It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me.
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Solving JS challenges using deno
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Downloading challenge solver lib script from https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.solver.lib.min.js
It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command, as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment, and being able to package it up together with the solver before runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start of downloads seems much faster now.
Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
What environment are you using that:
- Has access to Youtube
- Can run Python code
- Can’t run JS code
If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you’re using Deno).
If you’re using some sort of weird OS or architecture that Deno/Node doesn’t support, you might consider QuickJS, which is written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.) Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain. (You don’t have to trust Google in general to trust that they won’t serve you actual malware.)
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)
I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically, especially things that does network requests sometimes (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of packaging it before I run it, so it's not the end of the world.
No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.
> IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly possible).
It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another.
I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downloading one JS file.
For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval, can't be too positive.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci Resolve, not to mention mobile apps powering TikToks. There are also excellent and built-in video players in every browser and every OS.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents.
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very concrete codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
Oh fuck you, I didn't have the $1,500 I just spent on Amazon for one of those! I've been waiting forever for them to make one with a finger print sensor, and I thought you were responding to a different comment so I looked it up and thank you :)
That's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.
No, it's also iOS that's arbitrarily restricting it. I opened a bare .webm directly in Safari and got nothing on long press and nothing in any of the control widgets to save it.
A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser, the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth.
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
I also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.
I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).
I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller niche video sites aren’t even implemented properly. On some sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL and cookies in the request, and download it to view locally.
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
RealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was around the times things really got bad.
The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.
Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.
It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
Chrome desktop has just landed enabled by default native HLS support for the video element within the last month. (There may be a few issues still to be worked out, and I don't know what the rollout status is, but certainly by year end it will just work). Presumably most downstream chromium derivatives will pick this support up soon.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.
The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.
I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.
I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)
Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.
Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)
Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?
Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.
> You are a digital hoarder.
Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.
It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.
I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.
As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.
I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.
I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.
I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you
I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.
I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all
I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.
I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube.
Many of them are fan-made, many already unavailable
I sometimes play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.
I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.
Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.
Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.
I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.
So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.
And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.
* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.
* There is a liked videos playlist
Yes, I read your comment above.
Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.
maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only would get them pretty much all the way there.
They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in sandboxes and their content would be safe.
Of course, the same can be said for FB, Tiktok, instagram, Pintrest, reddit, ... and I'm sure the list keeps going. Frankly, Youtube is pretty damn good about this, really.
They find devices that are easy to hack (and I mean rip and tear) and extract the decryption keys from each of them, from what I have heard cheap chinese tvs and set top boxes, they extract the keys from the chips (hardware hacking, heard some even use microscopes to read the keys by hand), and then use them to decrypt streams, I heard that they catch them pretty fast to they use like 1 device per season. This is why they use mostly stollen devices.
The really shitty thing is that vulnerable devices get blacklisted en masse, so all legitimate users get stuck with 480p video content on streaming services. The Nexus 5 got this treatment, as I understand it, because it was too easy to extract the keys.
Search for widevine decrypt. You’ll find code and forums where at least some L3 (software) keys are publicly shared. For high resolution on some platforms, you need L1 keys, but as far as I understand the decryption process basically stays the same once you have a working key.
Breaking HDCP is a lot easier than breaking the other things. You don't have to attack the torment nexus directly. This is not the most ideal option but it is information theoretically correct assuming your capture rig is set up properly.
I knew of this chrome bug which could allow netflix to be ripped. I had heard it in comments of some section of youtube and I might need to look further into it but its definitely possible.
Yes, it's called: Web Environment Integrity + hardware attestation of some kind
> "the technical means through which WEI will accomplish its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a server can ask a third-party "verification" service to make sure that the user's browsing environment has not been "tampered" with. A translation of the policy's terminology will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way from Google's accepted browser configuration" [1]
Let's say the only devices you can get that will run YouTube are running i/pad/visionOS or Android and that those will only run on controlled hardware and that the hardware will only run signed code. Now let's say the only way to get the YouTube client is though the controlled app stores on those platforms. You can build a chain of trust tied to something like a TPM in the device at one end and signing keys held by Apple or Google at the other that makes it very difficult to get access to the client implementation and the key material and run something like the client in an environment that would allow it to provide convincing evidence that it is a trusted client. As long as you have the hardware and software in your hands, it's probably not impossible, but it can be made just a few steps shy.
