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How journalists use youtube-dl

freedom.press

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Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#301
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on your response, and the parent comment, it seems like content hosts have a responsibility: to determine if a DMCA takedown request is valid. If a host doesn't see this as a responsibility, and simply complies with every DMCA (whether valid, invalid, or even fraudulent), I'd agree with op... the host is culpable whenever they comply with an invalid or fraudulent DMCA request. Maybe not culpable in a legal sens…

They don't have a responsibility except in a goodwill sense. The DMCA gives hosts an option to have legal immunity for each specific case of infringement, to gain the immunity they need only take the content down at the cost of outraging a potential customer. They don't have to take the option, however. It is common in industry for hosts to simply discard obviously invalid complaints particularly if the target is hig…

I once worked for a business that got a DMCA request for taking down a legitimate site, from a law firm acting on the site owner's behalf. They refused to listen to reason and didn't stop until we got the site owner to call their own lawyers and tell them back off. Luckily, we were outside the jurisdiction of the DMCA so we had the option of simply saying no.

I can't imagine it was the only time such a thing happened, and that alone is an argument for simply ignoring those take-down requests if possible.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#302
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Watching TV shows about manufacturing process (e.g.: How It's Made) made me realise that manufacturing is not just about "making things perfect", but also "discarding the outliers".

You can make something quite bad on average, and that's okay, you just have to be able to filter out everything you don't want and keep what you want. When CPUs are manufactured, this is what they mean by the "yield". It's the percentage of the product that can be kept, with the rest of the wafer discarded.

Chef's Gallery had a scene that actually shocked me a bit -- this award winning chef was making this deep-fried puff thing that was absolutely perfect. They showed his process, which was to make dozens of them and then plate just the best one for the customer. He never had a knack at all for making them perfect! He was just throwing out 99% of the puffs that he made, using the same technique as anyone else would.

You just have to change your perspective: You're the product. You're the deep fried puff.

If you're an outlier, you will be discarded. You're the bent piece of framing. You're the slice of the silicon wafer that failed the test.

Nobody feels the slightest bit bad about rejecting a faulty product on the production line. No tears are shed. No phone calls are made to the product to see if there's anything the manufacturer can do to fix the situation.

This is Google and by extension YouTube in a nutshell. They're an advertising company manufacturing ad impressions and ad clicks. Viewers are their product.

Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.

Rejected.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#303
post #275

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)

I'm afraid to ask how you take screenshots.

Even for fun question, how does he take a screenshot of a smartphone screen?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#304
post #275

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)

I'm afraid to ask how you take screenshots.

With the appropriate tools, such as gnome-screenshot.

But when I find myself on a locked down computer - e.g. watching a movie on an AppleTV, or when I was shown surveillance video but was refused a copy for some bureaucratic reason (or it required a different license to export, reasons were unconvincing) - I use a mobile device.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#305
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-...

Did Microsoft make a decision here? I thought it was DMCA takedown which legally requires immediate removal.

DMCA takedowns are about removing violations of someone's copyright, like posting a Beatles song on YouTube. Though the request was made to look like a takedown request, it's hard to see how they could make the claim the software itself was a copyright violation.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration for video playback and never did, while the most recent Firefox almost does, if one turns a couple of experimental knobs.

Off topic but I just tried to move from MacOS to Pop!_OS and this is the main reason that I can't migrate now. No GPU Accel on Chrome means scrolling is horrid on QHD/higher resolution (besides YouTube being pretty much useless). Firefox is fine but there's no user profile modes to separate between my various profiles. With so much work being done on browsers, it feels weird that Linux is so behind on this. And Chrom…

From what I've heard, this is used as a replacement for profile modes on Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the argument is whether or not obfuscation is DRM? If that's true anyone can claim that some weird URL scheme is DRM. That's a dangerous slope to tread.

I think it is, too, but "is this sufficiently obfuscatory to fall under the DMCA or not" is really only something a court can decide- it's not a technical question. So "this is obviously not DRM" is an argument, but until a court says otherwise the RIAA seems to have a leg to stand on.

"is really only something a court can decide"

Sometimes I think the scope of what a court is allowed to decide is crazy. It allows new concepts to be manufactured for the convenience of muddying the legal waters. Why the hell legislate around "DRM" and then decide later what that means.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#308
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What browser are you using? Google has been known to make YouTube perform worse on browsers that aren’t Chrome.

I tried firefox, chromium and chromium-vaapi (which gives a slight improvement). Hardware is a HP T610.

Firefox added hardware acceleration support very recently, June for Wayland and end of August for X11, and needs to be manually enabled plus YouTube needs to be told to use a supported codec. It's also possible your distro isn't supporting it yet.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#309
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…

One (poor) solution I did was to add in the description a list of the videos in the playlists, so once a video was removed, I could just add it back.

I did that with only one YouTube playlist, so it wasn't too much work.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#310
post #150

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.

Not to mention that the chroma subsampling gets worse and worse this way. Not just because that's an inherent problem but also because youtube is (like most video players) horrendously bad at resampling the chroma.
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