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Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

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Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#121

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #51
AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #48

On a sidenote am I imagining things or do videos actually look a tiny bit better in YouTube? 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 "block…

I don't understand your reply. Why don't you just take a screenshot at the exact same timestamp? It's that easy and would have taken you less time than writing this up.

I'm watching with AppleTV, comparing Infuse with YouTube. So I can only "eyeball" it. Wish AppleTV let me do screenshots it would be fun!

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#122

Post by [deleted] »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #97
deno wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty they could do. They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users, and they could further enable DRM, as pretty much by now the majority of users are already on DRM-handicapped platforms. Any will-be-called "legacy" users would just get limited to 480p.

> They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users Huge amount of users of youtube are literally babies, they don't know how to read or write so they don't sign in. I'm starting to also suspect the trend of YTs algorithm insisting on recommending videos you've already watched is also a decision from this huge baby user base.

[deleted]

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#123

Post by londons_explore »

chii wrote: post #112
londons_explore wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

splicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.

i dont think what's stopping google is a technical difficulty problem, but a scale problem (as well as a lack of real need atm). I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos). It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the…

Adblocking is very much on googles radar. But they realise it is a cat and mouse game - and whenever you start playing that game, you run the risk of ending up in a position worse than you started with. They currently get 80-90% of the ad impressions they try to display, which is pretty good compared to a hypothetical future where someone like Microsoft makes an adblocking-by-default browser and courts force Google not to block them.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#124

Post by thfuran »

sph wrote: post #32
benterix wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies do not have ethics, only interests. While that's certainly true (although an simplification - they are just managed by people with low ethics), we can do better. If I behaved like managers of Google, Meta or Microsoft, I'd be ashamed of myself.

I despise this philosophy. Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them? It's a popular theme because it makes one feel like they have control over the world around them: they just have to be better than it. No. I shouldn't have to work harder myself to somehow cancel out the evil in the world. Because if we were less cowards and calling them for what they are - evil - they wouldn't hold so much power over us…

>Megacorps are shit, so we should be better than them?

To do otherwise plainly makes you shit as well.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#125

Post by Aachen »

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #121
Knee_Pain wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your reply. Why don't you just take a screenshot at the exact same timestamp? It's that easy and would have taken you less time than writing this up.

I'm watching with AppleTV, comparing Infuse with YouTube. So I can only "eyeball" it. Wish AppleTV let me do screenshots it would be fun!

I don't know what Infuse is but I could screen record Apple TV from the web browser just fine back when I had that subscription. Otherwise, try a VM

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#126

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

mgdlbp wrote: post #77
AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #48

On a sidenote am I imagining things or do videos actually look a tiny bit better in YouTube? 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 "block…

What filter the player uses for scaling (and chroma scaling) affects sharpness. Playing a native resolution stream fullscreen should eliminate differences here for monochrome edges. Depending on OS you might be able to toggle rapidly between two fullscreen apps to test for differences (cf ISO 29170-2, which recommends 5 Hz). Colour shifts (as in, input != output, not gradients) can come from bad handling of video col…

I'm "eyeballing" switching between Infuse and YouTube on an Apple TV 4k 2nd Gen (2021). The Sony TV is 1080p but I've been chosing 1440p now in YouTube as it definitely looks better overall (more details).

The downloaded video is also 1440p, same audio/video streams as far I can tell. So both Infuse and YouTube will do some scaling to the viewport 1440 > 1080p.

This is an example video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VE-tgVOZN8&t=3m30s

So the left side is really dark and that's the area where you'd typically see more compression artifacts right? Due to the algorithm thinking there's no detail there. So in YouTube it feels solid. But in Infuse I notice tiny little jitters there and it just distracts and I'm guessing it's those really subtle "grainy" things that take away from the picture feeling really clean and smooth.

Now when I switch back to YouTube and I really look for it, at same time stamp I can notice some artifacts, but it's just not as noticable... so I'm still wondering what is going on. Does YouTube also do some kinda brightness/contrast filter perhaps similar to audio? Due to playing back on a TV maybe?

Without being able to make screenshots it's really hard to tell since the time it takes to switch between the apps you get flashes or brightness/dark and the eyes are affected by it. All I can tell is in YouTube the picture just feels smoother and cleaner overall.

edit:

Another example gives some hitns perhaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VE-tgVOZN8&t=6m32s

So now I am checking out the video on my desktop linux with a 1440p monitor, in YoUTube and in VLC player (Ubuntu, AMD GPU).

So interestingly in the background behind Ally to the left on VLC you can clearly see the banding of blue colours, there are lots of squares which are jittering, like the fuzzy grain on a night cam. It's really distracting.

In YouTube (same desktop, via Google Chrome), there is colour banding in the blue background to the left of Ally, but it is not as noticeable because it's like the squares have been averaged and the edge of the bands is smoother. While you can see some tiny shaking there in the colour bands if you look for it, it is not distracting from the overall image.

Hmm.

UPDATE /SOLVED?

Ok after redownloading 1440p 271 stream (VP9) I can confirm the color banding is the "smooth" one I saw in YouTube.

Something's fishy with YouTube I did download the VP9 codec ~3 weeks ago and since then they have changed the streams and the bitrates are lower. There are these new "6xx" streams while the old 1xx/2xx streams appear to have a lower filesize.

But oddly enough the 400 MB filesize I just downloaded has the smoother nicer picture, whereas the 500 MB file I downloaded weeks ago, has the squares/fuzzy/grainy effect. VLC tells me both are VP9 so hmm.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#127

Post by rand846633 »

Andrews54757 wrote: post #86
probably_wrong wrote: post #28

I've never tried YouTube, but I have downloaded videos from sketchier streaming websites using the web developer tools. Almost all of them have the same protection: some code that triggers only when you open the tools and stops the video by creating a debugger statement you cannot skip and triggering some cpu-heavy code (probably an infinite loop, although I wouldn't discard cryptominers). More importantly this code…

Try Anti-Anti-Debug [0]. It's a simple extension to bypass those kinds of anti-debugging techniques. Made it in a few hours a while ago for similar reasons. 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anti-anti-debug/mn...

Than you for this valuable tool; Looking forward to using it!

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#128

Post by mrighele »

Applejinx wrote: post #35
planede wrote: post #12

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.

What is complicated about throttling downloads, let’s say X times the bitrate of the video? I am sure Google’s engineers can implement something ever more complex

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#129

Post by hombre_fatal »

Knee_Pain wrote: post #53
albert_e wrote: post #18

Some videos offer multiple audio channels for different languages? Why have I never come across such videos before / missed somehow?

Because it's an extremely new feature and honestly only a few channels can afford to make use of it

It's also becoming more common now that Youtube will generate its own AI-voice dubs.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#130

Post by thunderbong »

rivo wrote: post #95
matheusmoreira wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly recompilation shouldn't even be necessary, browsers should just let us disable the debugger statement when "clever" sites start taking advantage of it. This usage of debuggers to circumvent our tools is abuse and should be literally impossible unless we consent to it. Our computers are our realms. God giveth and god taketh away.

Chrome Developer Tools allows this. There's a button in the Source tab to deactivate breakpoints from debug statements. The button looks like an arrow cut in half.

This doesn't work for debugger statements.
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