The decryption code could verify that it's only providing decrypted content to an attested-legitimate monitor, using DRM over HDMI (HDCP).
You might try to modify the decryption code to disable the part where it reencrypts the data for the monitor, but it might be heavily obfuscated.
Maybe the decryption key is only provided to a TPM that can attest its legitimacy. Then you would need a hardware vulnerability to crack it.
Maybe the server could provide a datastream that's fed directly to the monitor and decrypted there, without any decryption happening on the computer. Then of course the reverse engineering would target the monitor instead of the code on the computer. The monitor would be a less easily accessible reverse engineering target, and it itself could employ obfuscation and a TPM.
I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more professional approach based on external recording.
I might be recalling it wrong,but I remember reading that there was some old hardware that refused to record protected TV/Movies probably a VCR or a DVR.
Camera manufacturers can easily refuse to record a stream of they detect it is protected, may be via watermarks or other sidechannel.
I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me.
Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.
In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.
What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.
The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway.
Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.
But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.
And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing.
I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.
No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I’d argue it’d helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for corporate videos. Yeah there’s other solutions but the number of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.
I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.
I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point).
The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?”
Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.
Just because the balance shifts doesn't mean the desktop/laptop stops being supported.
Laptops aren't going anywhere. Even if phones and tablets replace them for a third of tasks, or a third of people.
The idea that laptops with browsers would become so rare that YouTube would drop support, within any reasonably predictable future timeframe, is pure fantasy.
>within any reasonably predictable future timeframe
I think given the pace of technological advancement and given how every generation we see at least one major piece of electronics completely wipe out generations of predictions, this statement doesn’t serve a productive purpose other than to make “I don’t agree” sound like some variation of “it’s an objective fact that what you said is impossible.” You’re just spiking the conversation, even if that is not your intention.
I didn’t say this is definitely going to happen. I’m just saying clearly the way we engage with computers is shifting and that means companies will adjust accordingly. It’s not that far fetched.
As for “within any reasonably predictable future timeframe,” for all we know YouTube will become a relic.
That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario is far-fetched. This isn't between two comparably plausible scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent where a popular site like YouTube would remove support. It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on current actual trends.
I’m not too proud to admit that I am way out on a limb and probably wrong. I’m just kind of musing and thinking out loud about a broader question. I don’t mind you disagreeing, I don’t mind being wrong, but I don’t know man…maybe try and ease off the gas a bit?
Working in infrastructure design (specifically railways), cab ride videos are often useful to fill in gaps in as-built plans or the pictures you took on a site visit (you'll always miss out to photograph something that'll be of major interest later), especially in early planning phases. Plus there's the odd software tutorial video here and there, too, of course.
Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.
Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.
Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?
And nobody's saying you're getting paid to watch YouTube all day. But video links get sent around, and people check out whatever 3 minute video. They watch during lunch. You know how it is.
I think it would give me a life crisis and I'd feel like a failure of a boss if I learned my otherwise productive employees felt they couldn't watch sloptube the clock. A sysadmin that isn't constantly jacked into nethack is hardly a sysadmin at all. You should really demand more humane working conditions if you feel like you have to micro-optimize your work day.
Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly.
But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go)
And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher)
That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)
> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
"yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
> Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
It would still be possible with native apps. Somebody will have to reverse engineer it continuously. So it will be slower, but still possible.
However, that won't be the case if they start using some secret (like a private key) that you can't access directly from an app, or if they decide that you can't run custom/modified apps. That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
> That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.
> What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
>
> The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this project.
More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.
>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.
Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.
Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.
Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.
I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.
PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then later, even when profitable can gradually reduce the quality of the service to the point where users have to pay to get back to an experience they used to have is textbook enshittification.
It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but please do not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to execute untrusted code. Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.
For a long time, yt-dlp worked completely with Python. They implemented a lightweight JavaScript interpreter that could run basic scripts. But as the runtime requirements became more sophisticated it struggled to scale
> Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices?
