22 ms·

How journalists use youtube-dl

1651 points by thisisparker 6y ago

underdeserver 6y ago
youtube-dl has so many uses. This DMCA stuff is outrageous. I hope they put it up onn a Github-like site outside the US.
djsumdog 6y ago
My two big uses cases for youtube-dl: 1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. 2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole. The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you can easily see if an account or channel has been censored/banned.
- ricardobeat 6y ago
  Wish I had thought of #2 long ago. The majority of videos I've saved are long gone.
- masklinn 6y ago
  My main use on youtube-dl is downloading videos to watch them in places with slow / unreliable DSL. Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnections or high latency spikes well.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    I don't even keep most of the videos I downloaded due to that, as they are not worth watching more than once anyway, so it could be argued that it's no different than how people usually use YouTube. AFAIK, (good) browsers still give you the direct links if you know where to look, but the slow boiling of the frog is really evident with things like hiding View Source and such (often under the guise of "usability".) The demise of youtube-dl, along with Google's pushing of their proprietary protocols and other continued user hostilities surely paints a sad picture for the freedom of the Internet...
  - tracker1 6y ago
    I've had similar issues on a recent camping trip since the switch from google play music to youtube music... when I lose connectivity, there's no buffer, and seems to be no songs kept to be able to play anything, and it was a really crappy experience. May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      Google's engineering is not about providing a good user experience, but about using metrics to squeeze out the last 1% of inefficiency. This inevitably makes the system fragile and leaves some people out in the cold, but you're the product, not the customer. Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters. It automatically upgrades to 4K videos (of course), but its buffering algorithm is pared so close to the bone that it can't handle high bandwidths as well.
      - Google234 6y ago
        Your comments seems contradictory. How is optimizing to provide a good experience for those with bad internet not providing a good user experience? I have fast internet and it works fine for me, maybe the problem is on your end?
        jiggawatts 6y ago
        My point is that because of the excessive "optimisation" at YouTube, users now have a poor experience if they "don't fit in the middle of the bell curve". The cause of the issues can be high latency, low latency, high bandwidth, low bandwidth... whatever. If you're in the 1%, YouTube has optimised you out in order to save 1% in hosting costs somewhere. It's a type of over-fitting that results in a fragile system. Engineers at Google get bonuses for shaving 0.1% off of something, because at their scale that could be millions of dollars saved. Hence protocols like HTTP/3, which exist almost entirely to optimise some Google backend by single-digit percentage points. YouTube has had every last percent of "inefficiency" squeezed out of it, to the point where lots of users have a degraded experience. Google famously doesn't care about user experience at all. They care about costs and their own internal KPIs, which are all tied to advertising revenue, not "video playback smoothness". This is why Firefox was 5x slower on YouTube for years. This is why Google famously has next to zero "customer support", even if you pay them. They don't view you as a customer. You're the product. Firefox users click on ads less. Firefox users tend to have adblock. They're not good products. Similarly, Google is fighting a turf war with the likes of NetFlix and Apple for advertising eyeballs, so they do not want to ensure that Apple TV can play back YouTube in the best possible quality. They optimise for Chrome and Chromecast first, everything else a distant second. Got to build that walled garden! I pay NetFlix the same amount monthly as I pay for YouTube Premium. NetFlix provides support, YouTube doesn't. NetFlix works flawlessly on every device I have, YouTube doesn't. YouTube doesn't play 4K on my Apple TV 4K! It doesn't play 4K on my flagship Samsung TV! It downgrades my iPhone for 480p even on WiFi! This kind of anti-consumer (anti-product?) bullshit is why Google needs to be broken up. The vendor that makes the device, the browser, the search engine, the network protocol, and the advertising platform shouldn't also be television for half the world. They shouldn't get to degrade the experience to benefit their browser team. They shouldn't get to slow down the experience for a competing browser. They shouldn't get to simply ignore customer complaints. Television broadcasters in most countries have to answer to an ombudsman. YouTube doesn't. That's too much control that invites anti-competitive, anti-human behaviour. The incentives are all wrong.
  - fogihujy 6y ago
    Ditto, but with slow/unreliable 3G. It's perfectly possible to watch a 4k video with max quality that way, even if one has a poor connection. Otherwise, I'd be stuck at 240p much of the time.
  - samoa42 6y ago
    try out mpv. with cranked up caches it will buffer the whole vid in ram and bobs your uncle.
- dEnigma 6y ago
  It is really distressing to see how many of the videos in my, admittedly quite large, favourites list are gone by now. Even ones that I only added in the past few weeks. Either simply "Deleted", "Private" or "Removed/Blocked by the copyright holder". In most cases I have trouble even finding out what the title of the video even was.
  - blevin 6y ago
    One layer of the internet is about packets, another is about ordered sequential streams — and both are widely supported protocols. Above these could potentially sit a dissemination layer, retaining and persisting anything of interest. But in a legal system where information can be speech or property, it is problematic to do that as a standard protocol. Instead we have archive.org, The Archive Team, BitTorrent, and a million progressively less durable options from there, including some of us running youtube-dl on videos of interest, grabbing PDF’s off Arxiv, SSRN, etc. I’m not sure what to do about any of this except a yearly donation to archive.org, and accepting the great distributed fitness function of fate.
    - tracker1 6y ago
      Wonder if archive.org and the EFF could get a video site up to compete with youtube, or work to back something like bitchute or otehr alternatives to raise awareness and push back on overreach takedown requests. YouTube/Google just seem to cave, and apparently so does GitHub.
      - tripzilch 6y ago
        So does everyone who got owned by a multinational megacorp. That's when all the human vision goes out the door. Because there's no mechanisms to keep it there, it will eventually wither. We could have had so many nice things if it wasn't for those things. It's almost as if there's somewhere a country which acts as a fertile breeding ground for these uncontrollable unregulated monstrosities, to grow really big, and at some point left roaming wild for other countries to deal with "yeah we don't do that here" (by which I mean stuff like false advertising and reasoning like "if it's legal and I make a profit then I get to do it").
- nitrogen 6y ago
  1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?
  - Fnoord 6y ago
    On Twitch streamers have a browser window open and pause it to comment.
    - tracker1 6y ago
      HDCP protections added to Chrome in 3...2... edit: I only meant this in so much that it's entirely possible for Google, that controls both Chrome (the biggest browser) and YouTube (biggest online video site) to encable DHCP restrictions on video capture from within the browser for sites (such as YouTube) that might implement it. Given their proclivity towards giving the RIAA/MPAA whatever they ask for, it wouldn't surprise me.
      - nitrogen 6y ago
        > DHCP protections... I'm guessing you meant HDCP? I'm pretty sure that encrypted media sites already use HDCP because my projector glitches for a few seconds sometimes when I first navigate to Prime Video, and whenever I have a secondary analog VGA monitor connected Prime Video will only play in standard definition.
        tracker1 6y ago
        That was what I was thinking, edited, thanks... Half surprised they haven't done this to some youtube videos/channels already then.
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Any rebroadcast is already against Youtube TOS. It's only for personal use.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  #1 is an activity protected by fair use, and something fairly important. Imagine a world where you can't reference images or clips in your journalism or reviews, forever having to rely on only licensed material and descriptions.
  - Google234 6y ago
    Fair use does not override the TOS which YouTube-DP violates
    - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
      You can’t issue a DMCA takedown for software that violates someone’s TOS. (Never mind that it’s someone else’s TOS.)
      - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
        It wasn't a DMCA takedown notice. It was a DMCA section 1201 notice. Section 1201, which criminalizes circumvention of access controls, has nothing to do with copyright. John Deere uses it to go after sellers of unauthorized replacement parts for their tractors. Non-compliance is a felony carrying a 5 year / $500k punishment. Unlike takedown notices, there's no counter-notice opportunity for the receiving party. So if the receiving party believed the notice isn't valid, they'll need to argue that as a criminal defendant in criminal court.
    - indymike 6y ago
      Please quote relevant TOS.
      - Google234 6y ago
        B. Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.
- abhgh 6y ago
  My primary use case has been to download talks and watch them later. I frequently used to work out of cafes (not since Feb of course) where the connection may not be reliable. Youtube-dl was very helpful in those cases.
wolco2 6y ago
I never downloaded videos from youtube until this came up. Didn't realize how easy it was.
est31 6y ago
Indeed, it should be good practice for any journalist to download copies of online material they are reporting about (not just video, but anything), for the case that they are being deleted or altered. In the old world, you had a piece of paper or a document that you could store somewhere. An URL is not a way of storing the content, it can always disappear.
arendtio 6y ago
Another valid use-case is to use the hardware acceleration with your native video player. AFAIK, mpv uses youtube-dl under the hood to play youtube videos. For a long time the video acceleration in browsers wasn't very good for Linux users, so we used players like mpv instead to watch high resolution content.
- jglauche 6y ago
  it still isn't. I can't watch 720p videos on my thin client with browser overhead, but I can with mpv.
  - cdrt 6y ago
    What browser are you using? Google has been known to make YouTube perform worse on browsers that aren’t Chrome.
    - Liskni_si 6y ago
      Actually Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration for video playback and never did, while the most recent Firefox almost does, if one turns a couple of experimental knobs.
      - raihansaputra 6y ago
        Off topic but I just tried to move from MacOS to Pop!_OS and this is the main reason that I can't migrate now. No GPU Accel on Chrome means scrolling is horrid on QHD/higher resolution (besides YouTube being pretty much useless). Firefox is fine but there's no user profile modes to separate between my various profiles. With so much work being done on browsers, it feels weird that Linux is so behind on this. And Chrome seem to not want to implement the GPU acceleration at all. I guess I'll pay the Apple tax for the foreseeable future.
        arendtio 6y ago
        Well, I am not sure I understand what you mean. There are two distinct GPU Acceleration technologies at work here: - for videos - for website rendering AFAIK the video acceleration part is the big problem as the issue was ignored for many years by the browser vendors. For rendering websites most browser should do just fine, some hardware-browser combinations might be exceptions though. I also wonder what you mean by Firefox has no user profiles, because Firefox has a profile concept too. Be default it doesn't ask you, but when you start it with `firefox --ProfileManager` you will see what I mean. I don't like messing with the Profile Manager every time, so I just have different Icons for starting different Profiles (e.g. Music --> Spotify, Movies --> Amazon & Netflix, etc.). Currently there are just two websites for which I have to use Chromium: 1. Geforce Now, officially Linux is not supported, but with Chromium it does work when you change your user-agent 2. Binance, for whatever reason their login capture doesn't work with Firefox
