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Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

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Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#11

Post by G3rn0ti »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #7
NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like, press the "Download" button and pay for Premium?

YouTube Premium doesn’t let you download the video file. Even if you do it from a browser, it is only accessible from the YouTube website run offline as a SPA. Even then, downloaded videos can only be played for 29 days before having to reconnect most of the time, with some regions restricting it to 48 hours.

I think parent means the YouTube app. On iOS (and android/chromos?) you can actually download videos and watch them offline if you got a premium membership. But then the videos are under control by the app.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#12

Post by planede »

jgtrosh wrote: post #10

Technically, all interesting. Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the real browser test to get regular browser speeds”). There you're not “wasting” any more of YouTube's resources than a browser user with ad-block. Getting full Gb/s without paying anything feels to me like you're pushing all the ad-blocked users' luck. But then agai…

I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time. You are utilizing more bandwidth but you go away earlier.

I think the original browser use case is tuned for the common occurrence of not watching the whole video. But if you intend to watch (and archive) the whole video to begin with then I don't think this eats away Google's bandwidth more. OTOH it probably has more overhead due to the amount of connections.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#13

Post by leshenka »

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #3
0x7d0 wrote: post #2

Have you ever tried to download videos from YouTube? I mean manually without relying on software like youtube-dl, yt-dlp or one of “these” websites. It’s much more complicated than you might think.

Like, press the "Download" button and pay for Premium?

Premium is not available worldwide.

I tried to trick google by creating an account using VPN in Europe. I even managed to subscribe for Premium. Even with an active Premium subscription Youtube app won't let me use its features such as downloading, background play and picture in picture (you know, basically everything)

Because "you live in the wrong part of the world". Creating a problem, selling the solution is what they do.

Like, I don't even care about downloading, but Google intentionally cripples their mobile website experience by suppressing pip and background play. It would cost zero dollars not to do this but they did.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#14

Post by leshenka »

G3rn0ti wrote: post #11
mynameisvlad wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube Premium doesn’t let you download the video file. Even if you do it from a browser, it is only accessible from the YouTube website run offline as a SPA. Even then, downloaded videos can only be played for 29 days before having to reconnect most of the time, with some regions restricting it to 48 hours.

I think parent means the YouTube app. On iOS (and android/chromos?) you can actually download videos and watch them offline if you got a premium membership. But then the videos are under control by the app.

You can't get .mp4 though. It's there somewhere inside YT app's persistent storage but there is no "share" button for it.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#15

Post by suprjami »

hruzgar wrote: post #4

So make a nice, good documented blog post for google engineers to understand and fix this issue?? Whyy

The people who created an entire video streaming platform with these blocks and rate limiting are more than capable of reading open source youtube-dl/yt-dlp and probably have been doing so for years.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#17

Post by no_time »

jgtrosh wrote: post #10

Technically, all interesting. Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the real browser test to get regular browser speeds”). There you're not “wasting” any more of YouTube's resources than a browser user with ad-block. Getting full Gb/s without paying anything feels to me like you're pushing all the ad-blocked users' luck. But then agai…

>Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google"

Companies do not have ethics, only interests. It's only natural I behave similarly.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#20

Post by mrtksn »

jgtrosh wrote: post #10

Technically, all interesting. Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the real browser test to get regular browser speeds”). There you're not “wasting” any more of YouTube's resources than a browser user with ad-block. Getting full Gb/s without paying anything feels to me like you're pushing all the ad-blocked users' luck. But then agai…

Technically, everyone pays for connecting to the network. I wouldn't say it's unethical to slam YouTube with full speed downloads but at the same time I wouldn't judge YouTube if they take measures against it.

I'm using a browser extension to show full size of images on social media when hover and Instagram went crazy about it, warning about unusual activities and threatening to lock my account. I looked into it to see if the extension does any scrapping behind but no, it all seems fine. My assumption is that Meta detects requests happening in wrong order which might indicate data scrapping due to the non-standart client behaviour.

So, measures and countermeasures. I guess it's up to YouTube to implement their counter measures and push the scrappers to implement theirs but overall at some point they should be able to limit downloading to the playback*2 speed because a legitimate consumption wouldn't happen any faster on a legitimate client.

But honestly, downloading shouldn't be restricted. The contents are protected by laws anyways and most people have legitimate reasons for downloading videos. It could be for archiving purposes because the video has some value for you, it could be for analysis or it could be about creating content based on the vide content(like downloading a movie trailer to extract parts for you movie review video). The content in YouTube is not created in vacuum and once published they create the new environment where new videos will be made and this creative freedom is important unless we want the current videos be the last videos ever made.

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