This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when then this sort of limitation will be removed.
I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is certainly part of the equation.
I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on doing so.
Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.
Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.
Yeah, it's pretty much to support backwards compatibility with old smart TVs and the like. They already enforce stricter rules on new hi-res content, and once those old devices cycle out of service you can expect the support to go away.
It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you really, really have to.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS server.
It's been working great by itself for the most part since the beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the way.
We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.
(I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)
Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429 until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to have resolved things for the most part.
Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once.
Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled into a native executable that can run without having to install Deno separately.
> if using QuickJS, version 2025-4-26 or later is strongly recommended for performance reasons
Oh, I wonder if they got performance to a reasonable level then? When the external JS requirements were first announced, they said it took upwards of half an hour, and a QuickJS developer wrote in the ticket that they didn’t see a path towards improving it significantly enough.
I do not understand why Google doesn't just explicitly permit people who pay for premium to use yt-dlp or other tools to watch YouTube however the fuck they want. Put that in your terms, Google -- so people aren't afraid they'll lose their GMail because they wanted to watch a video -- and you'll get more paying customers...
Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.
Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.
I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...
I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).
It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.
It depends on a lot of factors. But even if it works in a virtual machine, your CPU is going to be pegged at 100% the whole time to handle the re-encoding. Unless you use a hardware h.264 encoder, but then the quality is pretty terrible since it's explicitly optimized for speed over quality and isn't tunable the way software encoders are.
It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You always just want to access the original compressed bitstream if possible.
Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them elsewhere.
With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording software sees a blank screen.
I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.
There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point.
I imagine there would be ways around this. I know from personal experience that Kazam screen recorder on Firefox on Ubuntu can record anything and everything, including YouTube as well as DRM content on Disney+ and Prime Video.
I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I don't think that even Google could demand changes like that to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably circumvent that.
And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
Why is this relevant? To be clear, I'm asking from a place of ignorance. Are you saying that because the video player can have the video decoding happen entirely on the GPU, screen recording software can't pick it up? Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
In the current times yes, you can basically record your screen with whatever tool you fancy.
But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders" are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from the hdmi cable output for example.
Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
> Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?
To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.
I don't know if Youtube cares, but other website do attempt to block this as well. They will either black your screen or prevent playback if you try to screen record, even encrypting to prevent recording the HDMI/DP output.
Someday it will have to launch a VM with a copy of Chrome installed and use an AI model to operate the VM to make it look like a human, then use frame capture inside the VM to record the video and transcode it.
Knock on wood not to jinx it, but I wonder why this manages to stay up on github when eg paywall-busting chrome extensions get banned from there (because of DMCA takedowns I guess?)
there was already an attempt to take it down back in 2020/2021 [0]. The DMCA claim's main argument was that ytdl was circumventing Techincal Protection Measures (TPMs) in order to access the content. Thanks to a letter from the EFF [1] which explains how ytdl accesses content in the same way that a browser does (i.e. it does circumvent anything such as DRM), github rejected the takedown.
this is also why ytdl has stood firm in saying they will never attempt to be compatible with anything protected by DRM.
It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.
What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those creators can upload wherever they want.
And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or something?
Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic, arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of it are actually not that great and a potential government system might actually be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
I will say that is something I would not have considered reasonable prior to watching his video.
Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just add another flag to the invocation:
It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me. It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command, as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment, and being able to package it up together with the solver before runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start of downloads seems much faster now.Glad to hear it’s faster now!
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly.
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in recent years.
I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music).
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
No idea what you are talking about. I don’t have premium and use in both logged in and logged out.
If I'm logged out, I get "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" about once a week from both home and the office.
I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.
Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you’re using Deno).
If you’re using some sort of weird OS or architecture that Deno/Node doesn’t support, you might consider QuickJS, which is written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.) Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain. (You don’t have to trust Google in general to trust that they won’t serve you actual malware.)
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)
I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically, especially things that does network requests sometimes (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of packaging it before I run it, so it's not the end of the world.
No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.
> IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization (https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.sol...), not from Google or any websites, FWIW.
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly possible).
