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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

#111

Post by fatchan »

lelandbatey wrote: post #108
jacobgkau wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible.

Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s.

Big ups on keeping independent.

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

#112

Post by imiric »

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…

As the web devolves further, the only viable long-term solution will be allow lists instead of block lists. There is too much hostility online—from websites that want to track you and monetize your data and attention, SEO scams and generated content, and an ever-increasing army of bots—that it's becoming infeasible to maintain rules to filter all of it out. It's much easier to write rules for traffic you approve of, although they will have to be more personal than block lists.

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

#113

Post by gblargg »

IOUnix wrote: post #49

I surprised they didn't even mention jdownloader on the list. It's great for most sites.

Seconded on jDownloader. Still works on an ancient system with Java 1.8.0_66, and able to install the latest updates. Covers so many platforms, not just YouTube.

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

#114

Post by numpad0 »

KwanEsq wrote: post #15
xnx wrote: post #6

ytarchive is also great for downloading livestreams. Unfortunately, it's not as up-to-date as yt-dlp so it can be fragile against blocks. I'm hoping that yt-dlp adds some functionality for downloading portions of a livestream (i.e. not downloading from the start, 120 hours ago).

Huh, last/only time I used yt-dlp on a livestream it downloaded exactly from when I ran it, didn't get anything in the past at all (which was a shame for me personally at the time, as I would have liked the earlier stuff too). Maybe that was a difference in the stream itself though, since I've experienced both past-seekable and live-only live streams on YouTube.

--live-from-start

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #56
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?

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by anigbrowl »

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…

Especially given that YT frequently blocks yt-dlp and bans users who workaround by using the --cookie flag

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

#118

Post by cocogoatmain »

fatchan wrote: post #111
lelandbatey wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/ The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible. Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s. Big ups on keeping independent.

~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~

It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget

Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands

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

#119

Post by skinnymuch »

charcircuit wrote: post #35
skinnymuch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you access those downloads?

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

As the other sister comment said. I was replying to you saying YouTube has downloading in a thread about file access. I use the YouTube premium offline access, it’s nice but I only have premium for mobile background.

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

#120

Post by casey2 »

Can I just rant about how absolutely ridiculous it is that google, a company that has made it's fortune off the back of the web and public internet infrastructure blocks downloads. Maybe when it started this was a necessary compromise. In 95' it cost between a hundredth ~ a tenth of a cent to serve the average webpage, it costs google much less than that to serve a video, literally 0 if the users ISP already cached it (think about how unfair that is for a moment a AI generate short evicting some live saving medical document from your ISPs cache so that when you request it the owner of that resources pays again and the user is delayed in their request for potentially live saving information. GROSS!).

The part that is so infuriating is that they try to turn around and capture that value would should rightly be owned by the public by offering downloads for premium members, especially when that we KNOW the only reason YouTube isn't totally financially ruined is that the ISPs are legally required to price worthless youtube's (literally AI generated) spam traffic the same as useful services. (Net Neutrality)

And the are using these ill gotten gains to create their own backbone for yet more profit. Entirely pointless exercise when you realize the government is eventually going to break these companies up and will of course nationalize the one that owns all the infrastructure. Corporations are simply not the correct tool for managing infrastructure that the public relies on. I'm sure anybody whose tried to run a business on top of a google service can attest that's it's a bad strategy and is guaranteed to fail in the long term.

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