Bypassing YouTube video download throttling

Have you ever tried to download videos from YouTube? I mean manually without relying on software like youtube-dl, yt-dlp or one of “these” websites. It’s much more complicated than you might think.

So make a nice, good documented blog post for google engineers to understand and fix this issue?? Whyy

I’m almost positive that the engineers already know how the throttling is applied and how it could be circumvented.

Downloading the same file used in the official UI and applying/reverse engineering the function is not exactly rocket science.

The only real thing they could try to do is to try enforcing video/IP speed cap. They probably don't due to false positives - for example people jumping around a long video also make may "range" requests.

And the other approach is currently in progress - soon logged users won't be able to view videos without watching(or at least displaying/downloading) adds, so the logical next step is to nerf anonymous(as is without google account) viewing. No matter how I look YT has exact problems (and solutions) as all file locker sites. The only difference is that YT is not at mercy of Ad companies, it is the Ad company(at least Google is). So they might try some more aggressive measures, that normally would get a site banned from publishing ads.

Technically, all interesting.

Ethically, if you don't only think “fuck Google”, I feel like it's reasonable to stop after the first optimization (“pass the real browser test to get regular browser speeds”). There you're not “wasting” any more of YouTube's resources than a browser user with ad-block.

Getting full Gb/s without paying anything feels to me like you're pushing all the ad-blocked users' luck.

But then again, fuck Google I guess?