It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another.
I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downloading one JS file.
For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval, can't be too positive.
> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command
Download a random video and then copy ejs from yt-dlp’s cache directory (I think it’s in /home/username/.cache)
> being able to package it up together with the solver
`make yt-dlp-extra`
I manually installed Deno via Chocolately, but I also installed yt-dlp from choco so it's on v2025.10.22
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
That's if you weren't using a Mac
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci Resolve, not to mention mobile apps powering TikToks. There are also excellent and built-in video players in every browser and every OS.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents.
Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free.
But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very concrete codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon.
Flash, also almost came built into every browser.
By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine.
Today, most browsers have most codecs.
Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark patterns.
1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
> The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
When it's not impeded by DRM, that is
"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.
But are DRM and poor user experiences hard requirements for something to fit in your pocket?
Otherwise, I don’t think I get your point - maybe you could clarify?
throwaway94275 wrote:
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
> use it in line at the post office
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
My GPD pocket 4 fits into really large cargo pants if that counts lol, and there is the micropc2 too that’s even smaller :p
Oh fuck you, I didn't have the $1,500 I just spent on Amazon for one of those! I've been waiting forever for them to make one with a finger print sensor, and I thought you were responding to a different comment so I looked it up and thank you :)
Well… https://www.zotac.com/page/zotac-vr-go-4
There are also various handheld PCs.
I’m also waiting for the gallon sized water bottle I can fit in my <1l pocket.
"Fitting into my carry-bag so I can use it in line at the post office" is already possible for a PC and many people do it all the time.
That's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.
That looks like something a dweeb would use, I want one
Handhelds like the Steam Deck are PCs and can fit in some pockets :P
long press -> save image/video is perfectly supported on a phone, it's just content diffusion platform that arbitrarily restrict it.
No, it's also iOS that's arbitrarily restricting it. I opened a bare .webm directly in Safari and got nothing on long press and nothing in any of the control widgets to save it.
You can't even make a screenshot if the app doesn't allow it. Phones are broken. (well, the OS on them is).
A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser, the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth.
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
Back then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now, however, companies prioritise their own interests over the user.
We even have a name for this now…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1
Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)
/s
There are myriad ways to optimise for the user, user friendliness is only one of them.
As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's particular about who its friends are".
We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
YouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...
Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).
I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
Around 2012?, I had some extension that forced YouTube videos to play with Quicktime in-browser, which was leaner. Original file, no conversion.
Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
It’s not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have struggled on YouTube the past weeks.
Sometimes I can’t even click on the front page, sometimes when I open a video it refuses to play.
I don’t know what’s up, but it works in chrome.
I also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
I've got a fresh install of endeavouros/arch and yt is horribly slow now. The upside is I've reduced my usage of the site.
Oh and it's not working at all on my desktop with the same setup, it's telling me to disable ad block. I'd rather give up yt.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.
I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).
Chrome has finally just landed enabled by default native HLS playback support within the past month. See http://crrev.com/c/7047405
I'm not sure what the rollout status actually is at the moment.
> See go/hls-direct-playback for design and launch stats analysis.
Is that an internal Google wiki or something? I can't find whatever they're referring to.
I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller niche video sites aren’t even implemented properly. On some sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL and cookies in the request, and download it to view locally.
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
The standard video element is really nice:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works really well.
You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)
> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
RealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was around the times things really got bad.
That does mean we go, essentially:
Step 1: We barely have video at all.
Step 2: Everything is terrible.
The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.
Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.
It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
Chrome desktop has just landed enabled by default native HLS support for the video element within the last month. (There may be a few issues still to be worked out, and I don't know what the rollout status is, but certainly by year end it will just work). Presumably most downstream chromium derivatives will pick this support up soon.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
So this should eventually help things.
Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.
The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.
I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.
I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)
Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.
I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at
Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
BLS says $0.30 is $1.25 today. Each roll was like 30 pictures too (24, but I like round numbers), so like her $30 a roll?
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...
I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)
I take pictures of the sky, not to post it somewhere immediately but it’s like documentary captures for later years looking back
We can’t ever document all of life on earth but we can try
Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?
Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.