shmerl 6y ago
I hope developers are working with someone to fight back against RIAA trolls.
lemoncurd 6y ago
oh no the beloved profession journalism, very sad!
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Amateur sleuths and bloggers download and analyze youtube videos, too.
CobrastanJorji 6y ago
Youtube-dl had some good notes in their README about legitimate uses and an explanation about how they tried to avoid adding sites that specialized in infringing content, but they really did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. That will not help their argument at all. Youtube-dl absolutely has important and completely legal uses, reporting being among them, but the law doesn't care whether it CAN be used for legal purposes. The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose." On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?
- rbecker 6y ago
  Downloading copyrighted videos, just like home taping, is legal. There was a supreme court case deciding that the latter is legal. I have yet to hear any reasoning why "home taping, but on the internet" would not fall under that same precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.
    - SahAssar 6y ago
      The DRM argument would be relevant if youtube had any DRM. It does not, so it isn't.
rbecker 6y ago
We're lucky it wasn't forced off an app store on a locked platform. Then we'd be begging some corporation to be allowed to run it..
sesuximo 6y ago
Imo... people should be able to download stuff for free if they’re able to see it for free. The “you can see it but you must watch an ad” model is weird and leads to unenforceable/wacky situations like this (I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)
- WilTimSon 6y ago
  It's strange to me because I've been using adblokcers for as long as I've been watching things online, as do a large percentage of people, I'm sure. So does it really matter that much to YouTube when I download some video, considering me watching it brings it literally no benefit? What's the gain here?
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    Control. Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware. If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
- comeonseriously 6y ago
  > The “you can see it but you must watch and ad” model... ... funds OTA television. Also funds YT. With OTA, it is okay to record OTA broadcasts using a VCR, so I'm not sure why youtube-dl would be different.
  - pwinnski 6y ago
    The different, Google would argue, is that YouTube-dl doesn't download the ads, while a VCR captures ads and content alike. But really, if the VCR were invented today, it would be made illegal.
    - boring_twenties 6y ago
codegladiator 6y ago
FWIW I was contacted by a "prestigious" publisher (the ken) and it was a story against google. The journalist was not even ready to listen to the "pros", she was just interested in whats the harm.
kavalec 6y ago
What's the best "use case" for launching this offshore?
motohagiography 6y ago
I used ffmpeg and audacity with youtube-dl to download and do file and spectrograph analysis on a faked political video. That analysis showing how the audio was spliced together may have killed the story before it got legs. In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.
- AnonsLadder 6y ago
  That's freaking awesome
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  Did you post an article about it? I'd be interested to read it.
- lostgame 6y ago
  This is probably one of the coolest and most underrated comments in this topic! Could you tell us more about this process?
  - motohagiography 6y ago
    Thanks, it's way less cool when I write spectrogram instead of spectrograph. My mistake on that part. If you use those tools, it's really straight forward process of using the tools. I didn't know about Audacity until I had spent most of my time figuring out ffmpeg/ffplay. It was an amateur effort, but I've done a lot of security analysis.
- kortex 6y ago
  > In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever. I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates. Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged. I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection. http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/ http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/ https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives-matter https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives...
jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
Jokes on them! I have the source! And if it ever breaks I know how to patch it!
- digdigdag 6y ago
  A long time ago, I wrote and maintained a fairly used Userscript plugin to scrape and download YouTube videos. Let me tell you -- without constant updates (which I've gotten complacent of by using `pip install --upgrade` with youtube-dl), I have forgotten just how much of a hassle it is to constantly fix the HTML parser used to identify and generate download URLs. The reality is, any front-end source code change on YouTube would potentially break the script, sometimes necessitating complete re-write of the parsing scheme. That is all to say, I hope you've set aside ample time and coffee for this hobby...
comeonseriously 6y ago
How is using youtube-dl different to using a "VCR" and recording OTA television?
- roywiggins 6y ago
  RIAA alleges that it bypasses a form of DRM. Youtube tries to obfuscate the full URL of videos, so youtube-dl does a little dance to work out where to download it from. If this is a form of DRM, then the DMCA plausibly applies.
  - comeonseriously 6y ago
    So, the argument is whether or not obfuscation is DRM? If that's true anyone can claim that some weird URL scheme is DRM. That's a dangerous slope to tread.
    - roywiggins 6y ago
      I think it is, too, but "is this sufficiently obfuscatory to fall under the DMCA or not" is really only something a court can decide- it's not a technical question. So "this is obviously not DRM" is an argument, but until a court says otherwise the RIAA seems to have a leg to stand on.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        I mean, technically, can this be called obfuscation when Google provides to you the code to de obfuscate it?
        roywiggins 6y ago
        That's how DRM usually works, one way or another.
      - Chris2048 6y ago
        "is really only something a court can decide" Sometimes I think the scope of what a court is allowed to decide is crazy. It allows new concepts to be manufactured for the convenience of muddying the legal waters. Why the hell legislate around "DRM" and then decide later what that means.
ineedasername 6y ago
It's a bit tragic: Most tools have a potentially negative/illegal use case. These developers advertising those uses, even if it was just in the source code, wasn't a good idea. Now there is an uphill battle to legitimize its use again.
ugjka 6y ago
There's a fork of youtube-dl seems to be pretty active: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc
- oger 6y ago
  I did not look at the repo — but has anyone checked if this is trustworthy? Probably many are looking for a new source - providing a nice and convenient entry point to seed dubious / dangerous additions (aka. malware).
  - ugjka 6y ago
    From Readme "youtube-dlc is a fork of youtube-dl with the intention of getting features tested by the community merged in the tool faster, since youtube-dl's development seems to be slowing down. (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462)"
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  Still on github though. It's only a question of time till it's found. They'd do themselves a favor by moving off of there.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Given that they've yet to clean up the copy people spliced into github/dmca [1], I reckon it might take a while, if not another DMCA. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921
lmilcin 6y ago
Obviously, lots of people use it for legitimate reasons. I for example, use it to download large amounts of material for when I am offline while sailing. Programming tutorials to learn some useful stuff while offline, entire university courses on interesting topics, etc. There aren't many practical ways for me to do it.
- tssva 6y ago
  I imagine YouTube would argue this isn't a legitimate reason since they provide YouTube Premium as a paid subscription which includes as one of its perks the ability to download material for viewing offline.
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    I actually pay for YouTube Premium. Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.
    - tssva 6y ago
      I download for offline viewing quite often. It is available only on mobile devices and the videos are available offline for 30 days post download. Solutions exist to view video from phones on laptops. But all that doesn't go to my argument which is that YouTube, not myself, may not see your use case as legitimate since they provide a subscription service which enables offline viewing. I doubt that because the way they have implemented it, for whatever technical, contractual or just on whim reasons, may not meet all your specific needs they see you bypassing controls to implement in your own manner as legitimate.
  - californical 6y ago
    Then you’re violating YouTube’s terms of service, sure, but the tool you’re downloading with is not unlawful because you’re violating YT’s terms
bleepblorp 6y ago
[Post deleted after 60 minutes. It has had adequate exposure.]
- nullc 6y ago
  I don't follow the argument that the procedural invalidity makes Github more culpable. In a normal, procedurally valid, DMCA the only harm to the host for not following the procedure is that they lose the safe harbor. In this case because it isn't a question of infringement there isn't a safe harbor at all. In either case a company can choose to take something down because it wants to reduce its exposure to litigation. I'm disappointed that even after acquisition github has continued with the beyond-industry-standard level of aggressiveness with takedowns. But I don't see how you conclude that the anti-circumvention complaint makes github more in the wrong for complying.
  - the8472 6y ago
    > is that they lose the safe harbor. For that particular instance or permanently?
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      For the specific averred infringement.
  - subroutine 6y ago
    Based on your response, and the parent comment, it seems like content hosts have a responsibility: to determine if a DMCA takedown request is valid. If a host doesn't see this as a responsibility, and simply complies with every DMCA (whether valid, invalid, or even fraudulent), I'd agree with op... the host is culpable whenever they comply with an invalid or fraudulent DMCA request. Maybe not culpable in a legal sense, but certainly they are to blame (otherwise who?) for complying with invalid DMCA.
    - nullc 6y ago
      They don't have a responsibility except in a goodwill sense. The DMCA gives hosts an option to have legal immunity for each specific case of infringement, to gain the immunity they need only take the content down at the cost of outraging a potential customer. They don't have to take the option, however. It is common in industry for hosts to simply discard obviously invalid complaints particularly if the target is high profile. The legal immunity isn't very valuable if the complaint is baseless-- (sure, there might be frivolous litigation, but that is always possible). It also seems pretty common for hosts to allow the target of the complaint to counter-notice in advance of taking the material down and then just skip the takedown, or they take it down but restore it immediately on counter-notice (youtube itself does this, or at least did when I was hit with a spurious dmca complaint there years ago). Both of these procedures don't follow the letter of the law and arguably cost the provider their safe-harbour. OTOH, almost no DMCA complaints are actually valid per the specific requirements of the statute, so maybe they don't actually lose their safe-harbour.
AndrewBissell 6y ago
A large number of alternative news outlets have been catching YouTube bans under the cover of the QAnon crackdown. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the main archiving tool one could use to migrate off of YouTube is being squelched at the same time.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
