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How journalists use youtube-dl

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Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#291

Post by _flux »

t0astbread wrote: post #239
hnlmorg wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Google could do but there's more than enough problems vs reward to make it unattractive: - When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't. - It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer) - Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded…

What do you mean by "technical issues"? Google already has a streaming video player supporting multiple bitrates and formats. They could just do whatever youtube-dl does to pack it into a file or even more optimally, grab it from their video database directly should there be something like that.

Exactly, Google has that player, but to replicate the same effect for offline playing you would need to play a playlist or a DASH video and multiple fragments.

But I grant it's technically possible to do with a single MPEG file, just not trivial. You would need to prepend the advertisement to the video bitstream (re-encoded with same parameters such as width, height, FPS, intra picture interval) and then do the same for audio, while ensuring the video/audio synchronization is kept intact (MPEG edit lists are not well-supported by players, such as by ffmpeg), while preferably not re-encoding the actual video. A bit more complicated to do the insertion in the middle of the file.

It's possible to do, but I don't think it's something that any off-the-shelf tools actually do.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#292

Post by chetty33 »

megous wrote: post #92
filmgirlcw wrote: post #64

I left a comment about my own non-infringing use cases of the tool earlier — and I think it’s important that the non-infringing use cases get mentioned. Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright? Most of us weren’t distributing anything, but I think most of us were aware this was at the very least a grey area, if not outright infringement. I’m a huge fan a…

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…

Thank you so much for the thread here! I would like to share the service on https://streamingsites.com where you will find many good paid and free streaming sites and apps with cool movies to watch. It was really helpful to me, I have to say. I am sure that you will like it a lot too, good luck with it!

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#293

Post by TonyTrapp »

ojosilva wrote: post #282

I'm concerned that the "internet of videos" is not being properly archived, like the hypertext one is. I use ytdl primarily to save valuable homemade videos that I'm afraid could disappear if that person, or Google, were to delete or block the account. I'd hope this could be a coordinated effort by libraries and institutions interested in preserving this invaluable and unprecedented corpus of daily life, culture, spo…

archive.org archives YouTube videos, too! They might not have everything but I have used it more than once to salvage an old video for which I used to still have a link but it was removed by the uploader...

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#294

Post by ponker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #281
ponker wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer people probably see the nondeterministic behavior in words like “primarily” as evidence of a bug. To the law school graduates who write the laws, it’s a feature and not a bug that these decisions are made by a judge in a courtroom.

It helps to realize that "human reality" is nondeterministic in the sense that we lack sufficient computing power and modelling capability to work with it. It's not random, it's AI-complete. We literally can't handle it formally, and that's why we need to defer to the only "general AI" we have - or as its ordinarily called, human judgement. And human judgement is not random - it's taking into account vast amounts of…

And the concept of case law / precedent is an attempt to synthesize a point of view from multiple different judges. “Training data,” if you will.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#295

Post by minerjoe »

AlbinoDrought wrote: post #223
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.

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 o…

I beefed up my browser cache to remember everything and have a server in the background downloading any youtube channel I visit. Now I know that anything I've ever looked at via the browser is now accessible offline.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#296

Post by Fnoord »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #262
tracker1 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was what I was thinking, edited, thanks... Half surprised they haven't done this to some youtube videos/channels already then.

Any rebroadcast is already against Youtube TOS. It's only for personal use.

There's fair use though. It makes sense that you are able to quote a video. Its just that those people on Twitch don't quote; they play the whole thing. Captions with bookmarks would fix that (Pornhub has that natively, quite useful).

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#297

Post by Majestic121 »

tracker1 wrote: post #142
masklinn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are you talking about, Youtube Music literally downloads automatically 100s of songs locally for offline playing, and you can download entire albums for offline playing at the press of a button.

There's even a little popup saying something like "It seems we can connect to the server, do you want to play your downloaded songs instead ?" when there are connectivity issues.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#298

Post by notnap »

jiggawatts wrote: post #174
tracker1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google's engineering is not about providing a good user experience, but about using metrics to squeeze out the last 1% of inefficiency. This inevitably makes the system fragile and leaves some people out in the cold, but you're the product, not the customer. Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters…

I was living a few blocks away from YouTube HQ building and with 1gigabit up/down fiber optics cable had YouTube stutters. They [YouTube] definitely don’t optimize for that

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#299

Post by neop1x »

roboyoshi wrote: post #290
NanoCoaster wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there already DRM that works by encrypting the video stream and only decrypting / decoding the video stream on the TV? Or at least, in some sort of closed-off execution context? I'm thinking of Widevine level 1 DRM, for example. If I remember correctly, it mandates that all of the decryption has to happen in a "Trusted Execution Environment", which seems to mean a hardware enclave. I think this effectively lock…

Yes that is indeed a problem. But it's more prominent in the streaming platforms netflix et al. The encrypted widevine stream can still be captured though and AFAIK if any of the hardware leaks the decryption keys it's easily recovered. YouTube will hopefully never implement a DRM solution - it would lock out a lot of older clients that simply do not support it..But in any case you can still record stuff with your ph…

Until HW decryption is cracked, there may just be more camera-captured content or content recorded from modded display panels. If they want to prevent copying their content, why they are even publishing it? They can keep it for themselves. They either want us to see it or not.

By making it difficult to archive videos I am starting to see more and more low quality screen captures being shared (e.g. on social platforms). A screen capture of a phone camera-recorded video of a phone-recorded TV screen where it is barely possible to understand the spoken words of the actors. That is pretty sad to see in this technologically-advanced world.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#300

Post by fogihujy »

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…

Ditto, but with slow/unreliable 3G. It's perfectly possible to watch a 4k video with max quality that way, even if one has a poor connection. Otherwise, I'd be stuck at 240p much of the time.
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