> You are a digital hoarder.
Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.
> Is this meant to be negative?
It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.
Yeah, I still have a VHS collection of cartoons I used to watch as a kid.
It did not sound particularly negative to me either, but if it was, I wonder why.
I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.
As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.
I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.
I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.
Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.
Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.
Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.
Generations of talent & creativity just gone.
What's a "YTP"?
Anything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee you want to see it again.
I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...
What percentage, in numbers?
do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh
Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
You people always make everything more complicated than necessary.
That does none of the things tubearchivist does, among them:
- Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos
Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around, instead of visiting a page in my browser.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
Ooooh thanks! ElasticSearch? Who cares, gotta use somehow that spare memory in my k8s home cluster!
Gives me Magnum Archives vibes.
Damn, one can really build an offline internet for themselves these days huh?
No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you
I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.
I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all
I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.
How many of the 20,000+ videos you've saved locally do you actually care about if they get "removed" from YouTube?
I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.
I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube. Many of them are fan-made, many already unavailable I sometimes play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.
I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.
Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.
Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.
I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.
So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.
And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.
> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?
No.
How so? What’s missing?
* Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as "music" by uploaders, to start.
* Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc.
* Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device.
* If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device.
(Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)
* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.
* There is a liked videos playlist
Yes, I read your comment above.
Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
Great. I'll keep using mine, though.
I have a script that calls out to a small llm
etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present in the titleHey ^^, that's a great idea.
I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me until now, thanks!
In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.
They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on L2 attested device.
>They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM.
That's already here. Even random aliexpress tablets support widevine L1 (ie. highest security level)
maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only would get them pretty much all the way there.
They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in sandboxes and their content would be safe.
"their" content? This is Youtube.
Of course, the same can be said for FB, Tiktok, instagram, Pintrest, reddit, ... and I'm sure the list keeps going. Frankly, Youtube is pretty damn good about this, really.
No where else to go that pays. They can pay which entices those to stay.
Google owns that monopoly.
Netflix is already there for 4k streams
And it's an entirely useless effort. No idea how it is done but the internet is full 4k rips.
They find devices that are easy to hack (and I mean rip and tear) and extract the decryption keys from each of them, from what I have heard cheap chinese tvs and set top boxes, they extract the keys from the chips (hardware hacking, heard some even use microscopes to read the keys by hand), and then use them to decrypt streams, I heard that they catch them pretty fast to they use like 1 device per season. This is why they use mostly stollen devices.
The really shitty thing is that vulnerable devices get blacklisted en masse, so all legitimate users get stuck with 480p video content on streaming services. The Nexus 5 got this treatment, as I understand it, because it was too easy to extract the keys.
More easily in the past (I don't think if it's still true for 4K) you only needed an HDMI splitter to bypass HDCP copy protection.
Interesting - do you have any sources to read further?
Search for widevine decrypt. You’ll find code and forums where at least some L3 (software) keys are publicly shared. For high resolution on some platforms, you need L1 keys, but as far as I understand the decryption process basically stays the same once you have a working key.
Random article: https://www.ismailzai.com/blog/picking-the-widevine-locks
Claimed to be L1 key leaks (probably all blacklisted by now): https://github.com/Mavrick102/WIDEVINE-CDM-L1-Giveaway
The analog hole is real.
Breaking HDCP is a lot easier than breaking the other things. You don't have to attack the torment nexus directly. This is not the most ideal option but it is information theoretically correct assuming your capture rig is set up properly.
I knew of this chrome bug which could allow netflix to be ripped. I had heard it in comments of some section of youtube and I might need to look further into it but its definitely possible.
It's not as easy as downloading a YouTube video though
Can you explain in simple terms what would prevent one from running the decryption programmatically posing as the end client?
Yes, it's called: Web Environment Integrity + hardware attestation of some kind
> "the technical means through which WEI will accomplish its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a server can ask a third-party "verification" service to make sure that the user's browsing environment has not been "tampered" with. A translation of the policy's terminology will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way from Google's accepted browser configuration" [1]
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/web-environment-integrit...
