I made a rough guide of my setup for someone wanting to download videos from their browser. Since Seal uses yt-dlp, it will work with Youtube as well.

Hope this can help you out

In the case of your laptop and microphone together while being on the go, a “small” microphone and somewhat cheap would indeed be best like I said previously. If you’re outside, I wouldn’t bring some equipment that attracks too much attention to you for sure.

As for in-ear earbuds, the only good options I’m aware of do not offer any microphones. The cheapest and only ones that I can think of are the old (now retired) apple standard earbuds. However the mic isn’t that “good” per say and I doubt many places still have a stock of them.

It is a solution. I prefer to know exactly how my software is doing things and prefer to set every settings myself. While that isn’t something I recommend most do due to time constraint, I also forgot that those tools are implemented in a lot of big applications making use of video/audio calls. If it suits your needs and find no issue using them, go for it. It will indeed help tremendously. The tips to dampen the noise in the room you are in still applies. Noise cancelling tools like so need to distort the audio the more ambiant sounds there are and the volume they’re at. The louder an environment is, the more your audio will be distorted and the worst the quality will get. Nowadays, we are at a point where it shouldn’t matter too much because of how well those tools processes the audio so it should be fine. Just keep it in mind.

In the end that wasn’t all that useful but I hope you’ll manage to have good calls with an audio that fits your needs and liking.

While browsing a few years back, I found myself buying the Blue Snowball. While many headsets now include good microphones, I chose this one because it was (and still is) cheap and of good enough quality for regular use.

As for the input settings, that might be tough if you have no experience with it. Depending on your laptop’s OS and the wide range of software it might be tough.

Before any audio settings in place, test out your audio with:

• a microphone,
• a physical filter (some uses socks, its not recommended but it’s just to give you an idea of what it is),
• a room with as much noise reduction as possible (thick curtains/room with a good amount of furniture/sound absorbant panels, all of those can help).

Chances are, the noise will still be too much and you will want some artificial changes from softwares afterwards, but the more you dampen the noise, the less tweaks you will have to do in the software making it easier while also not ruining the audio too much with software filters.

If you’re willing to tell me what OS you will use with that laptop I can try and see what could potentially work on there without just telling you xyz software and giving you random values you have no informations on. Sometimes, simple OS audio configurations can do as much as some advertised software.

As blackstrat said, a commentator headset-microphone might be the thing you need if you ever have the money to spend on it. I could give you a good recommendation if you need one but the headset without anything else costs around $3k US iirc. That’s without the needed cable and DAC. Think around $5k US for the whole thing. It is really impressive because no matter how much shouting or loud noise there is right next to you, you cannot hear it if you want to filter it out by decreasing the noise gate.

Do you need to have such a high end headset-microphone? Probably not. A good microphone, adjusted audio input settings and mixing should be well enough. However, if you do feel like you really need a luxurious microphone then tell me and I’ll find the referrence for it in a bit.

You could always try on another machine if you can to see if the latency is due to the laptop or the keyboard itself.

Also, changing keyboard, especially if you’ve been using a certain keyboard type and you change to another, can really mess uo the eay you type until you get used to it.

Lastly, bluetooth is a whole mess so it very well could be that. If you value what you bought and like you said, someone close to you is a tinkerer, converting a bluetooth device to a wired can be a nice project if they haven’t done so before (and it prevents throwing out a working device with a small defect).

Thanks for the info, I’ll keep this in mind. Also, I’m glad to hear your friend got better.

My birth was a pretty big event that changed my life drastically. I wish it never happened…

Instructions unclear, brain got out of its fleshy cage and I can’t get it back.

Setup:

Download Seal and go to Settings > General. From there click on the update yt-dlp to make sure you’re on the latest yt-dlp build. No head to Custom command > New template. Put your label of choice and in the “Command template” section put in your custom command.

To create a good custom command I highly recommend you browse TheFrenchGhosty’s Ultimate YouTube-DL Scripts Collection’s Watch on Mobile Devices Script to get an idea of what you would want (I’ll give an example template later on based on theirs).

Once your command is done click “Done”. If you have not configured the output directory yet, go to Settings > Download directory > Custom command directory (Usually you’ll want this in the Download folder. On android: /storage/emulated/0/Download/<Name-Of-Your-Choosing> Make sure to have “Configure before download” under Settings > General, enabled. From there, exit the app.

Go to the app you want to download your media from (ie. Browser, Youtube). If you are in a browser, long press the url bar of your link and click “Share”. You will be presented a menu to share the selected link. Long press on the Seal icon marked as “Quick Download”. You will be presented with a way to pin the app. This will allow this specific app you’re in to have Seal be presented right away when you want to share a link and be prompted with the “Configure before download” menu. From there, select “Commands” as “Download type” and click on the template’s label you created earlier. You can now click “Download” and enjoy.

