…and (mostly) not going crazy.

tl;dr: It's youtube-dl and Overcast. And being a day behind is good for your health.

I got it into my head that to be a good citizen, I should follow the impeachment trial. The entire impeachment trial. Yes, even after I found out that 48 hours of argument had been allotted over just 6 days.

I knew technology was on my side. During the House public hearings, I realized that I could rewind YouTube live streams and then speed them up. This let me jump back in the coverage and catch up, scheduling breaks on my own terms. I thought I'd do this for the Senate trial as well, but I found it not good enough.

First, eight hours is in fact a long time. Second, because the presentations were monologues, rather than questioning of witnesses, there were lots of long, dramatic pauses. For someone who's used to listening to podcasts with Overcast's Smart Speed feature, it was a poor experience. Then I had a thought: why don't I make the trial a podcast and use Smart Speed? The only tradeoff would be having to wait until each marathon session concluded before sideloading it into Overcast.

It turns out I had to wait even longer. Even though C-SPAN's live feeds were getting promptly converted to archived videos, they weren't immediately available for download. As I came to learn, while that archiving process takes place, only the last 4 hours of the stream is available — and some days' proceedings went over 11 hours. Once I discovered the pattern, I could see when the archive was complete within youtube-dl itself. Running youtube-dl -F lists the available download formats for a video. If in that process, an m3u8 file is downloaded and no file size is given for the audio track, the video is still being treated as a stream. If there's no mention of an m3u8 and format 140 has a file size, YouTube has re-encoded the entire stream (however long) and it's ready to rip.

No good, this is still a stream.

Fully archived.

Some of these files were big — they're not podcast-optimized audio. Fortunately, Overcast's premium uploads feature allows files up to 1GB, and the largest was in the 600-700MB range. After another download cycle on my iPhone, everything was queued up for maximum civic engagement.

The result was exactly what I hoped for. I put my base listening speed at 1.35x, just two clicks over my speed for run-of-the-mill podcast listening. But Smart Speed really kicked things up, thanks to how the words were being delivered. In conversational podcasts, Smart Speed is usually good for about a 10% increase in speed. For my makeshift impeachment-cast, Smart Speed regularly was boosting up to around 2x, without distorting the actual words beyond my comprehension.

Blasting through in double time was far better than I could have hoped to do on YouTube, and it freed me up to walk away from my computer and multitask. I never got more than a day behind, listening to the previous day's session while the current one was ongoing. And that made for a great secret benefit: I skipped the live Twitter reaction entirely. That was not how I treated the earlier hearings, when I would hit my Screen Time limit before lunch. That let me actually digest what I was hearing on my own terms. And I was making good enough progress that if I wanted to, I could follow up with another podcast or two, which provided much deeper analysis than the necktie take machine.

Overall, my little civics project has been a huge success. I lived through the Clinton impeachment and couldn't tell you anything about the Senate trial (perhaps because I was being shielded from it as a young teenager, or perhaps because it was simply way less accessible). And it's proven once more to me that Overcast is a truly magical app, and that I would barely recognize podcasts — or any audio content — without it.