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Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

tyrrrz.me

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Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#31

Post by mikae1 »

petra wrote: post #30
zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #28

If you really want to understand how streaming video works then it definitely takes you down a couple rabbit holes - but it’s worth it. I think more people and companies should try to stream their own video content rather then be at the mercy of Google, their algorithms, and their censorship. You don’t have to “be” YouTube and host other users content but you should be able to host your content without YouTube’s appr…

There are probably many paid video hosting platforms. You can't save that much by hosting it yourself. Anyone who is hosting on YouTube is looking for a free service.

> Anyone who is hosting on YouTube is looking for a free service.

https://archive.org/help/video.php is also “free”.

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#32

Post by kfarr »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #6
ape4 wrote: post #4

Its too bad such an important resource (youtube) has a secret API - that changes all the time.

Why? YouTube has a proper public API, that doesn't change all the time.

The proper public API notably does not provide access to the raw video steam making it useless for many use cases

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#35

Post by charrondev »

jscipione wrote: post #34

Why do the comment counts almost never match the actual number of comments? I know the answer is censorship but why doesn’t YouTube shadow-ban the comment count when they shadow-ban comments?

Honestly i don’t know what type of comment moderation they are doing but it’s pretty horrible. I constantly see obvious spam links or scammers as first level nested comments, often pretending to be the video author doing “giveaways” or trying to siphon off information. It’s incredibly widespread and has been happening for months at least.

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#36

Post by jscipione »

charrondev wrote: post #35
jscipione wrote: post #34

Why do the comment counts almost never match the actual number of comments? I know the answer is censorship but why doesn’t YouTube shadow-ban the comment count when they shadow-ban comments?

Honestly i don’t know what type of comment moderation they are doing but it’s pretty horrible. I constantly see obvious spam links or scammers as first level nested comments, often pretending to be the video author doing “giveaways” or trying to siphon off information. It’s incredibly widespread and has been happening for months at least.

Ok that’s an example of seeing spam comments, I’m asking about the comments you CAN’T see. For example the link says 3 replies but when you click it there is only 2 comments listed. Is there a technical reason why the reply count is not updated when comments are removed?

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#38

Post by rasz »

2h wrote: post #21
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #16

Interestingly I found that YouTube's web UI actually requests range URLs rather than range HTTP headers, allowing it to seek around the video faster than mpv with yt-dlp (and conveniently avoiding throttling as well). I suspect this may be related to DASH: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/issues/10601 Unfortunately mpv and ffmpeg do not currently have mature DASH support and cannot benefit from fast seeks: https://g…

> and conveniently avoiding throttling as well throttling is not avoided. the YouTube web client generates a JavaScript signature that disables the throttling, same as what the code in the article does.

Signature is old news (couple of years), generating proper one (or straight up copying from YT using devtools) wont get you unthrottled access.

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#39

Post by tyrrrz »

2h wrote: post #23
tyrrrz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can afford to always be logged in, then sure, but it's not always an option. Especially if you need a general solution.

who said anything about always? you log in as needed. most videos are open.

I mean, if you're not the sole user of the tool, you can't guarantee that everyone can log in (or would want to)

Re: Reverse-Engineering YouTube: Revisited

#40

Post by 2h »

rasz wrote: post #38
2h wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and conveniently avoiding throttling as well throttling is not avoided. the YouTube web client generates a JavaScript signature that disables the throttling, same as what the code in the article does.

Signature is old news (couple of years), generating proper one (or straight up copying from YT using devtools) wont get you unthrottled access.

yeah, it will:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/30184

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