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How journalists use youtube-dl

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Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#221

Post by judge2020 »

kortex wrote: post #219
beagle3 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this significantly different than placing a video camera in front of a screen? Yt-dL is surely nicer and more convenient, but from an evidence standpoint, a one time $500 (to go wild) setup should have you covered, no? (Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)

This, along with screen capture, is known as a form of rebroadcast and it's used to obscure and obfuscate digital alterations, watermarks, deepfake artifacts and the like. When doing media forensics, it's optimal to get as close to the raw source as possible.

Isn't this just due to more compression? What's stopping someone from turning down the bitrate and re-encoding a video into different formats a few times to kill the quality (which will still look fine on a 6 inch phone in portrait orientation)?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#222

Post by anjbe »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #44
pwinnski wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The different, Google would argue, is that YouTube-dl doesn't download the ads, while a VCR captures ads and content alike. But really, if the VCR were invented today, it would be made illegal.

I mean, they tried desperately to make it illegal in the 80s. The Betamax case went to the Supreme Court! [1] Given the current makeup of justices, I would imagine Betamax would be decided differently today, in favor of Universal rather than Sony. Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous. ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. D…

> Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.

I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:

> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.

> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#223

Post by AlbinoDrought »

dEnigma wrote: post #78
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…

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.

I've been distraught at the same thing. I had a few playlists that I grew over time, and it's annoying to go back and see gaps of "[Deleted video]" where your favorites used to be. I'm curious to know if you've found a solution for this.

Personally I've started locally saving anything I think I would want to watch or reference again. When favoriting something or saving it to a playlist, I download it too. I started off with using youtube-dl on the command line and have experimented with the "Import from YouTube" function on Peertube but ended up with a tiny cobbled-together video platform, importer (youtube-dl wrapper), and Firefox extension. I think the next step will be easily saving non-video things - probably recording WARCs?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#224

Post by kortex »

motohagiography wrote: post #15

I used ffmpeg and audacity with youtube-dl to download and do file and spectrograph analysis on a faked political video. That analysis showing how the audio was spliced together may have killed the story before it got legs. In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.

> In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.

I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates.

Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged.

I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection.

http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/

https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives...

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#225

Post by 20after4 »

pabs3 wrote: post #158

Software Freedom Conservancy are asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over the youtube-dl takedown demand: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-...

That Microsoft is a member of the RIAA is a big problem. One more reason to abandon GitHub.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#226

Post by Rastonbury »

judge2020 wrote: post #221
kortex wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, along with screen capture, is known as a form of rebroadcast and it's used to obscure and obfuscate digital alterations, watermarks, deepfake artifacts and the like. When doing media forensics, it's optimal to get as close to the raw source as possible.

Isn't this just due to more compression? What's stopping someone from turning down the bitrate and re-encoding a video into different formats a few times to kill the quality (which will still look fine on a 6 inch phone in portrait orientation)?

Nothing. But his point is that raw files are better than screencapture/record

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#227

Post by TecoAndJix »

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…

They have a handy upload site for your requests!

https://lers.google.com

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#228

Post by kortex »

judge2020 wrote: post #221
kortex wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, along with screen capture, is known as a form of rebroadcast and it's used to obscure and obfuscate digital alterations, watermarks, deepfake artifacts and the like. When doing media forensics, it's optimal to get as close to the raw source as possible.

Isn't this just due to more compression? What's stopping someone from turning down the bitrate and re-encoding a video into different formats a few times to kill the quality (which will still look fine on a 6 inch phone in portrait orientation)?

That's one of the effects we model in fact, "social media laundering" is the term of art.

Various detectors are more or less thwarted by it. It actually surprised me how strong the artifacts from some GANs are - they can survive several passes of re-encoding, but accuracy does suffer.

But I still need the raw 720/1080 stream for training.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#229

Post by hiisukun »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #85
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…

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

A few points you might want to consider:

* youtube-dl is not just for Youtube (ie. google). It supports heaps of sites, and youtube is probably less likely to have the sort of content I'm referring to than twitter, pornhub, liveleak, who knows.

* I am in Australia, so for a subpoena (or similar) my friends would need to issue an MLAT request, which would indeed take a very long time. In fact, this often does happen, but in the meantime a formal preservation request (to the service provider) and a local copy (via something like youtube-dl) are important steps.

* Many investigations don't go to court, for a litany of reasons (that's a pun I guess). In such cases, a subpoena isn't in context: law enforcement have to investigate what has happened, to figure out if it needs to go to court.

* Some investigations are important but do not meet the 'serious crime' threshold for forcing companies or parties to provide information. If you can imagine being the victim of a minor crime, that someone filmed and put on twitter, I'm sure you can imagine the local police may want a copy of the video before the tweet gets deleted - but also know that there will never be an international cooperative justice process. It's just a local issue.

* Publically posted video is very common and often important, and it is not surprising that the police need a tool to download it. There are so many sites and web browser technologies, and the cops are not efficient spending their time coding youtube-dl equivalents.

I feel quite strongly about youtube-dl being taken down for copyright infringement by the RIAA, but have tried to answer in an informative way. Sorry if it comes across harsh - no ill will intended :)

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#230

Post by beagle3 »

talaketu wrote: post #216
beagle3 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this significantly different than placing a video camera in front of a screen? Yt-dL is surely nicer and more convenient, but from an evidence standpoint, a one time $500 (to go wild) setup should have you covered, no? (Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)

Obviously CC stream is not readily searchable if you record it with a video camera.

Well, sure, but google/YouTube search does find in it. The GP was talking about their work collecting evidence - they can find it just as well, and record a copy for posterity just as well.

I am not saying it’s as convenient (more options >> less options except for analysis-paralysis). But I don’t understand how it tips the scale to making any archiving or evidence gathering unusable or uneconomical. (I am not saying GP is wrong - just want more explanation so I can understand)

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