Let's say the only devices you can get that will run YouTube are running i/pad/visionOS or Android and that those will only run on controlled hardware and that the hardware will only run signed code. Now let's say the only way to get the YouTube client is though the controlled app stores on those platforms. You can build a chain of trust tied to something like a TPM in the device at one end and signing keys held by Apple or Google at the other that makes it very difficult to get access to the client implementation and the key material and run something like the client in an environment that would allow it to provide convincing evidence that it is a trusted client. As long as you have the hardware and software in your hands, it's probably not impossible, but it can be made just a few steps shy.
Here are a couple ideas:
The decryption code could verify that it's only providing decrypted content to an attested-legitimate monitor, using DRM over HDMI (HDCP).
You might try to modify the decryption code to disable the part where it reencrypts the data for the monitor, but it might be heavily obfuscated.
Maybe the decryption key is only provided to a TPM that can attest its legitimacy. Then you would need a hardware vulnerability to crack it.
Maybe the server could provide a datastream that's fed directly to the monitor and decrypted there, without any decryption happening on the computer. Then of course the reverse engineering would target the monitor instead of the code on the computer. The monitor would be a less easily accessible reverse engineering target, and it itself could employ obfuscation and a TPM.
Attestation requiring a hardware TPM 2.0 (or higher), and not being able to extract the private key from the TPM on your system.
TPM is Mathematically Secure and you can't extract what's put in. See, Fritz-Chip.
I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more professional approach based on external recording.
I might be recalling it wrong,but I remember reading that there was some old hardware that refused to record protected TV/Movies probably a VCR or a DVR.
Camera manufacturers can easily refuse to record a stream of they detect it is protected, may be via watermarks or other sidechannel.
Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.
DRM protection schemes usually don't rely on TPM, the real magic happens inside your GPU and the monitor.
TPM isn't the only misfeature that makes Windows 11 an abomination. People who don't switch to a respectful platform is in for a lot of pain.
The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on a phone.
Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.
I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
Works dandily here.
Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me.
Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.
> Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much deliberate censorship.
> It's very much deliberate censorship.
Also known as "moderation"
And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.
In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.
What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
> livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already
maybe it's vibe coded nowadays
dumb middle management driven by dumb metrics
a very old story...
Google is having a hard time conforming to their own javascript standards.
One constant about Google, they always bet on the web.
i think a lot of millenials and older gen-z use youtube on browsers. It has more and more alternative competitors too, like bilibili in China.
Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
They'll never leave money on the table like that. The older demographic are the only ones that can buy things.
Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
> No more interoperability
> no more leverage against corpos
> just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are things like attestation in consumer hardware.
> These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are things like attestation in consumer hardware.
Totally this, and not because powers suddenly realized they can't control Web like they controlled early "smart" dumb phones circa J2ME times.
Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.
The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway.
Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.
But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.
And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
> Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
Could you elaborate a bit, please? Any links are appreciated.
https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-ex...
Silicon Carbon batteries. And others, but this tech is already in production.
Good article. Thanks!
This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing.
I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.
They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill all non-Chromium browsers.
No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I’d argue it’d helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for corporate videos. Yeah there’s other solutions but the number of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.
I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.
I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point).
The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?”
Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.
Just because the balance shifts doesn't mean the desktop/laptop stops being supported.
Laptops aren't going anywhere. Even if phones and tablets replace them for a third of tasks, or a third of people.
The idea that laptops with browsers would become so rare that YouTube would drop support, within any reasonably predictable future timeframe, is pure fantasy.
All the ewaste MS generated w/Win11 min requirements… I’m thinking that kinda maneuver. Eh not really but anyways:
A slow dropping of support for those who aren’t using an app or Chrome with some Play(Video) Integrity Extension installed.
>within any reasonably predictable future timeframe
I think given the pace of technological advancement and given how every generation we see at least one major piece of electronics completely wipe out generations of predictions, this statement doesn’t serve a productive purpose other than to make “I don’t agree” sound like some variation of “it’s an objective fact that what you said is impossible.” You’re just spiking the conversation, even if that is not your intention.
I didn’t say this is definitely going to happen. I’m just saying clearly the way we engage with computers is shifting and that means companies will adjust accordingly. It’s not that far fetched.