grezql 6y ago
Microsoft has to reverse this takedown. Even though it is called "youtube-dl", it also is for downloading videoes on hundres of other video platforms! Many, as stated in this article, use it for research purposes and investigative journalism. Why do companies like MS, Google, Amazon etc acquire smaller companies if they cant protect the values these small companies stand for and made them attractive in first place.
filmgirlcw 6y ago
When my full-time job was as a journalist, I used youtube-dl all the time as a way to have archives of content that was either in danger of being taken down (related to a mass-shooting or other global event) or that the creator would take down after it received attention. In fact, I used to have instructions for how to install it in the various wikis/docs for other team members (this was easier once the Python GUI frontend became available, but I still created step-by-step instructions for specific settings). I produce/host a few weekly news shows focused on developer-centric news and updates and have a keyboard macro setup to run youtube-dl against a text file with URLs not to download the videos, but the thumbnails for videos, so I can use them in the on-screen graphics when talking about a specific story. Before I scripted that solution, the process of having to manually extract the thumbnail for any video I was highlighting was a major PITA. Also, being frank, youtube-dl is significantly better than the official YouTube API for downloading past content from channels I own/manage. It’s faster and a lot more scriptable. I have automated scripts set to watch specific playlists or channels and auto-download stuff for archival purposes — and again, this is content that I either own or that exists on a channel where I’m one of the admins. It’s unfortunate that the test suite had links to commercial music — we’ve seen in past RIAA litigation that that is enough to go against the argument that this isn’t encouraging download of copyrighted content. But as a tool, for not just YouTube but so many other services, it’s invaluable even in non-data hoarding/grey area or straight up infringement scenarios. To be clear, I’ve often used youtube-dl to infringe (as have the vast majority of its users), but that’s my choice/fault. The tool itself has plenty of non-infringing uses. I just wish they’d either linked the test file to another area or used other examples.
sabujp 6y ago
Where will new development take place? What's the russian / chinese equivalent of github?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  The Chinese software startup I worked for used self-hosted gitlab.
- swiley 6y ago
  It's also github. The other year China tried blocking github via the GFW and had to allow it because so many developers there needed it. Either way you can host git yourself (or just use git format-patch) there's not a single thing github really does for you other than integrate a bunch of self-hostable tools behind a flashy (and increasingly less usable) web GUI.
JabavuAdams 6y ago
FYI I use Open Broadcaster Software https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ . I record my own screen while playing the YouTube content.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  Not ideal, as you're recording a lossy format and re-encoding it through a lossy codec and you're also stuck with recording in realtime.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    Not to mention that the chroma subsampling gets worse and worse this way. Not just because that's an inherent problem but also because youtube is (like most video players) horrendously bad at resampling the chroma.
- brokenmachine 6y ago
  This is sucks though. You end up wasting space to have a worse quality recording.
incompatible 6y ago
YouTube even offers a Creative Commons feature, such as on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o: if you scroll to the end of the description it reads: License Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed). I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal. Likewise for public domain videos.
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  I don't think it's any more complicated than that it's because they can't roll ads on videos that are downloaded. youtube-dl et al are niche enough that it doesn't put a real dent in their ad business, but making it more convenient with a Download button might.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > I don't think it's any more complicated than that it's because they can't roll ads on videos that are downloaded. That's certainly something they can do; they just don't do it. Compare movies on VHS tapes, which all roll ads before actually playing the movie.
    - hnlmorg 6y ago
      Sure, Google could do but there's more than enough problems vs reward to make it unattractive: - When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't. - It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer) - Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded the file - There's no way of having users "click" those adverts, let alone report back to Google that they've engaged with it - Some of those aforementioned points might also have a knock on effect with how advertising is charged, which would mean Google would need another pricing model ...and all of this is before you even address the technical issues of video files having multiple different bitrates and formats. You could probably generate a new file on the fly but that would be extremely computationally expensive. So they'd rack up more costs hosting the service as well as lose money on advertising. Honestly, I can't blame Google for not supporting a download option.
deleted 6y ago
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filmgirlcw 6y ago
I left a comment about my own non-infringing use cases of the tool earlier — and I think it’s important that the non-infringing use cases get mentioned. Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright? Most of us weren’t distributing anything, but I think most of us were aware this was at the very least a grey area, if not outright infringement. I’m a huge fan and user of youtube-dl and think this action from the RIAA is ridiculous (though not surprising — I’m a little surprised it took this long) and that the law over this stuff is absolutely bonkers — but the commentary and false pretenses about not just how we use the tool but the purpose for why the tool was built is incredibly disingenuous. It was built and designed to download content that the creators or sites that host the content either didn’t want people to download or outright didn’t allow. The program has support for username/passwords for TV Everywhere SSO’s for premium services. There are ways to tunnel in via a proxy to avoid region block downloads. Again, I’m a huge fan, and I’m someone who absolutely used these features, but let’s not pretend the purpose wasn’t exactly what it is. That doesn’t make the RIAA’s actions any better or anything — but I really dislike pretending like we weren’t all using the program for the exact purposes the complaint laid out, or that they use case wasn’t the primary reason this tool existed.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wizzwizz4 6y ago
  I wasn't, and it's not. I genuinely think you're in the minority here (which is unusual, on the 'net, where piracy's concerned).
- reggieband 6y ago
  To add to this (which I 100% agree with) is the chorus of voices suggesting that their usage was OK because they weren't downloading RIAA content. Just because someone isn't an RIAA member doesn't mean they don't have copyright over the content they upload to YouTube. There are some YouTube creators that would be totally fine with you downloading their content but you can't assume every creator is the same. Just because a user filmed, edited and uploaded some video from their own house doesn't mean they have any less rights than music or video from major labels or Hollywood studios.
deleted 6y ago
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typenil 6y ago
The RIAA has shown itself time and time again to be completely unethical.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  It's a racket claiming to act on behalf of the music industry. It's the RIAA: Racketeer Industry Association of America.
azinman2 6y ago
Sounds like YouTube should have a download button for journalists then.
hiisukun 6y ago
I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites. Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence. Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.
- bigiain 6y ago
  Why was my first though here "I bet Palantir have their own fork of youtube-dl which they rent out to cops in a SaaS thing for the low low price of $ASTRONOMICAL-SUM-COMPARED-TO-ALL-THE-DONATIONS-THE-PROJECT-HAS-EVER-RECIEVED ???:
  - dang 6y ago
    "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I understand the environment variable convention but if you think about the reason for the above rule, it's clear what needs to take precedence.)
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  Doesn't law enforcement have a means to subpoena Google for such evidence?
  - kgog 6y ago
    Which way do you think takes less time and effort?
  - neuronflux 6y ago
    Assuming the content is public, why would they need a subpoena?
whywhywhywhy 6y ago
Where is the solution? We all know the problems by now.
atdt 6y ago
I run a simple service that syncs a private YouTube playlist and publishes it as an audio-only podcast feed. When I come across talks that I find interesting, I save them to the playlist, so I can listen to them while walking, exercising, etc., because I find it much easier to absorb new information if I can move around. This has been a huge boon to me personally, and I'm very worried about losing it.
- movedx 6y ago
  You won't lose it. The tool is open source so either you or someone else can (and will) maintain a fork. You can't stop these things.
chris_wot 6y ago
All the RIAA have done is guaranteed that the tool will go underground.
benlumen 6y ago
Sorry for being behind on this discussion, but how can there possibly be a legal basis for taking down open-source software on the basis that it might be used for infringing someone's copyright? Can they takedown my web browser and operating system too? These are general purpose tools. It's sad that the conversation is all about justifying its use - I think the takedown is absolutely unjustified. GitHub should have let it go to court.
- deelowe 6y ago
  The continuous integration environment downloaded a few seconds of copyrighted content bc those videos have obfuscation they needed to test. The RIAA claims that this is a violation. Youtube dl claims it's fair use.
  - benlumen 6y ago
    Right, that makes far more sense. I should have known I was missing something as it's ridiculous on the face of it. Thanks!
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  The DMCA request was not legal, but it isn't GitHub's job to determine that. GitHub is following the law here, just like they would follow the law and reinstate the repository as soon as the owner files a counter-claim.
this_machine 6y ago
I use youtube-dl to improve YouTube video playback on older Chromecasts[1]. [1] https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes
crusty 6y ago
I am super curious, if this software is open source and the most damning aspect of this case is likely to come down to non-software specific factors like the inclusion of copywrited material (from big name artists) in the unit tests and README and such, what would be the result is someone with the repo just scrubbed the README, refactorfed the unit tests to rid them of any tests on copywrited material, changed the name to something generic like webvid-archiver or some such and rereleased it?
- hiq 6y ago
  Stay tuned: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc
nullc 6y ago
I use youtube-dl to archive my recordings of my own performances which have been put online by third parties (and which no one but me has any rights to!). I use youtube-dl to view videos on other sites (such as vimeo) that don't display in my browser (due to compatibility or privacy settings), usually product support stuff. I use youtube-dl to collect evidence about cryptocurency scammers, which often gets removed from youtube by the time the scam starts collecting. By collecting it when its online it makes it possible to hand over to lawyers so they know what to go subponea. At least once a video I saved probably personally saved me from a frivolous lawsuit (attorney fired his lying client after sending me a threat letter which I responded to with an archived video). I sometimes use youtube-dl to buffer longer pieces which I'm watching which might suffer from infuriating connection interruptions. I don't use youtube-dl to save copyrighted music (except incidentally), among other reasons: the audio on youtube is often pretty low quality.
