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Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

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141–150 of 242 posts

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#141
post #4

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

That's what I thought too. Don't give away all your tricks to the enemy; even if the information is already available in other places, the extra publicity won't help our side of the war.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#142

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 can answer about the audio. YouTube (and most other streaming sites like Spotify etc) use something called ReplayGain. It's essentially a tag that specifies the calculated average loudness of the video/song/whatever (this number is calculated at upload time). Upon playback, the official YT client knows to use that tag and adjust its volume level accordingly, but I'd imagine either the tag isn't getting downloaded,…

The loudness information is derived from the file in the first place, so a smart enough player can re-derive it and normalize audio on the fly. My player (mpv) does this by calling out to libav. It can handle both live audio and prerecorded audio, using different algorithms for each case. This functionality can be enabled with config flag `af="acompressor=ratio=4,loudnorm"`. I will admit that I copied these options from examples without really knowing what they do or how they do it, but they make things much more pleasant.

It's disgraceful that even major movie studios often do such a bad job with audio mixing that I indiscriminately run everything through a filter. This is not a problem with the files I'm using; I find the same thing in the theater. C'est la vie.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#144
post #32

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…

Agree very much with this. To mix metaphors, megacorps see you as cattle to be fleeced. Any public good they might do is a public relations stunt or to take advantage of something, e.g. open source development. Yes, there are people in charge, but their duty is to the corporation. Corporations do not have ethics. They cannot have ethics.

A person should be ethical to another person, because that person can reciprocate. A person should only interact with a corporation in terms of legal frameworks, which are also amoral, because that is the only "moral" framework within which a corporation can act. The fictional personhood of a corporation is just that, a fiction.

(There is somewhat of a sliding scale on this, in that a small corporation formed to protect a fruit stand or something is certainly not Microsoft and shouldn't be treated as a Microsoft.)

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#145

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 can answer about the audio. YouTube (and most other streaming sites like Spotify etc) use something called ReplayGain. It's essentially a tag that specifies the calculated average loudness of the video/song/whatever (this number is calculated at upload time). Upon playback, the official YT client knows to use that tag and adjust its volume level accordingly, but I'd imagine either the tag isn't getting downloaded,…

Thanks! I've always compared playing music on YT and playing lossless music in Rhythmbox on Linux and wondered why YT sounds better. Now discovered the ReplayGain toggle in Rhythmbox thanks to your comment.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#146
post #66

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.

[dead]

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#147
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

By default, it's even right next to what's playing now. It's only below when you're in theater mode.

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#149

I always wondered How YouTube distribute videos l, it's the smoothest video platform, even on when I had crappy internet it worked fine also not all.platform works well in south America.The closest to YouTube it's Netflix but lacks behinds a lot.

They have cache servers deployed into the ISP networks close to your home. The ISPs allow them to do this because they also benefit from it: Their bottleneck is the connection from their own network into the wider internet backbone, and having cache servers for the big CDNs takes a huge chunk of load away from that bottleneck. Here's documentation about a similar setup for Netflix: https://openconnect.netflix.com/

Re: Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

#150
post #74

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…

>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 If you missed it, not so long ago there was a submission that evaded exactly this. Their solution is so simple yet effective: Recompiling the browser with the debugger keyword renamed. Made me smile. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36961445

You just need to disable breakpoints in the 'Sources' tab of dev tools and refresh. Then you can get the .mp4 or .m3u4 url that can be used with yt-dlp.
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