As for “within any reasonably predictable future timeframe,” for all we know YouTube will become a relic.
> It’s not that far fetched.
That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario is far-fetched. This isn't between two comparably plausible scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent where a popular site like YouTube would remove support. It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on current actual trends.
I’m not too proud to admit that I am way out on a limb and probably wrong. I’m just kind of musing and thinking out loud about a broader question. I don’t mind you disagreeing, I don’t mind being wrong, but I don’t know man…maybe try and ease off the gas a bit?
>Watching YT at work is a major thing.
Where are these jobs where I can get paid to watch YouTube?
Working in infrastructure design (specifically railways), cab ride videos are often useful to fill in gaps in as-built plans or the pictures you took on a site visit (you'll always miss out to photograph something that'll be of major interest later), especially in early planning phases. Plus there's the odd software tutorial video here and there, too, of course.
Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.
Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.
Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?
And nobody's saying you're getting paid to watch YouTube all day. But video links get sent around, and people check out whatever 3 minute video. They watch during lunch. You know how it is.
I think it would give me a life crisis and I'd feel like a failure of a boss if I learned my otherwise productive employees felt they couldn't watch sloptube the clock. A sysadmin that isn't constantly jacked into nethack is hardly a sysadmin at all. You should really demand more humane working conditions if you feel like you have to micro-optimize your work day.
In small shops youtube is quite a handy source of information. I have to prototype and 3D print lots of stuff.
I hope they will do that, yes really.
Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly.
But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go) And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher)
That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)
> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
It's not YouTube though, but downloader :)
"yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
I think that too. When the people refresh their TVs with the newer, more DRM friendly/updated version this channel will meet its end :(
My understanding is that the original yt-dl used the browser interface. yt-dlp uses the android app interface.
>This impacts yt-dlp as we currently request video data from YouTube as if we were YouTube on TV.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
> Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
It would still be possible with native apps. Somebody will have to reverse engineer it continuously. So it will be slower, but still possible.
However, that won't be the case if they start using some secret (like a private key) that you can't access directly from an app, or if they decide that you can't run custom/modified apps. That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
> That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
Yeah, that is exactly I was thinking.
Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.
They know that. yt-dlp uses browser-like access to download.
From https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404
> What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
>
> The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this project.
More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.
>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on servers and staff in three months.
Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.
Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.
Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.
Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
They have the money and the world would be better.
> (presumably, I haven't looked into it)
YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.
Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.
I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.
PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then later, even when profitable can gradually reduce the quality of the service to the point where users have to pay to get back to an experience they used to have is textbook enshittification.
From
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
it looks like deno is recommended for these reasons:
> Notes
> * Code is run with restricted permissions (e.g, no file system or network access)
> * Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm (--remote-components ejs:npm).
It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but please do not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to execute untrusted code. Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.
i wonder if it would be legal if they did, as an anti-circumvention counter-measure.
For a long time, yt-dlp worked completely with Python. They implemented a lightweight JavaScript interpreter that could run basic scripts. But as the runtime requirements became more sophisticated it struggled to scale
I wonder why YouTube doesn't implement full DRM, such as Widevine, at this point.
Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices? Is it too expensive?
(not that I'd like that; I always download videos from YouTube for my personal archive, and I only use 3rd party or modified clients)
They are already experimenting with DRM on all videos in certain clients (like the HTML5 TV one) https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
Sooner or later, in the next couple of years, it will happen.
> Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices?
This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when then this sort of limitation will be removed.
I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is certainly part of the equation.
I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on doing so.
Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.
Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.
Yeah, it's pretty much to support backwards compatibility with old smart TVs and the like. They already enforce stricter rules on new hi-res content, and once those old devices cycle out of service you can expect the support to go away.
It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you really, really have to.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
I wish @pg would just add "Replace YouTube" to his Frighteningly Ambitious Startup ideas.
https://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS server.
It's been working great by itself for the most part since the beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the way.
We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.
(I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)
Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429 until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to have resolved things for the most part.
yt-dlp feels like a whole army fighting Google. Users reporting and the army performs.
If by army you mean underfunded open source volunteers then yes.