- vilifiedtwin 6y ago
  It seems like Google starts having a pattern of working with scammers. First they disabled phone call recordings in Android or made it super difficult to enable, now you can't use ytdl to download evidence.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
phendrenad2 6y ago
Whatever happens with the youtube-dl case, it's a good reminder to take perception seriously.
pabs3 6y ago
Software Freedom Conservancy are asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over the youtube-dl takedown demand: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-riaa-youtube-dl/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-...
- 20after4 6y ago
  That Microsoft is a member of the RIAA is a big problem. One more reason to abandon GitHub.
  - movedx 6y ago
    GitHub is "OK". It's only popular because it was first to market(?) I find GitLab far superior in every regard: its UI, CI stack, Auto DevOps, K8s integrations, on-prem/self-hosting option, support options, pricing structure, customer service, communications and open nature, frequent updates with great release notes, and more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- seventhtiger 6y ago
  Did Microsoft make a decision here? I thought it was DMCA takedown which legally requires immediate removal.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    DMCA takedowns are about removing violations of someone's copyright, like posting a Beatles song on YouTube. Though the request was made to look like a takedown request, it's hard to see how they could make the claim the software itself was a copyright violation.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    The issue is not that MS obeyed the takedown as they are required to do. The issue the SFC are discussing is that MS are part of the group that issued the takedown request in the first place. MS has two hats in the game here: one as a member of the RIAA who have issues a DMCA take-down request, and on as the owner of GitHub which has acted upon that order.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
I never use youtube-dl because it is almost always overkill and it is always breaking. I write my own downloaders. The one I use for YouTube is currently less than half a page of shell script. I never download VEVO or other videos that have enciphered signatures (most videos I encounter on web pages don't), so there is no need for Python or any other slow scripting language and fiddling around with Google's Javascript player. Funnily enough, my scripts hardly ever break. When they do break because of some YouTube change (only once so far), I can fix them in a fraction of the time it takes for the yt-dl project to respond to user complaints and make necessary fixes. I doubt the press nor anyone else really needs yt-dl if all they are doing is downloading unprotected videos. Even if someone wants to download VEVO or other protected ones, they don't need youtube-dl to do it. It is trivial to get the download URL for these videos with any "modern" browser. For example, in Chrome, open Developer Tools Network tab, type "videoplayback" in the search box, copy one of the URLs (alt-click) and remove the &range= parameter from the URL. I wonder if the RIAA will ever go after persons trying to make money by offering anti-circumvention services, e.g., http://api.gitnol.com/ http://api.gitnol.com/ I find all those websites trying to sell so-called "video downloaders" very annoying.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  s/anti-//
lxe 6y ago
I keep thinking about this takedown... the issue at hand is the inclusion of youtube links in the readme, which encourages downloads of copyrighted works from youtube. From the complaint: > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. (i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case? (ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization. I feel like this is a YouTube ToS violation, not a DMCA-strike-worthy copyright violation.
- ttt0 6y ago
  > the issue at hand is the inclusion of youtube links in the readme, which encourages downloads of copyrighted works from youtube. The README file doesn't encourage any downloads of any copyrighted works. All examples included in the README point to their own example video. The only thing that comes close to this is that they say that they will not support any services that are violating copyrights. The copyrighted content is used in test cases, that are not meant for users to see. > (i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case? What's being "circumvented" is the encrypted URL to the content. But it's not really circumvented, YouTube decrypts it with javascript. All youtube-dl does is that it interprets the javascript that's on their website, just like a web browser does. > (ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization. Correct. Not sure what "reproduce" means in legal speak, but youtube-dl doesn't even have any functionality to distribute anything.
ogou 6y ago
I use youtube-dl to make art videos that I re-upload. It is indispensable for mashups, especially political. https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyy7Csjpl8/?igshid=s29gkfosrt2q https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyy7Csjpl8/?igshid=s29gkfosrt2q https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBV9SKQZzAWuIXspogOq3pHFC9BuJoL7_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBV9SKQZzAWuIXspogOq3...
JAlexoid 6y ago
I wondered when we are going to see the day, when RIAA/MPAA are going to support terrorists... albeit indirectly. I guess it's time to do sudo apt install youtube-dl
vilifiedtwin 6y ago
I used youtube-dl to store various videos about vintage equipment repair. Sometimes authors take these videos down thinking that they are boring, rubbish and not useful, but they are a goldmine of knowledge that will be gone in few years.
jancsika 6y ago
> I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites. I'm so sick of hearing this "investigations want to be free" nonsense from law enforcement. Just because they want to pirate their investigations without paying they think it's ok for content creators to go hungry? Get a job hippies.
TedShiller 6y ago
Banning youtube-dl won’t accomplish much. I can simply record my screen with audio (for example using QuickTime Player) and save that as a video. I do that as a last resort if video download software doesn’t work. This method can never be stopped. If I can see it and hear it, then I can record it, with close to perfect quality. And it will get even easier with more user friendly tools. Sorry, technology wins.
- NanoCoaster 6y ago
  Isn't there already DRM that works by encrypting the video stream and only decrypting / decoding the video stream on the TV? Or at least, in some sort of closed-off execution context? I'm thinking of Widevine level 1 DRM, for example. If I remember correctly, it mandates that all of the decryption has to happen in a "Trusted Execution Environment", which seems to mean a hardware enclave. I think this effectively locks the user out of the whole decryption phase, which means that you don't get to record your screen. I might be wrong about this, though. Might have to do a little research. (Funnily enough, just looking for information right now turns up this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307308 HN post, which does contain some interesting information)
  - roboyoshi 6y ago
    Yes that is indeed a problem. But it's more prominent in the streaming platforms netflix et al. The encrypted widevine stream can still be captured though and AFAIK if any of the hardware leaks the decryption keys it's easily recovered. YouTube will hopefully never implement a DRM solution - it would lock out a lot of older clients that simply do not support it..But in any case you can still record stuff with your phone by simply recording with the camera if you must.
    - neop1x 6y ago
      Until HW decryption is cracked, there may just be more camera-captured content or content recorded from modded display panels. If they want to prevent copying their content, why they are even publishing it? They can keep it for themselves. They either want us to see it or not. By making it difficult to archive videos I am starting to see more and more low quality screen captures being shared (e.g. on social platforms). A screen capture of a phone camera-recorded video of a phone-recorded TV screen where it is barely possible to understand the spoken words of the actors. That is pretty sad to see in this technologically-advanced world.
known 6y ago
youtube.com should have an option to download videos as torrents
chrisallick 6y ago
Would this have happened if they hadn't sold to Microsoft?
8bitsrule 6y ago
There are certainly legitimate uses for tools like y-dl. Those using online services for marketing purposes -which include copyrighted material- must be required to reach an agreement with those services to flag the status of those materials in a way that's transparent to software. If I stream a file for an hour, I tie up a bunch of network resources for an hour. If I can legitimately DL that in 2 minutes, I'm using less net resources for a shorter time. Why in the hell should that be denied because some material is not in the public domain? Completely illogical result. I watch a lot of long-playing material (I think is non-copyright but WTF do I know?) that I DL to timeshift and watch offline in chunks as time allows. Is that music concert from Poland that's up on Youtube copyrighted? That amateur history/science/education channel that asks for Patreon help? Screw RIAA (again)
allsmedhish 6y ago
why don't they block screen capturing softwares ? its simply possible to capture any kind of copyrighted media online? for instance one can capture screen with ms windows screen capture feature. therefore they must ban windows!
blazespin 6y ago
just use windows-g
pcf 6y ago
I actually use JDownloader instead to download YouTube videos and playlists. And I use youtube-dl to download content from other sites, like nrk.no, svt.se and bbc.co.uk.
ochronus 6y ago
Exactly the kind of report which should be part of youtube-dl's front material!
ojosilva 6y ago
I'm concerned that the "internet of videos" is not being properly archived, like the hypertext one is. I use ytdl primarily to save valuable homemade videos that I'm afraid could disappear if that person, or Google, were to delete or block the account. I'd hope this could be a coordinated effort by libraries and institutions interested in preserving this invaluable and unprecedented corpus of daily life, culture, spoken word, music etc. that could be studied for generations to come. And I couldn't care less about VEVO and other copyrighted material, which, I wish, could find home in a completely different platform for all I care.
- TonyTrapp 6y ago
  archive.org archives YouTube videos, too! They might not have everything but I have used it more than once to salvage an old video for which I used to still have a link but it was removed by the uploader...
hanselot 6y ago
How hard would it be do DCMAdos github?
ochronus 6y ago
Also, a clone in golang: https://github.com/kkdai/youtube https://github.com/kkdai/youtube
bassie2 6y ago
I used youtube-dl for my thesis, analysing Twitch streams and capturing hate speech. Downloading complete playlists with youtube-dl was the only reliable solution. Science, journalism and law enforcement will miss this great tool.
jijji 6y ago
banning open source software is like the streisand effect, its probably impossible but a new name will popup tomorro even if it was banned... its funny there is even a law to ban attempt to ban software, which is essentially poetry or speech. any challenge to the supreme court would likely fail on those grounds.
hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago
At this point... this kind of behavior from some lawyer somewhere is about the status quo of existence. However, people have been kind of quiet about Microsoft here. They pretty much cowered and caved with zero effort on their part to even say, no I won't take that down... for a company that probably pays a billion dollars in legal fees a year... fuck microsoft.
johnisgood 6y ago
Do any of you know where youtube-dl developers are continuing?
gitaarik 6y ago
I'm traveling a lot. I usually download videos on Wi-Fi so I can watch them later when I don't have Wi-Fi. Why does youtube-dl get into trouble and not YouTube itself?

