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How journalists use youtube-dl

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Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#141

Post by nullc »

bigiain wrote: post #131
prox wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has zero interest in free downloads. They are in bed with the music industry which makes them some ad dollars and their client thinking is sub-zero. Thats because the public is not the client, the advertisers are. If I worked at Google I would be scratching myself behind the ears and take a long big look at what the company has become.

I suspect there's at least a small dose of ultra privilege of googlers involved too. The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to…

I want to agree with your cynicism.

But I lived in Mountain View. Decent internet is more or less not available there. Your choices are comcast or DSL.

Maybe they just don't remember the last time they had a waking hour out of the office ... :)

It's clear to me that whomever is making these product decisions has a very different relationship with computing and their data than I do-- but whatever the reason is, I don't think it's because they have a much better internet connection.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#142

Post by tracker1 »

masklinn wrote: post #63
djsumdog wrote: post #3

My two big uses cases for youtube-dl: 1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. 2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole. The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you c…

My main use on youtube-dl is downloading videos to watch them in places with slow / unreliable DSL. Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnection…

I've had similar issues on a recent camping trip since the switch from google play music to youtube music... when I lose connectivity, there's no buffer, and seems to be no songs kept to be able to play anything, and it was a really crappy experience.

May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#143

Post by megous »

renewiltord wrote: post #109
megous wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my country it's not illegal to download copyrighted movies/music. It's just illegal to share them. So how was I infringing copyright by downloading something from a public website where copyright holder left the content publicly accessible to anyone? I'll give you that it may or may not be against ToS of the distribution service, but that's all. But it's not a distribution service causing the ruckus around youtube…

What even is the relevance of this? So host a youtube-dl repo and reject DMCA requests then. Github, as it so happens, is American so it has to listen to America.

Relevance is "Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright?"

I'm not pretending if I'm not violating, even if I'm downloading the copyrighted videos.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#144

Post by tracker1 »

blevin wrote: post #130
dEnigma wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is really distressing to see how many of the videos in my, admittedly quite large, favourites list are gone by now. Even ones that I only added in the past few weeks. Either simply "Deleted", "Private" or "Removed/Blocked by the copyright holder". In most cases I have trouble even finding out what the title of the video even was.

One layer of the internet is about packets, another is about ordered sequential streams — and both are widely supported protocols. Above these could potentially sit a dissemination layer, retaining and persisting anything of interest. But in a legal system where information can be speech or property, it is problematic to do that as a standard protocol. Instead we have archive.org, The Archive Team, BitTorrent, and a…

Wonder if archive.org and the EFF could get a video site up to compete with youtube, or work to back something like bitchute or otehr alternatives to raise awareness and push back on overreach takedown requests. YouTube/Google just seem to cave, and apparently so does GitHub.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#145

Post by m-p-3 »

SahAssar wrote: post #57
roywiggins wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.

The DRM argument would be relevant if youtube had any DRM. It does not, so it isn't.

Which is what I'm afraid Google will eventually add to YouTube.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#146

Post by abhgh »

djsumdog wrote: post #3

My two big uses cases for youtube-dl: 1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. 2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole. The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you c…

My primary use case has been to download talks and watch them later. I frequently used to work out of cafes (not since Feb of course) where the connection may not be reliable. Youtube-dl was very helpful in those cases.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#147

Post by roywiggins »

SahAssar wrote: post #57
roywiggins wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.

The DRM argument would be relevant if youtube had any DRM. It does not, so it isn't.

They allege that it circumvents a "rolling cipher", which (they say) is sufficiently DRMy that it comes under the law. The DMCA doesn't have much of a definition of what counts as an access control measure, but the "rolling cipher" that scrambles the download URL looks like one if you squint. Exactly what counts as DRM is less of a technical question than a legal one, so (not being a copyright lawyer) it's not obvious to me what the right answer is.

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...

There is legitimately some obfuscation happening:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/06/youtube-download-counter-co...

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#148

Post by backtoyoujim »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #90
paulryanrogers wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't law enforcement have a means to subpoena Google for such evidence?

The process for a subpoena takes forever and isn't guaranteed. If I have a subject who has relevant video on a service like YouTube, and I decide to go the subpoena route, here's the process: - Find the exact video, document the URL, Content creator's account name, and video upload date. - Submit a preservation letter to Google to ensure the video will still be accessible when the subpoena is auctioned. - go to my pr…

"The process for a subpoena takes forever"

No, it doesn't. And that "forever" are human rights that are established and should require a subpoena to contest.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#149

Post by MKinley »

hiisukun wrote: post #73

I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites. Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards…

I am not in law enforcement myself, but do some online investigations, and like many others in my field we use YouTube-dl to save a copy of video evidence relevant to a case we are working on. It can be instrumental for archiving the evidence if it is ever removed or taken down, can also be used to grab extra info (CC text log is one example) and then manually searched for specific strings. This tool has made ma y investigations pay off in ways they never could have otherwise.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#150

Post by m-p-3 »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #43

FYI I use Open Broadcaster Software https://obsproject.com/ . I record my own screen while playing the YouTube content.

Not ideal, as you're recording a lossy format and re-encoding it through a lossy codec and you're also stuck with recording in realtime.
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