161–170 of 251 posts
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…
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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.
That's a wildly imaginative fever dream you're having. There is no timeline in which content creators would pay YouTube to encrypt their video content.
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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,…
Lol. That is not possible.
If I'm able to watch something, my device must be able to decrypt the DRM. If my device can decrypt the DRM, I can take my device apart and figure out how it does this, and do it myself.
The most DRM encumbered format is DCP, used my cinemas. Each projector has a unique key burnt into it, the decryption, decoding and watermarking happen on the same piece of silicon, and the entire device is built like an HSM, opening it wipes the keys.
There are bit-perfect DCP rips on the high seas, with the original compressed data.
HDCP is meant to prevent me from copying HDMI signals. Every conference center and lecture hall has cheap Chinese devices that remove it.
Regarding the analog hole, with a properly calibrated professional video camera recording in RAW, with both camera and monitor genlocked and color calibrated, and the proper postprocessing, you can capure the original pixel values exactly.
I've done that part more often than I'd like...
And worst case, you can then brute force which parameters the original encode used to re-encode your data without generation loss.
> Google has now covered its tracks better -- there’s nothing about “Google Product Abuse” in its current AdSense policies. In other (less biased) words: These old rules were rescinded haven't been enforced since 2012 (last example cited). This article was written in 2025 and still complaining about something that isn't happening anymore.
The author makes the case that EULAs are "toothless." However, what about federal law? In the U.S., at least, it is illegal to make copies of other people's work. This is not an offense against YouTube (who does not inherently own the media they present), but the publishers, the creators, etc. Somehow, I doubt that Alan Becker would approve people downloading and sharing his videos willy-nilly.
Maybe I am too old, but I remember a time where the broad population recorded radio shows on Tape and video shows on VHS, and no one was asking any copyright questions. And yes, recording a TV show in your home VHS recorder and selling/giving it to third parties, was illegal in most jurisdictions and the same laws apply probably still today.
But recording something for your own archive and watch it home (possibly with family members) is probably also still perfectly legal (as long as no DRM bypass was used).
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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…
There is an official download option inside the app. If they limit the download speed to the watching time, it won't be useful.
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…
Why don’t creators both publish to YouTube but also publish somewhere else for archival or public access reasons, to help keep content available for outside walled gardens? Is it just not important to them? Is it hosting costs? Missing out on ad revenue?
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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,…
> That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. Lol. That is not possible. If I'm able to watch something, my device must be able to decrypt the DRM. If my device can decrypt the DRM, I can take my device apart and figure out how it does this, and do it myself. The most DRM encumbered format is DCP, used my cinemas. Each projector has a unique key bu…
It is possible, both under the conservative interpretation of the word (like how AACS is continuously updated as security holes are found and compromises happen, with the keys being rotated each time), and on a theoretical level (FHE). The latter is not being done because it is not nearly performant enough, and the former is an ongoing cat and mouse game that is once again irrelevant to what we were discussing here.
With FHE, the "take the machine apart and analyze what it does to get the original bitstream" would be cryptographically hard, so good luck with that. With the usual DRM schemes it isn't, so they are pretty much always cracked in a few months or a few years, but until that point they are both sound and effective.
> Regarding the analog hole, with a properly calibrated professional video camera recording in RAW, with both camera and monitor genlocked and color calibrated, and the proper postprocessing, you can capure the original pixel values exactly.
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting too...
> And worst case, you can then brute force which parameters the original encode used to re-encode your data without generation loss.
Can you? I mean in practice, in a practical amount of time. And is that actually done?
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…
This is why I recommend everybody to stay AWAY from Youtube Music. I migrated my curated playlists from Spotify a few years ago, and to my surprise now I have dozens of songs that are no longer available and Youtube doesn’t offer a way to at least let me know which song it was. Indeed, I was a paying user and Youtube caused intentional and irretrievable data loss.
After a decade of paying for Youtube Premium I have unsubscribed and have vowed never to give them any more money whatsoever.
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Using DRM would make it illegal for YouTubers to use Creative-Commons-licensed content in their videos, such as Kevin MacLeod's music or many images from Wikipedia.
When you upload a video to YouTube, you agree that you own the copyright or are otherwise able to grant YouTube a license to do whatever they want with it [0]: > If you choose to upload Content, you must not submit to the Service any Content that does not comply with this Agreement (including the YouTube Community Guidelines) or the law. For example, the Content you submit must not include third-party intellectual pr…
To date, many Creative Commons licenses do in fact amount to "permission from that party", but if they start using DRM, those licenses would cease to grant YouTube permission.