1651 points by thisisparker 6y ago

youtube-dl has so many uses. This DMCA stuff is outrageous. I hope they put it up onn a Github-like site outside the US.

djsumdog 6y ago

My two big uses cases for youtube-dl: 1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. 2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole. The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you can easily see if an account or channel has been censored/banned.

ricardobeat 6y ago
Wish I had thought of #2 long ago. The majority of videos I've saved are long gone.
masklinn 6y ago
My main use on youtube-dl is downloading videos to watch them in places with slow / unreliable DSL. Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnections or high latency spikes well.
- userbinator 6y ago
  I don't even keep most of the videos I downloaded due to that, as they are not worth watching more than once anyway, so it could be argued that it's no different than how people usually use YouTube. AFAIK, (good) browsers still give you the direct links if you know where to look, but the slow boiling of the frog is really evident with things like hiding View Source and such (often under the guise of "usability".) The demise of youtube-dl, along with Google's pushing of their proprietary protocols and other continued user hostilities surely paints a sad picture for the freedom of the Internet...
- tracker1 6y ago
  I've had similar issues on a recent camping trip since the switch from google play music to youtube music... when I lose connectivity, there's no buffer, and seems to be no songs kept to be able to play anything, and it was a really crappy experience. May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
  - jiggawatts 6y ago
    Google's engineering is not about providing a good user experience, but about using metrics to squeeze out the last 1% of inefficiency. This inevitably makes the system fragile and leaves some people out in the cold, but you're the product, not the customer. Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters. It automatically upgrades to 4K videos (of course), but its buffering algorithm is pared so close to the bone that it can't handle high bandwidths as well.
    - Google234 6y ago
      Your comments seems contradictory. How is optimizing to provide a good experience for those with bad internet not providing a good user experience? I have fast internet and it works fine for me, maybe the problem is on your end?
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        My point is that because of the excessive "optimisation" at YouTube, users now have a poor experience if they "don't fit in the middle of the bell curve". The cause of the issues can be high latency, low latency, high bandwidth, low bandwidth... whatever. If you're in the 1%, YouTube has optimised you out in order to save 1% in hosting costs somewhere. It's a type of over-fitting that results in a fragile system. Engineers at Google get bonuses for shaving 0.1% off of something, because at their scale that could be millions of dollars saved. Hence protocols like HTTP/3, which exist almost entirely to optimise some Google backend by single-digit percentage points. YouTube has had every last percent of "inefficiency" squeezed out of it, to the point where lots of users have a degraded experience. Google famously doesn't care about user experience at all. They care about costs and their own internal KPIs, which are all tied to advertising revenue, not "video playback smoothness". This is why Firefox was 5x slower on YouTube for years. This is why Google famously has next to zero "customer support", even if you pay them. They don't view you as a customer. You're the product. Firefox users click on ads less. Firefox users tend to have adblock. They're not good products. Similarly, Google is fighting a turf war with the likes of NetFlix and Apple for advertising eyeballs, so they do not want to ensure that Apple TV can play back YouTube in the best possible quality. They optimise for Chrome and Chromecast first, everything else a distant second. Got to build that walled garden! I pay NetFlix the same amount monthly as I pay for YouTube Premium. NetFlix provides support, YouTube doesn't. NetFlix works flawlessly on every device I have, YouTube doesn't. YouTube doesn't play 4K on my Apple TV 4K! It doesn't play 4K on my flagship Samsung TV! It downgrades my iPhone for 480p even on WiFi! This kind of anti-consumer (anti-product?) bullshit is why Google needs to be broken up. The vendor that makes the device, the browser, the search engine, the network protocol, and the advertising platform shouldn't also be television for half the world. They shouldn't get to degrade the experience to benefit their browser team. They shouldn't get to slow down the experience for a competing browser. They shouldn't get to simply ignore customer complaints. Television broadcasters in most countries have to answer to an ombudsman. YouTube doesn't. That's too much control that invites anti-competitive, anti-human behaviour. The incentives are all wrong.
- fogihujy 6y ago
  Ditto, but with slow/unreliable 3G. It's perfectly possible to watch a 4k video with max quality that way, even if one has a poor connection. Otherwise, I'd be stuck at 240p much of the time.
- samoa42 6y ago
  try out mpv. with cranked up caches it will buffer the whole vid in ram and bobs your uncle.
dEnigma 6y ago
It is really distressing to see how many of the videos in my, admittedly quite large, favourites list are gone by now. Even ones that I only added in the past few weeks. Either simply "Deleted", "Private" or "Removed/Blocked by the copyright holder". In most cases I have trouble even finding out what the title of the video even was.
- blevin 6y ago
  One layer of the internet is about packets, another is about ordered sequential streams — and both are widely supported protocols. Above these could potentially sit a dissemination layer, retaining and persisting anything of interest. But in a legal system where information can be speech or property, it is problematic to do that as a standard protocol. Instead we have archive.org, The Archive Team, BitTorrent, and a million progressively less durable options from there, including some of us running youtube-dl on videos of interest, grabbing PDF’s off Arxiv, SSRN, etc. I’m not sure what to do about any of this except a yearly donation to archive.org, and accepting the great distributed fitness function of fate.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    Wonder if archive.org and the EFF could get a video site up to compete with youtube, or work to back something like bitchute or otehr alternatives to raise awareness and push back on overreach takedown requests. YouTube/Google just seem to cave, and apparently so does GitHub.
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      So does everyone who got owned by a multinational megacorp. That's when all the human vision goes out the door. Because there's no mechanisms to keep it there, it will eventually wither. We could have had so many nice things if it wasn't for those things. It's almost as if there's somewhere a country which acts as a fertile breeding ground for these uncontrollable unregulated monstrosities, to grow really big, and at some point left roaming wild for other countries to deal with "yeah we don't do that here" (by which I mean stuff like false advertising and reasoning like "if it's legal and I make a profit then I get to do it").
nitrogen 6y ago
1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos. I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?
- Fnoord 6y ago
  On Twitch streamers have a browser window open and pause it to comment.
  - tracker1 6y ago
    HDCP protections added to Chrome in 3...2... edit: I only meant this in so much that it's entirely possible for Google, that controls both Chrome (the biggest browser) and YouTube (biggest online video site) to encable DHCP restrictions on video capture from within the browser for sites (such as YouTube) that might implement it. Given their proclivity towards giving the RIAA/MPAA whatever they ask for, it wouldn't surprise me.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      > DHCP protections... I'm guessing you meant HDCP? I'm pretty sure that encrypted media sites already use HDCP because my projector glitches for a few seconds sometimes when I first navigate to Prime Video, and whenever I have a secondary analog VGA monitor connected Prime Video will only play in standard definition.
      - tracker1 6y ago
        That was what I was thinking, edited, thanks... Half surprised they haven't done this to some youtube videos/channels already then.
        GoblinSlayer 6y ago
        Any rebroadcast is already against Youtube TOS. It's only for personal use.
heavyset_go 6y ago
#1 is an activity protected by fair use, and something fairly important. Imagine a world where you can't reference images or clips in your journalism or reviews, forever having to rely on only licensed material and descriptions.
- Google234 6y ago
  Fair use does not override the TOS which YouTube-DP violates
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    You can’t issue a DMCA takedown for software that violates someone’s TOS. (Never mind that it’s someone else’s TOS.)
    - MacsHeadroom 6y ago
      It wasn't a DMCA takedown notice. It was a DMCA section 1201 notice. Section 1201, which criminalizes circumvention of access controls, has nothing to do with copyright. John Deere uses it to go after sellers of unauthorized replacement parts for their tractors. Non-compliance is a felony carrying a 5 year / $500k punishment. Unlike takedown notices, there's no counter-notice opportunity for the receiving party. So if the receiving party believed the notice isn't valid, they'll need to argue that as a criminal defendant in criminal court.
  - indymike 6y ago
    Please quote relevant TOS.
    - Google234 6y ago
      B. Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.
abhgh 6y ago
My primary use case has been to download talks and watch them later. I frequently used to work out of cafes (not since Feb of course) where the connection may not be reliable. Youtube-dl was very helpful in those cases.

wolco2 6y ago

I never downloaded videos from youtube until this came up. Didn't realize how easy it was.

est31 6y ago

Indeed, it should be good practice for any journalist to download copies of online material they are reporting about (not just video, but anything), for the case that they are being deleted or altered. In the old world, you had a piece of paper or a document that you could store somewhere. An URL is not a way of storing the content, it can always disappear.

arendtio 6y ago

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

jglauche 6y ago
it still isn't. I can't watch 720p videos on my thin client with browser overhead, but I can with mpv.
- cdrt 6y ago
  What browser are you using? Google has been known to make YouTube perform worse on browsers that aren’t Chrome.
  - Liskni_si 6y ago
    Actually Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration for video playback and never did, while the most recent Firefox almost does, if one turns a couple of experimental knobs.
    - raihansaputra 6y ago
      Off topic but I just tried to move from MacOS to Pop!_OS and this is the main reason that I can't migrate now. No GPU Accel on Chrome means scrolling is horrid on QHD/higher resolution (besides YouTube being pretty much useless). Firefox is fine but there's no user profile modes to separate between my various profiles. With so much work being done on browsers, it feels weird that Linux is so behind on this. And Chrome seem to not want to implement the GPU acceleration at all. I guess I'll pay the Apple tax for the foreseeable future.
      - arendtio 6y ago
        Well, I am not sure I understand what you mean. There are two distinct GPU Acceleration technologies at work here: - for videos - for website rendering AFAIK the video acceleration part is the big problem as the issue was ignored for many years by the browser vendors. For rendering websites most browser should do just fine, some hardware-browser combinations might be exceptions though. I also wonder what you mean by Firefox has no user profiles, because Firefox has a profile concept too. Be default it doesn't ask you, but when you start it with `firefox --ProfileManager` you will see what I mean. I don't like messing with the Profile Manager every time, so I just have different Icons for starting different Profiles (e.g. Music --> Spotify, Movies --> Amazon & Netflix, etc.). Currently there are just two websites for which I have to use Chromium: 1. Geforce Now, officially Linux is not supported, but with Chromium it does work when you change your user-agent 2. Binance, for whatever reason their login capture doesn't work with Firefox

shmerl 6y ago

I hope developers are working with someone to fight back against RIAA trolls.

lemoncurd 6y ago

oh no the beloved profession journalism, very sad!

roywiggins 6y ago
Amateur sleuths and bloggers download and analyze youtube videos, too.

