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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

#91

Post by pzmarzly »

peteforde wrote: post #86

One of the things that drives me crazy about YouTube is that if a video gets taken down, it shows up as a "This video is no longer available" with no further metadata. I am far, far more uptight about no knowing which video was removed than I am about the fact that it is no longer available. I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and ap…

I had a Bash script that parsed my browser history, and for every YouTube video it would run yt-dlp with "--write-info-json --write-subtitles --download-archive=already-downloaded.db" flags. Creating it was the easy part, but keeping it running has presented some challenges. For example, Google started rate limiting my IP quickly, so I had to offload this process to a NAS, where it could keep running for hours overnight, persistently downloading stuff at near dialup speeds. Then I was running out of storage quickly, so I had to add video filtering, and I planned to add basic garbage collection. And of course I had to have youtube-dl (and later yt-dlp) updated at all times.

In the end, I decided it is not worth it. In the scenario you described, I would take the video link/ID and paste it into Bing and Yandex. There is large chance they still have that page cached in their index.

FWIW if you are going to create your own tool, my advice will be to make it a browser extension, and try to pull the video straight from YouTube's element.

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

#92

Post by veegee »

Liftyee wrote: post #72
eek2121 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if you want the highest quality, and they could absolutely stop even that if desired. The only reason why those methods work is due to legacy support. If they only supported the latest versions of HDMI and DRM, it would be very hard to get decent quality video/audio. As it is, even with things currently as they are, we still don't have the high quality feeds that are sent to TVs and dedicated hardware.

I wonder if it would be possible to use e.g. an FPGA to intercept the "last-leg" MIPI signals going between a TV/monitor's control board and the physical display panel itself. Surely there can't be any DRM at that level, because there is not much more "compute" down the line? Granted, you would have to deal with whatever your display does to the raw video signal - preferable to pointing a camcorder at the display but…

Yes actually you can. But you don't even need to go that far, there are HDCP converters that do it for you and convert to HDCP 1 (whose master keys have been made available) or just plain HDMI. See HDFury etc.

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

#93

Post by [deleted] »

encrypted_bird wrote: post #80
lucb1e wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to speak for everyone but I'd not be interested in them because it's a lot of storage space and my device can display only "1k" (1080p) anyway

1080p is 2K. The value of the "K" coefficient is determined by the x axis, not the y axis. That's why 4K is 3840x2160. 16K = 15360x8640 8K = 7680x4320 4K = 3840x2160 2K = 1920x1080 1K = 960x540 (Every value is a doubling of the tier below it, or in the case of "1K" a halving.)

[deleted]

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

#94

Post by is_true »

jacobgkau wrote: post #85
lucb1e wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative. Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their own video hosting servers in favor of using Youtube links/embeds. Old videos on tweakers.net are simply not accessible anymore, that content is gone now This was well after HTML5 was widely supported. As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard n…

> As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. You acknowledge that it's not that simple: > running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) Can any old server really handle that? And can it handle the resulting storage of not only the hig…

Have you tried cloudflare r2?

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

#95

Post by veegee »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #57
nitwit005 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very easy to remove it with an HDCP remover like HDFury, or even an HDCP downconverter and then using the known master keys to decrypt that.

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

#96

Post by guerrilla »

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…

> 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 constant obfuscation that makes it a nightmare(and the maintainers heroes) to keep up. Google frequently rejects download attempts, blocks certain devices or access methods, and breaks techniques that yt-dlp relies on.

This just made me incredibly grateful for the people who do this kind of work. I have no idea who writes all the uBlock Origin filters either, but blessed be the angels, long may their stay in heaven be.

I'm pretty confident I could figure it out eventually but let's be honest, the chance that I'd ever actually invest that much time and energy is approximates zero close enough that we can just say it's flat nil.

Maybe Santa Claus needs to make some donations tonight. ho ho ho

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

#97

Post by yard2010 »

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…

Google is not a side here if you don't want people to download your video do not put it on the internet.

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

#98

Post by cindyllm »

guerrilla wrote: post #96
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…

> 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 constant obfuscation that makes it a nightmare(and the maintainers heroes) to keep up. Google frequently rejects download attempts, blocks certain devices or access methods, and breaks techniques that yt-dlp relies on. This just made…

[dead]

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

#99

Post by dmbche »

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…

>That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.

You know how any semi-motivated teen can open any masterlock with a piece of plastic, but we still use em? Keeps honest people honest - that's all.

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

#100

Post by youniverse »

peteforde wrote: post #86

One of the things that drives me crazy about YouTube is that if a video gets taken down, it shows up as a "This video is no longer available" with no further metadata. I am far, far more uptight about no knowing which video was removed than I am about the fact that it is no longer available. I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and ap…

Agreed, I can't describe the sadness that some of my most treasured nostalgic videos were lost before I knew about yt-dlp, and I can't find out what their titles even were. For example on spotify when music gets removed, if it's in your playlist it just shows it greyed out and unplayable.

Someone at google please give us the ability to see titles!

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