladly.

I use RSS to watch YouTube videos. I collect the ULRs of the videos I want to watch in a text file using my feed reader (Newsboat). In the evening a script transfers the file to my TV computer and fetches the videos with yt-dlp.

To play the videos I use another script, which plays and then trashes the video files in a loop.

Pros: no ads, no buffering videos during playback, plays videos without interaction (like TV), can collect video URLs over day, don’t have to bother with YouTube’s user interface, cookies etc.