CobrastanJorji 6y ago

Youtube-dl had some good notes in their README about legitimate uses and an explanation about how they tried to avoid adding sites that specialized in infringing content, but they really did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. That will not help their argument at all. Youtube-dl absolutely has important and completely legal uses, reporting being among them, but the law doesn't care whether it CAN be used for legal purposes. The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose." On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?

rbecker 6y ago
Downloading copyrighted videos, just like home taping, is legal. There was a supreme court case deciding that the latter is legal. I have yet to hear any reasoning why "home taping, but on the internet" would not fall under that same precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.
  - SahAssar 6y ago
    The DRM argument would be relevant if youtube had any DRM. It does not, so it isn't.

rbecker 6y ago

We're lucky it wasn't forced off an app store on a locked platform. Then we'd be begging some corporation to be allowed to run it..

sesuximo 6y ago

Imo... people should be able to download stuff for free if they’re able to see it for free. The “you can see it but you must watch an ad” model is weird and leads to unenforceable/wacky situations like this (I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)

WilTimSon 6y ago
It's strange to me because I've been using adblokcers for as long as I've been watching things online, as do a large percentage of people, I'm sure. So does it really matter that much to YouTube when I download some video, considering me watching it brings it literally no benefit? What's the gain here?
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  Control. Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware. If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
comeonseriously 6y ago
> The “you can see it but you must watch and ad” model... ... funds OTA television. Also funds YT. With OTA, it is okay to record OTA broadcasts using a VCR, so I'm not sure why youtube-dl would be different.
- pwinnski 6y ago
  The different, Google would argue, is that YouTube-dl doesn't download the ads, while a VCR captures ads and content alike. But really, if the VCR were invented today, it would be made illegal.
  - boring_twenties 6y ago

codegladiator 6y ago

FWIW I was contacted by a "prestigious" publisher (the ken) and it was a story against google. The journalist was not even ready to listen to the "pros", she was just interested in whats the harm.

kavalec 6y ago

What's the best "use case" for launching this offshore?

motohagiography 6y ago

I used ffmpeg and audacity with youtube-dl to download and do file and spectrograph analysis on a faked political video. That analysis showing how the audio was spliced together may have killed the story before it got legs. In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.

AnonsLadder 6y ago
That's freaking awesome
brokenmachine 6y ago
Did you post an article about it? I'd be interested to read it.
lostgame 6y ago
This is probably one of the coolest and most underrated comments in this topic! Could you tell us more about this process?
- motohagiography 6y ago
  Thanks, it's way less cool when I write spectrogram instead of spectrograph. My mistake on that part. If you use those tools, it's really straight forward process of using the tools. I didn't know about Audacity until I had spent most of my time figuring out ffmpeg/ffplay. It was an amateur effort, but I've done a lot of security analysis.
kortex 6y ago
> In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever. I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates. Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse. I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged. I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection. http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/ http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/ https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives-matter https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives...

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

Jokes on them! I have the source! And if it ever breaks I know how to patch it!

digdigdag 6y ago
A long time ago, I wrote and maintained a fairly used Userscript plugin to scrape and download YouTube videos. Let me tell you -- without constant updates (which I've gotten complacent of by using `pip install --upgrade` with youtube-dl), I have forgotten just how much of a hassle it is to constantly fix the HTML parser used to identify and generate download URLs. The reality is, any front-end source code change on YouTube would potentially break the script, sometimes necessitating complete re-write of the parsing scheme. That is all to say, I hope you've set aside ample time and coffee for this hobby...

comeonseriously 6y ago

How is using youtube-dl different to using a "VCR" and recording OTA television?

roywiggins 6y ago
RIAA alleges that it bypasses a form of DRM. Youtube tries to obfuscate the full URL of videos, so youtube-dl does a little dance to work out where to download it from. If this is a form of DRM, then the DMCA plausibly applies.
- comeonseriously 6y ago
  So, the argument is whether or not obfuscation is DRM? If that's true anyone can claim that some weird URL scheme is DRM. That's a dangerous slope to tread.
  - roywiggins 6y ago
    I think it is, too, but "is this sufficiently obfuscatory to fall under the DMCA or not" is really only something a court can decide- it's not a technical question. So "this is obviously not DRM" is an argument, but until a court says otherwise the RIAA seems to have a leg to stand on.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      I mean, technically, can this be called obfuscation when Google provides to you the code to de obfuscate it?
      - roywiggins 6y ago
        That's how DRM usually works, one way or another.
    - Chris2048 6y ago
      "is really only something a court can decide" Sometimes I think the scope of what a court is allowed to decide is crazy. It allows new concepts to be manufactured for the convenience of muddying the legal waters. Why the hell legislate around "DRM" and then decide later what that means.

ineedasername 6y ago

It's a bit tragic: Most tools have a potentially negative/illegal use case. These developers advertising those uses, even if it was just in the source code, wasn't a good idea. Now there is an uphill battle to legitimize its use again.

ugjka 6y ago

There's a fork of youtube-dl seems to be pretty active: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc

oger 6y ago
I did not look at the repo — but has anyone checked if this is trustworthy? Probably many are looking for a new source - providing a nice and convenient entry point to seed dubious / dangerous additions (aka. malware).
- ugjka 6y ago
  From Readme "youtube-dlc is a fork of youtube-dl with the intention of getting features tested by the community merged in the tool faster, since youtube-dl's development seems to be slowing down. (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462)"
LockAndLol 6y ago
Still on github though. It's only a question of time till it's found. They'd do themselves a favor by moving off of there.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Given that they've yet to clean up the copy people spliced into github/dmca [1], I reckon it might take a while, if not another DMCA. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921

lmilcin 6y ago

Obviously, lots of people use it for legitimate reasons. I for example, use it to download large amounts of material for when I am offline while sailing. Programming tutorials to learn some useful stuff while offline, entire university courses on interesting topics, etc. There aren't many practical ways for me to do it.

tssva 6y ago
I imagine YouTube would argue this isn't a legitimate reason since they provide YouTube Premium as a paid subscription which includes as one of its perks the ability to download material for viewing offline.
- lmilcin 6y ago
  I actually pay for YouTube Premium. Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.
  - tssva 6y ago
    I download for offline viewing quite often. It is available only on mobile devices and the videos are available offline for 30 days post download. Solutions exist to view video from phones on laptops. But all that doesn't go to my argument which is that YouTube, not myself, may not see your use case as legitimate since they provide a subscription service which enables offline viewing. I doubt that because the way they have implemented it, for whatever technical, contractual or just on whim reasons, may not meet all your specific needs they see you bypassing controls to implement in your own manner as legitimate.
- californical 6y ago
  Then you’re violating YouTube’s terms of service, sure, but the tool you’re downloading with is not unlawful because you’re violating YT’s terms

bleepblorp 6y ago

[Post deleted after 60 minutes. It has had adequate exposure.]

nullc 6y ago
I don't follow the argument that the procedural invalidity makes Github more culpable. In a normal, procedurally valid, DMCA the only harm to the host for not following the procedure is that they lose the safe harbor. In this case because it isn't a question of infringement there isn't a safe harbor at all. In either case a company can choose to take something down because it wants to reduce its exposure to litigation. I'm disappointed that even after acquisition github has continued with the beyond-industry-standard level of aggressiveness with takedowns. But I don't see how you conclude that the anti-circumvention complaint makes github more in the wrong for complying.
- the8472 6y ago
  > is that they lose the safe harbor. For that particular instance or permanently?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    For the specific averred infringement.
- subroutine 6y ago
  Based on your response, and the parent comment, it seems like content hosts have a responsibility: to determine if a DMCA takedown request is valid. If a host doesn't see this as a responsibility, and simply complies with every DMCA (whether valid, invalid, or even fraudulent), I'd agree with op... the host is culpable whenever they comply with an invalid or fraudulent DMCA request. Maybe not culpable in a legal sense, but certainly they are to blame (otherwise who?) for complying with invalid DMCA.
  - nullc 6y ago
    They don't have a responsibility except in a goodwill sense. The DMCA gives hosts an option to have legal immunity for each specific case of infringement, to gain the immunity they need only take the content down at the cost of outraging a potential customer. They don't have to take the option, however. It is common in industry for hosts to simply discard obviously invalid complaints particularly if the target is high profile. The legal immunity isn't very valuable if the complaint is baseless-- (sure, there might be frivolous litigation, but that is always possible). It also seems pretty common for hosts to allow the target of the complaint to counter-notice in advance of taking the material down and then just skip the takedown, or they take it down but restore it immediately on counter-notice (youtube itself does this, or at least did when I was hit with a spurious dmca complaint there years ago). Both of these procedures don't follow the letter of the law and arguably cost the provider their safe-harbour. OTOH, almost no DMCA complaints are actually valid per the specific requirements of the statute, so maybe they don't actually lose their safe-harbour.

