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Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

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Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#131

Post by Adverblessly »

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…

Players like VLC do much better and let you make your own arbitrary adjustments via GLSL :)

In particular, I like the anime4k shader pack, which is ML-based but runs in real time in mpv (and I think VLC as well). While it is tuned for anime (as is obvious from the name), it has decent denoise and deblur which often make YT content more watchable and a restore step that does a really good job with compression artifacts but is a bit too tuned for anime so may not always work, or even make things worse. See https://github.com/bloc97/Anime4K/releases

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#132

Post by nradov »

Applejinx wrote: post #37
abwizz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yea, i also don't think that the increased rate is a problem per se, but i also doubt that a majority of youtube views cover the entire length of the video, hence downloaders do probably use more data.

Any youtuber, myself included, can attest that a majority of youtube views demonstrably don't. A key factor in finding success as a youtuber is getting better at retention, hence all the ridiculousness and MrBeastness: some people specialize in retention, and they do better. It's weird from the standpoint of someone who sets out to watch an entire thing, but almost nobody sticks around while watching videos. It seems…

It's FOMO on a second-by-second basis. No matter what you're watching now you could be watching something better. The UI even somewhat encourages this with the way it displays a list of additional videos below what's playing now.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#133

Post by Aachen »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #90
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.

So suddenly thousands (millions?) of users are unable to view content on YouTube? Sounds pretty bad for ad-revenue....

You need a Google account for living a normal life, or perhaps an Apple account but that's about the extent of your options. I'm sure Google can do the math on how many principalistic people are not going to watch videos with ads anymore if they have to log in for it. Most people are already logged in because they needed an account at some point anyway, so the vast majority of viewers wouldn't even notice. Kicking off adblock users won't be a financial loss either, so it's only about the group that was logged out (probably a tech savvy, privacy-aware audience) and didn't use ad blocking (tech savvy privacy people that watch ads? You can count that group on one hand)

I hate to say this because I'd be affected but that's the math I would expect them to use. The only counter argument I can think of, why they might care to keep freeloaders there, is the network effect

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#134

Post by userbinator »

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…

I just use the logs of my filtering proxy.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#135

Post by nradov »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #73
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 you should be able to download video and you should not be prevented from this, at least to have a proof somebody was spreading hate speech or insulting you or your relatives. Of course you can camcord the screen but this sounds like a stone age solution. Do you know for example that you cannot take screenshots of netflix in your browser on Mac, and therefore cannot make a meme, which is a fair use that h…

What does hate speech have to do with anything? The content has no bearing on the legality or ethics of downloading or bypassing throttling controls.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#136

Post by CydeWeys »

planede wrote: post #12
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 pr…

> I wonder how abusive this is though. In the end you are downloading the same amount of data, but in a shorter time.

In the end you're downloading a lot more data in total, as what ends up happening is you're downloading all sorts of stuff that you never end up getting around to actually watching (data hoarder syndrome). Whereas if you could only watch that stuff during life playback, you'd be downloading much less data in total as there's no bytes wasted amassing a library that never gets viewed.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#137

Post by Aachen »

abwizz wrote: post #29
leshenka wrote: post #13

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…

[flagged]

Not sure what part of not using your suggested command line tools but wanting to just use the official version like everyone else warrants calling someone openly stupid

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#138

Post by userbinator »

chii wrote: post #66
londons_explore wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think youtube really cares if you pirate their content or use a 3rd party client. 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 l…

Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later. Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.

which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms.

Many VCRs could do that, and stop/start recording to skip ads, as that was the only way to do it.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#139

Post by ohgodplsno »

benterix wrote: post #23
no_time wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google" Companies do not have ethics, only interests. It's only natural I behave similarly.

> 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.

Allow me to wire 500k+ in your account every year, and you'll see that your morals are easily bought.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#140

Post by Aachen »

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?

As a more relevant alternative to "look I'm rich", a channel you can try this with is Real Engineering. NewPipe released a version just yesterday that now supports choosing the audio track
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