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…
You conveniently side-stepped the argument that YouTube already knows how to serve DRM-ized videos, and it's widely deployed in its Movies & TV offering, available on the web and other clients. They chose not to escalate on all videos, probably for multiple reasons. It's credible that one reason could be that it wants the downloaders to keep working; they wouldn't want those to suddenly gain the ability to download D…
Re: The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press
#251Why don't they just deploy a per-platform .exe equivalent per video?