AndrewBissell 6y ago

A large number of alternative news outlets have been catching YouTube bans under the cover of the QAnon crackdown. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the main archiving tool one could use to migrate off of YouTube is being squelched at the same time.

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grezql 6y ago

Microsoft has to reverse this takedown. Even though it is called "youtube-dl", it also is for downloading videoes on hundres of other video platforms! Many, as stated in this article, use it for research purposes and investigative journalism. Why do companies like MS, Google, Amazon etc acquire smaller companies if they cant protect the values these small companies stand for and made them attractive in first place.

filmgirlcw 6y ago

When my full-time job was as a journalist, I used youtube-dl all the time as a way to have archives of content that was either in danger of being taken down (related to a mass-shooting or other global event) or that the creator would take down after it received attention. In fact, I used to have instructions for how to install it in the various wikis/docs for other team members (this was easier once the Python GUI frontend became available, but I still created step-by-step instructions for specific settings). I produce/host a few weekly news shows focused on developer-centric news and updates and have a keyboard macro setup to run youtube-dl against a text file with URLs not to download the videos, but the thumbnails for videos, so I can use them in the on-screen graphics when talking about a specific story. Before I scripted that solution, the process of having to manually extract the thumbnail for any video I was highlighting was a major PITA. Also, being frank, youtube-dl is significantly better than the official YouTube API for downloading past content from channels I own/manage. It’s faster and a lot more scriptable. I have automated scripts set to watch specific playlists or channels and auto-download stuff for archival purposes — and again, this is content that I either own or that exists on a channel where I’m one of the admins. It’s unfortunate that the test suite had links to commercial music — we’ve seen in past RIAA litigation that that is enough to go against the argument that this isn’t encouraging download of copyrighted content. But as a tool, for not just YouTube but so many other services, it’s invaluable even in non-data hoarding/grey area or straight up infringement scenarios. To be clear, I’ve often used youtube-dl to infringe (as have the vast majority of its users), but that’s my choice/fault. The tool itself has plenty of non-infringing uses. I just wish they’d either linked the test file to another area or used other examples.

sabujp 6y ago

Where will new development take place? What's the russian / chinese equivalent of github?

thaumasiotes 6y ago
The Chinese software startup I worked for used self-hosted gitlab.
swiley 6y ago
It's also github. The other year China tried blocking github via the GFW and had to allow it because so many developers there needed it. Either way you can host git yourself (or just use git format-patch) there's not a single thing github really does for you other than integrate a bunch of self-hostable tools behind a flashy (and increasingly less usable) web GUI.

JabavuAdams 6y ago

FYI I use Open Broadcaster Software https://obsproject.com/ https://obsproject.com/ . I record my own screen while playing the YouTube content.

m-p-3 6y ago
Not ideal, as you're recording a lossy format and re-encoding it through a lossy codec and you're also stuck with recording in realtime.
- contravariant 6y ago
  Not to mention that the chroma subsampling gets worse and worse this way. Not just because that's an inherent problem but also because youtube is (like most video players) horrendously bad at resampling the chroma.
brokenmachine 6y ago
This is sucks though. You end up wasting space to have a worse quality recording.

incompatible 6y ago

YouTube even offers a Creative Commons feature, such as on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o: if you scroll to the end of the description it reads: License Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed). I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal. Likewise for public domain videos.

jyrkesh 6y ago
I don't think it's any more complicated than that it's because they can't roll ads on videos that are downloaded. youtube-dl et al are niche enough that it doesn't put a real dent in their ad business, but making it more convenient with a Download button might.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > I don't think it's any more complicated than that it's because they can't roll ads on videos that are downloaded. That's certainly something they can do; they just don't do it. Compare movies on VHS tapes, which all roll ads before actually playing the movie.
  - hnlmorg 6y ago
    Sure, Google could do but there's more than enough problems vs reward to make it unattractive: - When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't. - It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer) - Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded the file - There's no way of having users "click" those adverts, let alone report back to Google that they've engaged with it - Some of those aforementioned points might also have a knock on effect with how advertising is charged, which would mean Google would need another pricing model ...and all of this is before you even address the technical issues of video files having multiple different bitrates and formats. You could probably generate a new file on the fly but that would be extremely computationally expensive. So they'd rack up more costs hosting the service as well as lose money on advertising. Honestly, I can't blame Google for not supporting a download option.

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filmgirlcw 6y ago

I left a comment about my own non-infringing use cases of the tool earlier — and I think it’s important that the non-infringing use cases get mentioned. Having said that, can we please stop pretending like any of us weren’t using this to infringe copyright? Most of us weren’t distributing anything, but I think most of us were aware this was at the very least a grey area, if not outright infringement. I’m a huge fan and user of youtube-dl and think this action from the RIAA is ridiculous (though not surprising — I’m a little surprised it took this long) and that the law over this stuff is absolutely bonkers — but the commentary and false pretenses about not just how we use the tool but the purpose for why the tool was built is incredibly disingenuous. It was built and designed to download content that the creators or sites that host the content either didn’t want people to download or outright didn’t allow. The program has support for username/passwords for TV Everywhere SSO’s for premium services. There are ways to tunnel in via a proxy to avoid region block downloads. Again, I’m a huge fan, and I’m someone who absolutely used these features, but let’s not pretend the purpose wasn’t exactly what it is. That doesn’t make the RIAA’s actions any better or anything — but I really dislike pretending like we weren’t all using the program for the exact purposes the complaint laid out, or that they use case wasn’t the primary reason this tool existed.

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wizzwizz4 6y ago
I wasn't, and it's not. I genuinely think you're in the minority here (which is unusual, on the 'net, where piracy's concerned).
reggieband 6y ago
To add to this (which I 100% agree with) is the chorus of voices suggesting that their usage was OK because they weren't downloading RIAA content. Just because someone isn't an RIAA member doesn't mean they don't have copyright over the content they upload to YouTube. There are some YouTube creators that would be totally fine with you downloading their content but you can't assume every creator is the same. Just because a user filmed, edited and uploaded some video from their own house doesn't mean they have any less rights than music or video from major labels or Hollywood studios.

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typenil 6y ago

The RIAA has shown itself time and time again to be completely unethical.

m-p-3 6y ago
It's a racket claiming to act on behalf of the music industry. It's the RIAA: Racketeer Industry Association of America.

azinman2 6y ago

Sounds like YouTube should have a download button for journalists then.

hiisukun 6y ago

I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites. Speaking with them, it seems the associated metadata (json/xml?) and output log contain valuable information to go along with the video from an evidentiary perspective. Also the fact that youtube-dl has many test cases in the code goes towards demonstrating its reliability as an instrument for collecting evidence. Certainly seems a better approach than installing a 'DownloadVideosEzy' extension for chrome or similar.

bigiain 6y ago
Why was my first though here "I bet Palantir have their own fork of youtube-dl which they rent out to cops in a SaaS thing for the low low price of $ASTRONOMICAL-SUM-COMPARED-TO-ALL-THE-DONATIONS-THE-PROJECT-HAS-EVER-RECIEVED ???:
- dang 6y ago
  "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. (I understand the environment variable convention but if you think about the reason for the above rule, it's clear what needs to take precedence.)
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Doesn't law enforcement have a means to subpoena Google for such evidence?
- kgog 6y ago
  Which way do you think takes less time and effort?
- neuronflux 6y ago
  Assuming the content is public, why would they need a subpoena?

whywhywhywhy 6y ago

Where is the solution? We all know the problems by now.

atdt 6y ago

I run a simple service that syncs a private YouTube playlist and publishes it as an audio-only podcast feed. When I come across talks that I find interesting, I save them to the playlist, so I can listen to them while walking, exercising, etc., because I find it much easier to absorb new information if I can move around. This has been a huge boon to me personally, and I'm very worried about losing it.

movedx 6y ago
You won't lose it. The tool is open source so either you or someone else can (and will) maintain a fork. You can't stop these things.

chris_wot 6y ago

All the RIAA have done is guaranteed that the tool will go underground.

benlumen 6y ago

Sorry for being behind on this discussion, but how can there possibly be a legal basis for taking down open-source software on the basis that it might be used for infringing someone's copyright? Can they takedown my web browser and operating system too? These are general purpose tools. It's sad that the conversation is all about justifying its use - I think the takedown is absolutely unjustified. GitHub should have let it go to court.

deelowe 6y ago
The continuous integration environment downloaded a few seconds of copyrighted content bc those videos have obfuscation they needed to test. The RIAA claims that this is a violation. Youtube dl claims it's fair use.
- benlumen 6y ago
  Right, that makes far more sense. I should have known I was missing something as it's ridiculous on the face of it. Thanks!
Nextgrid 6y ago
The DMCA request was not legal, but it isn't GitHub's job to determine that. GitHub is following the law here, just like they would follow the law and reinstate the repository as soon as the owner files a counter-claim.

this_machine 6y ago

I use youtube-dl to improve YouTube video playback on older Chromecasts[1]. [1] https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes https://alexdelorenzo.dev/linux/2020/03/14/pipes

crusty 6y ago

I am super curious, if this software is open source and the most damning aspect of this case is likely to come down to non-software specific factors like the inclusion of copywrited material (from big name artists) in the unit tests and README and such, what would be the result is someone with the repo just scrubbed the README, refactorfed the unit tests to rid them of any tests on copywrited material, changed the name to something generic like webvid-archiver or some such and rereleased it?

hiq 6y ago
Stay tuned: https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc

nullc 6y ago

I use youtube-dl to archive my recordings of my own performances which have been put online by third parties (and which no one but me has any rights to!). I use youtube-dl to view videos on other sites (such as vimeo) that don't display in my browser (due to compatibility or privacy settings), usually product support stuff. I use youtube-dl to collect evidence about cryptocurency scammers, which often gets removed from youtube by the time the scam starts collecting. By collecting it when its online it makes it possible to hand over to lawyers so they know what to go subponea. At least once a video I saved probably personally saved me from a frivolous lawsuit (attorney fired his lying client after sending me a threat letter which I responded to with an archived video). I sometimes use youtube-dl to buffer longer pieces which I'm watching which might suffer from infuriating connection interruptions. I don't use youtube-dl to save copyrighted music (except incidentally), among other reasons: the audio on youtube is often pretty low quality.

vilifiedtwin 6y ago
It seems like Google starts having a pattern of working with scammers. First they disabled phone call recordings in Android or made it super difficult to enable, now you can't use ytdl to download evidence.

deleted 6y ago

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phendrenad2 6y ago

Whatever happens with the youtube-dl case, it's a good reminder to take perception seriously.

pabs3 6y ago

Software Freedom Conservancy are asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over the youtube-dl takedown demand: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-riaa-youtube-dl/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2020/oct/26/microsoft-github-...

