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How journalists use youtube-dl

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Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#311

Post by wodenokoto »

beagle3 wrote: post #212
MKinley wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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 think this is absolutely reasonable question.

Filming the screen, means that in order to fake it, you have to setup something that routes youtube.com to your own fake version of youtube, before filming. To me, that sounds much harder than say "this file was downloaded from here on that date"

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#312

Post by qwerty456127 »

beagle3 wrote: post #212
MKinley wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

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)

> Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)

It's just a GitHub repository which is lost, not ytdl itself.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#313

Post by pietrovismara »

NanoCoaster wrote: post #273
TedShiller wrote: post #213

Banning youtube-dl won’t accomplish much. I can simply record my screen with audio (for example using QuickTime Player) and save that as a video. I do that as a last resort if video download software doesn’t work. This method can never be stopped. If I can see it and hear it, then I can record it, with close to perfect quality. And it will get even easier with more user friendly tools. Sorry, technology wins.

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 DRM on video streams exists already. Try to stream netflix on twitch. Viewers will only see a black screen.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#314

Post by indymike »

Google234 wrote: post #179
indymike wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please quote relevant TOS.

B. Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display,…

Given Google amakes both Chrome and YouTube, the lines are pretty unclear on what provided functionality is.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#315

Post by dspillett »

seventhtiger wrote: post #258
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-...

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

The issue is not that MS obeyed the takedown as they are required to do. The issue the SFC are discussing is that MS are part of the group that issued the takedown request in the first place.

MS has two hats in the game here: one as a member of the RIAA who have issues a DMCA take-down request, and on as the owner of GitHub which has acted upon that order.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#316

Post by bonoboTP »

inqb wrote: post #232
cheeze wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, GitHub took it down, no?

You can claim anything, too. GitHub only checks if the Takedown is valid in format with necessary information provided.

Has someone abused this to harass big-name Github projects with takedown notices?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#317

Post by samoa42 »

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…

try out mpv. with cranked up caches it will buffer the whole vid in ram and bobs your uncle.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#318

Post by samoa42 »

retromagik wrote: post #106
nitrogen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?

There’s plenty of online tools and browser extensions to accomplish the same task (I wonder how many of those use YouTube-dl on the backend)

> I wonder how many of those use YouTube-dl on the backend

i wager to say that the vast majority of browser extensions and websites that allow downloading of media content use ytdl in the background

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#319

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

I'd already explained the problem, albeit without much detail.

The adverts are a different file to the video files. So you need to either merge them ahead of time or dynamically splice them in real time.

Ahead of time: Now you need to not only have a video asset for each bit rate and video format but you need to multiply that with the number of adverts on any given day. This would result in thousands of files, maybe even hundreds of thousands once you take targeted adverts into account. And they'd need to rebuild their entire catalogue whenever an ad campaign ends. Clearly that isn't going to work long term.

Real time: Option 2 is to stream the advert then follow immediately with the video content on the same HLS stream. This is much more achievable than option 1 but you are then running the streams like a live TV service where you're dynamically splicing content into existing streams. It isn't difficult to do per stream but it is extra processing compared with the existing set up. The real problem lies with scale. A TV broadcaster might do this with a dozen to a few hundred channels, each with contracts ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Youtube have millions of streams, each which earn pennies from advertising (and even less if they had to download because of the change in advertising model -- as I also described before). So they'd have to pay more and earn less. The financials simply wouldn't stack up.

Before you comment that YouTube and Twitch offer live streaming services based around the same advertising models, yes they do, but they also operate using the same stack as the pre-recorded videos because those video streams don't need to be spliced by YouTube / Twitch (any editing happens by the content creators before it hits YouTube and YouTube can show the adverts before or even between the videos by injecting them in the browser (ie so the splicing is managed at the front end rather than on Googles servers). None of this is doable with a "download video" button.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#320

Post by hnlmorg »

_flux wrote: post #291
t0astbread wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah there are off the shelf tools available to the broadcasting industry. But these things are designed to tens of streams, not millions. As usual, it's a scale problem rather than a code problem.
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