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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

#151

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> there is already a secret header used for authenticating that you are using the Google version of Chrome browser

Google needs to be broken up already.

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

#152

Post by zenmac »

brutal_chaos_ wrote: post #148
axiolite wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depending on the player and how they cache it. Yes, if google monitor every byte to which client had downloaded, but that just seems like ultra micro managing, and have no idea how many players will it break. Youtube seems like one of those site, should allow people to download or make them a public utility on IPFS or something like that.

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

#153

Post by Sophira »

eek2121 wrote: post #60
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.

> (mostly, I've never had a download NOT work, on the rare occasion I grab one)

A lot of the reason for that is because yt-dlp explicitly makes it easy for you to update it, so I would imagine that many frontends will do so automatically - something which is becoming more necessary as time goes on, as YouTube and yt-dip play cat and mouse with each other.

Unfortunately, lately, yt-dip has had to disable by default the downloading of certain formats that it was formerly able to access by pretending to be the YouTube iOS client, because they were erroring too often. There are alternatives, of course, but those ones were pretty good.

A lot of what you see in yt-dlp is because of the immense amount of work that the developers put in in order to keep it working. Despite that it now allows for downloading from many more sites than it originally was developed for, they're still not going to give up YouTube support (as long as it still allows DRM-free versions) without a fight.

Once YouTube moves to completely DRM'd videos, however, that may have to be when yt-dlp retires support for YouTube, because yt-dlp very deliberately does not bypass DRM. I'd imagine the name would change at that point.

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

#154

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.

I used to be obsessed with this.

The way I saw it was the universe took billions of years of concerted effort to generate a random number that represents a unique file such as an interesting video or image. It would be such a shame if all that effort was invalidated due to bullshit YouTube reasons or copyright nonsense or link rot or whatever.

So I started hoarding this data. I started buying hardware and designing a home data center with ZFS and hundreds of terabytes to hold it all. I started downloading things I never actually gave a shit about just because they were rare and I wanted to preserve them.

I think getting married cured me of this. Now it's all moments that will be lost to time, like tears in the rain.

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

#155

Post by arccy »

casey2 wrote: post #120

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 i…

If you ever tried hosting video at scale, you'll quite quickly learn that "0" cost x many users is a pretty big number.

And your ideas on ISP caches are from the prehistoric ages, everything is over HTTPS, the only caches for youtube are dedicated servers given to the ISP by google.

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

#156

Post by pta2002 »

kelvinjps wrote: post #68
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…

Downloading a Netflix show is not as easy as downloading a YouTube video is not like you go Netflix downloader put a link and download the video easily. Actually as it's was expensive for the piraters to get the show they only offer it with ads. Maybe you can find it with torrents but series are less common to find than movies

Go to literally any private tracker and you’ll find that the vast, vast majority of pirates just do it for free, mostly because they like doing it. And I guarantee you’ll be able to find basically everything, including TV shows, and if you can’t it’s usually a request away.

Mostly the only expense the pirates have is the cost of the media itself, so subscription for the streaming service or the cost of Blu-rays or movie rental.

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

#157

Post by pta2002 »

dylan604 wrote: post #43
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. Causation does not mean correlation. The vast majority of content available via torrents did not come from breaking a streamer's DRM.

This is completely bullshit. If you find a proper download, you’ll usually see something like “NFLX.WEB-DL” on the file name. That means it got ripped and downloaded from Netflix.

The DRM decryption isn’t the hard bit - it’s actually mostly a standard thing, and there are plenty of tools on GitHub that will decrypt it from you if you have a key, e.g. Devine.

The issue is mostly around getting a key, but those are easy enough to get if you know where to look (e.g. TV firmware dumps).

Once you have this though, and any piracy group will have this, it’s so much easier to do this than to screen record, and will give you the original quality as well.

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

#158

Post by pta2002 »

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.

Ripping the HDMI stream (which is usually still breaking DRM!) is going to force you to reencode the video which will inevitably lose quality. You might also end up with UI elements on the screen and won’t be able to get subtitles out.

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

#159

Post by tokioyoyo »

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?

Name itself might be what is legally required to be taken down.

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

#160

Post by bambax »

Happy user of yt-dlp for years. It's not just an app, it's mainly a Python library, so it can be scripted from a larger Python app, which is super useful.

Had never heard of Statcher, but it seems to just be a gui front for yt-dlp.

In my experience, New Pipe has never worked properly.

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