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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

#211

Post by Mindwipe »

js8 wrote: post #196
phoronixrly wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems quite naive to think they'd be affected in any way by the tiny intersection of users that are both yt-dlp users and premium subscribers boycotting them...

If every user of yt-dlp did as I do, then it would have exactly the effect that it needs to have. If yt-dlp is used by a small minority of users, why would Google be antagonistic to it? And if it's used by sizeable portion of users, then they would care.

Primarily because they contractually promised the music industry they'd do everything they can to prevent tools that allow the downloading of copyrighted music from the service.

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

#212

Post by cogman10 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #202
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…

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people.

Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video.

Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular.

If you don't have a huge viewership or dynamic content then yeah, it's actually pretty easy to setup and run videos sites (infowars has managed it). Target h264 and aac audio with a set number of resolutions and bitrates and viola, you've got something that's pretty competitive on the cheap that can play on pretty much any device.

It's not optimal for bandwidth, for that you need to start sniffing client capabilities. However, it'll get the job done while being pretty much universally playable.

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

#213

Post by Mindwipe »

molticrystal wrote: post #26
ameliaquining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument the article is making is that if they really wanted YouTube downloaders to stop working, they'd switch to Encrypted Media Extensions. Do you think that's not plausible?

Many smart devices that have youtube functionality(tvs, refrigerators, consoles, cable boxes, etc), have limited or no ability to support that functionality in hardware, or even if they do, it might not be exposed. Once those devices get phased out, it is very likely they will move to Encrypted Media Extensions or something similar, I believe I saw an issue ticket on yt-dlp's repo indicating they are already experime…

Anything that's had an official YouTube app for the past nine years does, because it's been a hard requirement for a YouTube port that long.

It's much more likely YouTube just doesn't want to mess with it's caching apparatus unless it really has to. And I think they will eventually, but the numbers just don't quite add up yet.

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

#214

Post by Mindwipe »

kragen wrote: post #79
ameliaquining wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument the article is making is that if they really wanted YouTube downloaders to stop working, they'd switch to Encrypted Media Extensions. Do you think that's not plausible?

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.

No it wouldn't.

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

#215

Post by axiolite »

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.

You are actually. Watch one second, the player buffers the next minute of video, then you skip ahead 1 minute. Process repeats.

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

#216

Post by mschuster91 »

cogman10 wrote: post #212
snowwrestler wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave. Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It is actually pretty easy to provide video. It's hard to provide video to a lot of people. Reddit and Youtube have just a massive number of people visiting and trying to watch video at all time. It requires an enormous amount of bandwidth to serve up that video. Youtube goes through heroic efforts to make videos instantly available and to apply high quality compression on videos that become popular. If you don't hav…

Thing with Infowars is, they got a lot of rich people and probably Russia paying the bills. Video hosting still is damn expensive if you are not one of the top dogs.

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

#217

Post by mschuster91 »

soared wrote: post #184
alright2565 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The official download option doesn't download it to your filesystem as a file. It just lets you watch the video offline in the official app/website. Just tested it now.

Meaning the video file exists in your file system somewhere, so downloading at a higher speed than possibly viewing the video is an existing functionality in the app.

If you're on iOS no way to access it, and I think on Android it's in protected storage as well.

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

#218

Post by furyofantares »

roboror wrote: post #84
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't buy this argument about YouTube depending on downloaders: > They perform a valuable role: If it were impossible to download YouTube videos, many organizations would abandon hosting their videos on YouTube for a platform that offered more user flexibility. Or they’d need to host a separate download link and put it in their YouTube descriptions. But organizations don’t need to jump through hoops -- they ju…

Yeah organizations don't use YouTube for file access, that's just not a good way to operate a video department in a business. Also the quality is terrible and adding another set of reencodes will make it even worse.

I've seen public schools and public courts use YouTube to host their videos. I don't quite follow why they would care so much about either using downloaders themselves or their users having access to downloaders that they'd switch providers. To me it is unlikely but plausible.

But even if they did - I don't see why Google would care about these organizations. I expect anyone doing this is not expecting to get any views from the algorithm, is not bringing in many views or monetizing their videos.

To steelman it though, maybe Google cares if their monopoly benefits from nobody even knowing other video sites exist.

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

#220

Post by Mindwipe »

estimator7292 wrote: post #180
varenc wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DRM isn't perfect of course, but it largely works. Unlike with Youtube videos, you can't just freely pull something off GitHub and crack Widevine level 1 DRM. The tools and extracted secret keys that release groups use to pirate 4K content are protected and not generally available. This doesn't matter if you want to find something popular enough for a release group to drop in a torrent, but if you have personal acces…

No, it really is not that complicated at all. You can just go online and grab software to bypass any and all DRM. It's called OBS. All DRM content must be rendered into meatspace at some point and there is literally no possible way to prevent this. Record your screen, record your system audio. It's pretty trivial

Netflix only serves 720p (or below) video to any platform that does not encrypt the video path that prevents OBS or anything else from screen recording.
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