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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

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Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#51

Post by beeflet »

grugagag wrote: post #36
nitwit005 wrote: post #31

This seems to be starting with the assumption that it's possible to prevent people from downloading the videos. That is a false assumption. You can, after all, just play the video and record it. Even if the entire machine playing the content is flawlessly locked down, you can just record the output. The efforts at DRM done by companies like Netflix is done because the companies that licensed the content demand it. Th…

Yeah, you can capture HDMI stream with a cheap card so basically everything is ultimately copyable, however that brings in some friction. Some people prefer the easiest option, even if that showers them in advertisments and distupts their attention.

It only takes one guy to copy it and upload it to bittorrent or something. All these trusted computing schemes are dependent on the weakest link never breaking, where the weakest link is a piece of hardware that the attacker always has access to.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#52

Post by Marsymars »

kuschku wrote: post #21
perching_aix wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually an important distinction. You can recapture the DRM protected (and then decoded) video pretty much always indeed, but then you degrade the quality by having to encode it again. Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important. Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium…

Even with DRM video you can fetch it losslessly. At some point, some part of your system requires access to the raw, decrypted video stream. As long as that's the case, you can get bit-perfect netflix rips.

The problem is that if you have the raw data, you’ve lost the original compression information, so you can’t get it back to a sensible size without double compressing. e.g. Think about what you get when you save a jpeg as a bitmap.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#53

Post by ls612 »

molticrystal wrote: post #26
ameliaquining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument the article is making is that if they really wanted YouTube downloaders to stop working, they'd switch to Encrypted Media Extensions. Do you think that's not plausible?

Many smart devices that have youtube functionality(tvs, refrigerators, consoles, cable boxes, etc), have limited or no ability to support that functionality in hardware, or even if they do, it might not be exposed. Once those devices get phased out, it is very likely they will move to Encrypted Media Extensions or something similar, I believe I saw an issue ticket on yt-dlp's repo indicating they are already experime…

Here has to be at least some benefit Google thinks it gets from youtube downloaders, because for instance there have been various lawsuits going after companies that provide a website to do youtube downloading by the RIAA and co, but Google has studiously avoided endorsing their legal arguments.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#54

Post by anotherevan »

batisteo wrote: post #20

> The best YouTube downloader for Android is NewPipe. You should have a look at Tubular, a fork.

Link for Tubular: https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

You should also look at PipePipe, also available on F-Droid and with similar enhancements (e.g., Sponsorblock) over NewPipe.

https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#55

Post by dzhiurgis »

hayksaakian wrote: post #40
molticrystal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many smart devices that have youtube functionality(tvs, refrigerators, consoles, cable boxes, etc), have limited or no ability to support that functionality in hardware, or even if they do, it might not be exposed. Once those devices get phased out, it is very likely they will move to Encrypted Media Extensions or something similar, I believe I saw an issue ticket on yt-dlp's repo indicating they are already experime…

for example I think feature length films that YouTube sells (or rents) already use this encryption.

That’s why authors should pony up and pay for the encryption feature and rest should be free to download. YouTube could embed ads this way too.

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#56

Post by dzhiurgis »

nitwit005 wrote: post #31

This seems to be starting with the assumption that it's possible to prevent people from downloading the videos. That is a false assumption. You can, after all, just play the video and record it. Even if the entire machine playing the content is flawlessly locked down, you can just record the output. The efforts at DRM done by companies like Netflix is done because the companies that licensed the content demand it. Th…

Why 4k shows are still quite rare on torrents?

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#57

Post by dzhiurgis »

nitwit005 wrote: post #46
dylan604 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows. Causation does not mean correlation. The vast majority of content available via torrents did not come from breaking a streamer's DRM.

I didn't say anything about breaking the DRM. I suggested there's no reason to.

AFAIK HDMI protects from direct ripping so how do they actually do it?

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#59

Post by dzhiurgis »

nativeit wrote: post #38
charcircuit wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a downloads button in the app to see your downloaded videos. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11977233

I'm pretty sure they meant, can the videos be accessed as files in the filesystem, which to my knowledge they cannot.

[flagged]

Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

#60

Post by eek2121 »

molticrystal wrote: post #23

The claim that Google secretly wants YouTube downloaders to work doesn't hold up. Their focus is on delivering videos across a vast range of devices without breaking playback(and even that is blurring[0]), not enabling downloads. If you dive into the yt-dlp source code, you see the insane complexity of calculations needed to download a video. There is code to handle nsig checks, internal YouTube API quirks, and const…

While I do agree (mostly, I've never had a download NOT work, on the rare occasion I grab one), they haven't made it impossible to download videos, so that is a win IMO.
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