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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

#141

Post by shaky-carrousel »

youniverse wrote: post #100
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!

Off the top of my head, did you try to access the URLs via archive.org? That way, at least you'll get the titles.

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

#143

Post by CM30 »

I think there's definitely an argument to be made that Google needs YouTube downloaders to work in some capacity, since a lot of their biggest and most profitable creators rely on them. Think news outlets/streamers/YouTubers that analyse video game/film/TV show trailers, reaction channels, drama YouTubers and celebrity YouTubers, essay channels in general, etc. Very few of those can afford to record all their own footage for their videos, simply due to how much time and effort it'd take. They rely on things like longplay channels and official company channels posting trailers for material, and bring Google a ton of traffic in return.

So there's probably at least some calculation where they have to decide how much effort they're putting into cracking down on these things, simply because on the one hand they don't want to anger Hollywood and music labels, and on the other hand they don't want to kill off 3/4 of media analysis content on the platform.

There's also the fact a lot of creators will deliberately turn a blind eye to people reusing their video footage so long as they credited in return. For a lot of them, it's less work to just let people figure out how to get the footage from their channels than to set up a third party hosting service where you can officially download them.

Interesting to hear about the terms of service provision though. Wonder how well it would hold up now given that a lot of modern outlets use donations or paid subscriptions for financing rather than ads? I can see an outlet like 404 Media covering YouTube downloaders at some point because of that.

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

#144

Post by CM30 »

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've always wondered why we don't see any platforms just remove the media while leaving the metadata, comments, ratings, etc intact. Like, is there some legal requirement that the idea itself has to be hard to find, or is it okay to just remove the media and let people keep discussing it?

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

#145

Post by perching_aix »

kuschku wrote: post #104
Marsymars wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can get the original compressed h264/h265/etc stream back out, that's the entire point. Even DRM media is using regular accelerated video decode.

The "entire point" of contemporary lossy-media DRM [0] is to prevent you from doing that. You can only do so if the DRM scheme is circumvented or unsound [1].

That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. In which case your only possible but also guaranteed stage of recapture is at the analog hole, by which point the media encoding is already undone, incurring a generational loss.

[0] I consider presently existing and historical DRM implementations deeply flawed and misguided; they severely overstep their boundaries implied by the name "DRM", in certain cases quite disgustingly - hence the many added adjectives for clarification

[1] puzzlingly, any access control will actually get you in the same legal situation, regardless of whether the access control mechanism is effective or sound, so this is actually a design decision; but it's pretty universally taken afaik.

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

#146

Post by genezeta »

MonaroVXR wrote: post #122
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).

I'm on mobile, but what player did you use on your website? Does it handle buffer?

Not the person above but they're using Video.js 7.10.2 http://videojs.com/>

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

#147

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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.

No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server.

Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive.

But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content, holds.

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

#148

Post by brutal_chaos_ »

axiolite wrote: post #129
geokon wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood why do they not limit downloading data to the speed at which you could be possibly watching it. Yesterday I downloaded a 15hour show in like 20 minutes. There is no way I could have downloaded that much data in a legit way through their website/player Im glad I wasn't blocked or throttled, but it seems like it'd be trivial to block someone like me Am I missing something? It does sort of feel like t…

You could have been a legit viewer... clicking to skip over segments of the video, presumably trying to find where you left off last time, or for some scene you remember, or the climax of the video... whatever. Youtube does try to throttle the data speeds, when that first happened, youtube-dl stopped being useful and everyone upgraded their python versions and started using yt-dlp instead.

If you click to skip over, even clicking every minute, you're still not grabbing the whole thing, right? Whereas downloading is grabbing every second.

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

#149

Post by globular-toast »

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 want a web cache that runs on my network transparently caching everything that goes through it. It would be a LRU cache but with the ability to easily mark some resource as archived such that it never gets deleted. A browser extension could be used to do this marking. Unfortunately client-side js makes this very difficult or even impossible to do.

We really dropped the ball when it came to running random js from websites. The number of people who truly run only free software these days is close to zero. I used to block all js about 10 years ago but it was a losing battle and ended up being essentially an opt out from society.

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

#150

Post by balamatom »

CM30 wrote: post #144
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've always wondered why we don't see any platforms just remove the media while leaving the metadata, comments, ratings, etc intact. Like, is there some legal requirement that the idea itself has to be hard to find, or is it okay to just remove the media and let people keep discussing it?

Legal requirement - probably not. Econophysical constraint - betcha. They mostly don't care about the discussion, or the content, or the idea, they care about keeping your eyeballs within a given rectangle until a bell rings.
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