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How journalists use youtube-dl

freedom.press

321–330 of 348 posts

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#321

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 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"

"oh nice, a youtube-link from one of my sources, let me get my camera set up to archive it ..."

I kind of expect a serious investigator to archive these materials just for the sake of it. I don't expect them to make it harder on themselves for no good reason.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#322
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there's at least a small dose of ultra privilege of googlers involved too. The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to…

Youtube makes money on advertising. You can’t put modern ads into a downloaded video. I don’t think the ultra-privilege of Googlers factors into this particular decision. (Also if you live in Mountain View, you’re stuck with a Comcast cable modem and a 38mbps max upload speed even when paying for their “gigabit” plan. But you'll only get 10-15mbps during the peak hours of the work day.)

> You can’t put modern ads into a downloaded video

youtube-dl has an experimental --include-ads option =)

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#323
post #6

Another valid use-case is to use the hardware acceleration with your native video player. AFAIK, mpv uses youtube-dl under the hood to play youtube videos. For a long time the video acceleration in browsers wasn't very good for Linux users, so we used players like mpv instead to watch high resolution content.

also a question of codec.

h264 is still the only widely supported in-hardware decodeable codec out there (cheapest for the client) but google serves webm by default (cheapest for them and built in-house)

ytdl-format lets you choose

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#324
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Viewers on 1Gbps give off two important signals to advertisers.

1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth

2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.

This is most likely somebody that advertisers are very interested in getting their ads in front of!

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#1 is an activity protected by fair use, and something fairly important. Imagine a world where you can't reference images or clips in your journalism or reviews, forever having to rely on only licensed material and descriptions.

Fair use does not override the TOS which YouTube-DP violates

A TOS is not private law.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#326
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine YouTube would argue this isn't a legitimate reason since they provide YouTube Premium as a paid subscription which includes as one of its perks the ability to download material for viewing offline.

I actually pay for YouTube Premium. Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.

I download for offline viewing quite often. It is available only on mobile devices and the videos are available offline for 30 days post download. Solutions exist to view video from phones on laptops.

But all that doesn't go to my argument which is that YouTube, not myself, may not see your use case as legitimate since they provide a subscription service which enables offline viewing. I doubt that because the way they have implemented it, for whatever technical, contractual or just on whim reasons, may not meet all your specific needs they see you bypassing controls to implement in your own manner as legitimate.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#327

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)

> Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic) It's just a GitHub repository which is lost, not ytdl itself.

So - if the issue is really the marketing around youtube-dl, does this mean someone can create a fork named something else, use different marketing, and carry on?

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#328
At this point... this kind of behavior from some lawyer somewhere is about the status quo of existence.

However, people have been kind of quiet about Microsoft here. They pretty much cowered and caved with zero effort on their part to even say, no I won't take that down... for a company that probably pays a billion dollars in legal fees a year... fuck microsoft.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see where you're getting that. GP rightly pointed out that 1201 prohibits tools "primarily" designed for prohibited circumvention. That's a perfectly coherent thing to prohibit, and that has the perfectly clear, logical implications that GP described. Now, if what you really mean is that is is vague , then I agree. But I don't see any case for it being incoherent.

When "guess, it will work somehow" is all you can say, it sounds like you agree that it's incoherent.

Maybe. But nobody said that.

Re: How journalists use youtube-dl

#330
post #92

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…

Which country would that be for the curious?
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