That's the point, they don't have the fund but still give the sense of fight and power of an army.
If it's free, can you even talk about underfunding?
You can donate to a free project, including yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Maintainers.md#...)
The developers can arbitrarily decide their own goals and always claim underfunding, that's why it's meaningless in this context
Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once.
Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled into a native executable that can run without having to install Deno separately.
> if using QuickJS, version 2025-4-26 or later is strongly recommended for performance reasons
Oh, I wonder if they got performance to a reasonable level then? When the external JS requirements were first announced, they said it took upwards of half an hour, and a QuickJS developer wrote in the ticket that they didn’t see a path towards improving it significantly enough.
Discussed here a few weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads - 1244 points, 620 comments
In case anyone was wondering, use `--js-runtimes node` to use the (as stated as insecure) node option.
Is there an UI wrapper for this?
I do not understand why Google doesn't just explicitly permit people who pay for premium to use yt-dlp or other tools to watch YouTube however the fuck they want. Put that in your terms, Google -- so people aren't afraid they'll lose their GMail because they wanted to watch a video -- and you'll get more paying customers...
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
I don't mind, but it has to work out of the box after a pip install.
Looks like the packaging will be a mess?
Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.
Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.
I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...
Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...
I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).
It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.
It depends on a lot of factors. But even if it works in a virtual machine, your CPU is going to be pegged at 100% the whole time to handle the re-encoding. Unless you use a hardware h.264 encoder, but then the quality is pretty terrible since it's explicitly optimized for speed over quality and isn't tunable the way software encoders are.
It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You always just want to access the original compressed bitstream if possible.
Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them elsewhere.
eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAi1pn3kBqE
With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording software sees a blank screen.
I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.
There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point.
I imagine there would be ways around this. I know from personal experience that Kazam screen recorder on Firefox on Ubuntu can record anything and everything, including YouTube as well as DRM content on Disney+ and Prime Video.
I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I don't think that even Google could demand changes like that to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably circumvent that.
And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
On Linux you can feed the GPU encoded bitstream and then GPU will use hardware to decode and display it as overlay.
Why is this relevant? To be clear, I'm asking from a place of ignorance. Are you saying that because the video player can have the video decoding happen entirely on the GPU, screen recording software can't pick it up? Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
In the current times yes, you can basically record your screen with whatever tool you fancy.
But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders" are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from the hdmi cable output for example.
Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
> Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?
To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.
I don't know if Youtube cares, but other website do attempt to block this as well. They will either black your screen or prevent playback if you try to screen record, even encrypting to prevent recording the HDMI/DP output.
Youtube obviously is making it harder to download videos because... it's training data
Someday it will have to launch a VM with a copy of Chrome installed and use an AI model to operate the VM to make it look like a human, then use frame capture inside the VM to record the video and transcode it.
I am impressed at their resourcefulness.
Knock on wood not to jinx it, but I wonder why this manages to stay up on github when eg paywall-busting chrome extensions get banned from there (because of DMCA takedowns I guess?)
there was already an attempt to take it down back in 2020/2021 [0]. The DMCA claim's main argument was that ytdl was circumventing Techincal Protection Measures (TPMs) in order to access the content. Thanks to a letter from the EFF [1] which explains how ytdl accesses content in the same way that a browser does (i.e. it does circumvent anything such as DRM), github rejected the takedown.
this is also why ytdl has stood firm in saying they will never attempt to be compatible with anything protected by DRM.
[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/s...
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
Thanks for context with good links!
It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.
From the preservation point of view yes. But realistically, it's been the norm throughout human history that irrelevant culture simply gets removed.
What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those creators can upload wherever they want.
And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or something?
> Do you think YT ought to be government-funded
Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic, arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of it are actually not that great and a potential government system might actually be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
I will say that is something I would not have considered reasonable prior to watching his video.
Is captcha solving on yt-dlp's roadmap? This seems to be a natural next step. Maybe there is an external library they could integrate?
Then someday it with require an entire llm installed locally
god damn they the youtube is at fault, always says: forbidden when trying to download a book audiobook
Ah! So, that’s why brew no longer updates yt-dlp on my iMac from 2017 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why deno over bun?