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I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.
I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.
What they care about is you wasting their bandwidth. For an ad-supported video streaming site, bandwidth is normally more expensive than revenue - Google only manages to make it just about work because they have probably the worlds cheapest bandwidth due to being able to bully ISP's into peering with them for free. (they don't let you peer with Google for just Google Search but not youtube).
All these throttling measures are simply trying to reserve most of the bandwidth for real users, not people scraping all the content.
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…
> Getting full Gb/s
Technically most of the time video is served on the same network(ISP) as youtube has caches with almost all ISPs, IXes in the world. It might be the largest CDN built to date.
Case in point, the authors YT URLs point to Canadian ISP Videotron.
"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." This reminds me of some sort of fizzbuzz test. This is not complicated at all. There is no need to use the Range header or run Javascript. The short script below does not download anything because there is no need. It do…
echo -n '{"videoId":"aqz-KE-bpKQ","context":{"client":{"clientName":"WEB","clientVersion":"2.20230810.05.00"}}}' |
http post 'https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player' |
jq -r '.streamingData.adaptiveFormats[0].url'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pr…
Well, you go away unless you're another organization that proposes to mirror all of YouTube and eat its lunch. Google can't only think about humans, it's got to also think about competing organizations. That complicates things.
Some videos offer multiple audio channels for different languages? Why have I never come across such videos before / missed somehow?
Mr Beast's videos have at least a spanish audio track, which funnily enough NewPipe defaults to (or did the last I checked) and NewPipe doesn't support changing the track as far as I can tell
There is an option now to select the audio track and MrBeast uploads dubs in more than a dozen languages.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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I barely have any problems in desktop because issues like no pip and background play just don't exist there.
This really has puzzled me. I downloaded a few favourites and watch them on VLC or Infuse on my AppleTV. In the YouTube app I can use the "nerd stats" to confirm I am viewing the exact same video/audio streams...
... it could be my imagination but it seems like YouTube does a really subtle kind of filter that makes the "blocky" compression artifacts smoother. It doesnt ehance edges or anything - my guess is it looks for areas WITHOUT edges where there are sublte shfts of colour, and it makes the blocky artifacts less prominent.
... it's really subtle and I still cant tell if its just my imagination, like my OCD thinking that my downloaded video doesnt look as good and yet, I noticed on YouTube the video feels more vibrant and solid. When I watch my downloaded vid there are these really sublte, but noticable artifacts often in the background , in the shadows and these constant tiny little jitters even on a 1440p video - make the final picture look not as good.
Am I making this up?
Audio wise there is definitely a change as well. YouTube audio is always more or less level for me, while a downloaded video always needs to crank up the volume which is annoying.
I wish players like VLC or Infuse did whatever YouTube does to make videos just more pleasant to look at. I dont think YoUTube changes the colours or does any kind of vibrancy filter though I may be wrong, but it does things to "level" audio so that you have a more consistent experience going from one video/channel to another.
I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.
Youtube is compatible with a lot of platforms, old browsers, ancient smart TV's, ancient android, etc - I would guess widevine isn't.
I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.
- Introduces a decryption step, which is slow
- Forces software video decoding, which is slow
- Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective
It would effectively push a significant portion of their user base off the platform while not being very effective in its goals.