You could avoid the hussle of setting up a custom command and tweak a few things in the app’s offered options. I just prefer to use my usual commands that I use to download on my phone as well.

As for the command, here’s a short template I just made from modifying TheFrenchGhosty’s scripts as mentionned above (haven’t tested it but should theoritically work):

yt-dlp --format "(bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=1080]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=720]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=480]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=360]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=240]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1][height=144]/bestvideo[vcodec^=avc1])+(bestaudio[acodec^=mp4a]/bestaudio)/best" --force-ipv4 --sleep-requests 1 --sleep-interval 5 --max-sleep-interval 30 --ignore-errors --no-continue --no-overwrites --add-metadata --parse-metadata "%(title)s:%(meta_title)s" --parse-metadata "%(uploader)s:%(meta_artist)s" --no-write-description --check-formats --concurrent-fragments 4 --output "%(title)s - %(uploader)s (%(upload_date)s).%(ext)s --merge-output-format "mkv" --throttled-rate 100K

Not all the info here is relevant for each use cases but I hope this gives ideas and helps even a bit.

I was just confused and not sure wether it was or not. Thanks to the clarifications of you and others I now know.

Thanks for the helpful answer. I’ll have a look at that stand-up.

Something I forgot, if you are brave enough, replace the thermal paste with a good quality one. Recently I did it and since then I have seen a huge difference. Just make sure to disassemble everything so you can access the CPU and the radiator.

Indeed. You can laugh about anything, but not with everyone. At least, that’s how I see it.

(Of course laughing here is meant as laughing at a joke and not laughing at the misfortune of others).

If you are technical enough you can use an Xposed module to prevent that. Like one that reduces the intake of energy while charging. Some ROMs also offer that built-in.

Try to see what your charger is. Maybe your phone is using “fast charging” which might make it charge faster but it will definitely get hotter. A charger that is compatible with your phone and without fast-charging capabilities might help your phone not be as hot.

Laslty, and this is less about the energy part and more about safety, make sure if you charge it unatended that it is away from anything flamable. While there is a very small change something like that would ever happen I wouldn’t take the risk.

I can definitely see that being a thing sadly.

So the post and comments refer to people who act in such a way mixed with the US politics because of how certain people make “jokes” about minorities that are oppressed and might be oppressed further in the worst case scenario, right?

A lot of organisations accept clothes and other belongings as donation for those in need.

I am in no position to tell yourself what to do or not with your life. I know that telling you “things will get better” is just a nice way to try to get you to endure it further. As good or bad as it is, people are mostly clueless on how to handle such situations but try to be supportive. The only things I can do is be here to listen if you need someone to talk to.

I am quite confused. Can someone please explain why there seems to be hate towards those who like “dark humor”? I can understand that some try to hide behind the name when in reality they just want to bad-mouth minorities or their views, however I don’t see a problem with dark humor by itself.

I may be missing something since a lot of the comments and the post itself mentions US politics where there is a lot of tensions.

If you do not download often or don’t mind the longer time it might take you can do the following.

Before the URI (URL if you prefer) of the post, put view-source:, you can then proceed to search with the “Find in page” tool, or however it might be named for your android browser. In the case of this site you’ll usually search for mp4 files so just search “.mp4” and you should find the file you want to download.

Sometimes you might find different file extensions on the same site for the same type of post because the uploader’ files are directly the ones being posted and not converted by the site itself. In this case you can browse the source a little by searching for a potential name of the file or a HTML tag.

If that is too much of a hassle, I believe applications like Seal (found on FDroid) are able to download from such websites. There’s no reason for it not to since it uses yt-dlp.

Hope that helps.

PS: If you decide to use Seal I could share a very fast workflow if it happens to work.

You did mention a “main drive”. I don’t know what’s taking all that space on your SSD but if you have a media library that takes some space you could move that to a connected HDD. While HDDs aren’t good as a boot drive it does the job well enough with most “standard” quality media. So can be said for documents and more obviously. You can then auto-mount your other drive to be inside your home directory for seemless access.

One thing that isn’t mentionned but I’ll just say this just in case. Always have external backups. I’ve scared myself way too many times thinking I had lost my main drive’s data just to find it the next day on one of my backup. Really a life saver if your setup has a problem where you find that one forum post from 12y ago with a “Nvm I fixed it” marked as [FIXED].

Other than that, thanks for sharing and with the solution at that.