20after4 6y ago
That Microsoft is a member of the RIAA is a big problem. One more reason to abandon GitHub.
- movedx 6y ago
  GitHub is "OK". It's only popular because it was first to market(?) I find GitLab far superior in every regard: its UI, CI stack, Auto DevOps, K8s integrations, on-prem/self-hosting option, support options, pricing structure, customer service, communications and open nature, frequent updates with great release notes, and more.
deleted 6y ago
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seventhtiger 6y ago
Did Microsoft make a decision here? I thought it was DMCA takedown which legally requires immediate removal.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  DMCA takedowns are about removing violations of someone's copyright, like posting a Beatles song on YouTube. Though the request was made to look like a takedown request, it's hard to see how they could make the claim the software itself was a copyright violation.
- dspillett 6y ago
  The issue is not that MS obeyed the takedown as they are required to do. The issue the SFC are discussing is that MS are part of the group that issued the takedown request in the first place. MS has two hats in the game here: one as a member of the RIAA who have issues a DMCA take-down request, and on as the owner of GitHub which has acted upon that order.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

I never use youtube-dl because it is almost always overkill and it is always breaking. I write my own downloaders. The one I use for YouTube is currently less than half a page of shell script. I never download VEVO or other videos that have enciphered signatures (most videos I encounter on web pages don't), so there is no need for Python or any other slow scripting language and fiddling around with Google's Javascript player. Funnily enough, my scripts hardly ever break. When they do break because of some YouTube change (only once so far), I can fix them in a fraction of the time it takes for the yt-dl project to respond to user complaints and make necessary fixes. I doubt the press nor anyone else really needs yt-dl if all they are doing is downloading unprotected videos. Even if someone wants to download VEVO or other protected ones, they don't need youtube-dl to do it. It is trivial to get the download URL for these videos with any "modern" browser. For example, in Chrome, open Developer Tools Network tab, type "videoplayback" in the search box, copy one of the URLs (alt-click) and remove the &range= parameter from the URL. I wonder if the RIAA will ever go after persons trying to make money by offering anti-circumvention services, e.g., http://api.gitnol.com/ http://api.gitnol.com/ I find all those websites trying to sell so-called "video downloaders" very annoying.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
s/anti-//

lxe 6y ago

I keep thinking about this takedown... the issue at hand is the inclusion of youtube links in the readme, which encourages downloads of copyrighted works from youtube. From the complaint: > The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. (i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case? (ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization. I feel like this is a YouTube ToS violation, not a DMCA-strike-worthy copyright violation.

ttt0 6y ago
> the issue at hand is the inclusion of youtube links in the readme, which encourages downloads of copyrighted works from youtube. The README file doesn't encourage any downloads of any copyrighted works. All examples included in the README point to their own example video. The only thing that comes close to this is that they say that they will not support any services that are violating copyrights. The copyrighted content is used in test cases, that are not meant for users to see. > (i) Does YouTube have "technological protection measures" that prevent downloading? In the case of the AACS controversy, this was a bit more clear-cut: there was a secret key that was cracked, but what exactly is being "circumvented" in this case? What's being "circumvented" is the encrypted URL to the content. But it's not really circumvented, YouTube decrypts it with javascript. All youtube-dl does is that it interprets the javascript that's on their website, just like a web browser does. > (ii) Nowhere does youtube-dl advertise that it's to be used to "reproduce and distribute" without authorization. Correct. Not sure what "reproduce" means in legal speak, but youtube-dl doesn't even have any functionality to distribute anything.

ogou 6y ago

I use youtube-dl to make art videos that I re-upload. It is indispensable for mashups, especially political. https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyy7Csjpl8/?igshid=s29gkfosrt2q https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyy7Csjpl8/?igshid=s29gkfosrt2q https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBV9SKQZzAWuIXspogOq3pHFC9BuJoL7_ https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBV9SKQZzAWuIXspogOq3...

JAlexoid 6y ago

I wondered when we are going to see the day, when RIAA/MPAA are going to support terrorists... albeit indirectly. I guess it's time to do sudo apt install youtube-dl

vilifiedtwin 6y ago

I used youtube-dl to store various videos about vintage equipment repair. Sometimes authors take these videos down thinking that they are boring, rubbish and not useful, but they are a goldmine of knowledge that will be gone in few years.

jancsika 6y ago

> I have friends in law enforcement who use youtube-dl to save copies of videos involving crimes or criminal allegations, from quite a few different social media and video sites. I'm so sick of hearing this "investigations want to be free" nonsense from law enforcement. Just because they want to pirate their investigations without paying they think it's ok for content creators to go hungry? Get a job hippies.

TedShiller 6y ago

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

NanoCoaster 6y ago
Isn't there already DRM that works by encrypting the video stream and only decrypting / decoding the video stream on the TV? Or at least, in some sort of closed-off execution context? I'm thinking of Widevine level 1 DRM, for example. If I remember correctly, it mandates that all of the decryption has to happen in a "Trusted Execution Environment", which seems to mean a hardware enclave. I think this effectively locks the user out of the whole decryption phase, which means that you don't get to record your screen. I might be wrong about this, though. Might have to do a little research. (Funnily enough, just looking for information right now turns up this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21307308 HN post, which does contain some interesting information)
- roboyoshi 6y ago
  Yes that is indeed a problem. But it's more prominent in the streaming platforms netflix et al. The encrypted widevine stream can still be captured though and AFAIK if any of the hardware leaks the decryption keys it's easily recovered. YouTube will hopefully never implement a DRM solution - it would lock out a lot of older clients that simply do not support it..But in any case you can still record stuff with your phone by simply recording with the camera if you must.
  - neop1x 6y ago
    Until HW decryption is cracked, there may just be more camera-captured content or content recorded from modded display panels. If they want to prevent copying their content, why they are even publishing it? They can keep it for themselves. They either want us to see it or not. By making it difficult to archive videos I am starting to see more and more low quality screen captures being shared (e.g. on social platforms). A screen capture of a phone camera-recorded video of a phone-recorded TV screen where it is barely possible to understand the spoken words of the actors. That is pretty sad to see in this technologically-advanced world.

known 6y ago

youtube.com should have an option to download videos as torrents

chrisallick 6y ago

Would this have happened if they hadn't sold to Microsoft?

8bitsrule 6y ago

There are certainly legitimate uses for tools like y-dl. Those using online services for marketing purposes -which include copyrighted material- must be required to reach an agreement with those services to flag the status of those materials in a way that's transparent to software. If I stream a file for an hour, I tie up a bunch of network resources for an hour. If I can legitimately DL that in 2 minutes, I'm using less net resources for a shorter time. Why in the hell should that be denied because some material is not in the public domain? Completely illogical result. I watch a lot of long-playing material (I think is non-copyright but WTF do I know?) that I DL to timeshift and watch offline in chunks as time allows. Is that music concert from Poland that's up on Youtube copyrighted? That amateur history/science/education channel that asks for Patreon help? Screw RIAA (again)

allsmedhish 6y ago

why don't they block screen capturing softwares ? its simply possible to capture any kind of copyrighted media online? for instance one can capture screen with ms windows screen capture feature. therefore they must ban windows!

blazespin 6y ago

just use windows-g

pcf 6y ago

I actually use JDownloader instead to download YouTube videos and playlists. And I use youtube-dl to download content from other sites, like nrk.no, svt.se and bbc.co.uk.

ochronus 6y ago

Exactly the kind of report which should be part of youtube-dl's front material!

ojosilva 6y ago

I'm concerned that the "internet of videos" is not being properly archived, like the hypertext one is. I use ytdl primarily to save valuable homemade videos that I'm afraid could disappear if that person, or Google, were to delete or block the account. I'd hope this could be a coordinated effort by libraries and institutions interested in preserving this invaluable and unprecedented corpus of daily life, culture, spoken word, music etc. that could be studied for generations to come. And I couldn't care less about VEVO and other copyrighted material, which, I wish, could find home in a completely different platform for all I care.

TonyTrapp 6y ago
archive.org archives YouTube videos, too! They might not have everything but I have used it more than once to salvage an old video for which I used to still have a link but it was removed by the uploader...

hanselot 6y ago

How hard would it be do DCMAdos github?

ochronus 6y ago

Also, a clone in golang: https://github.com/kkdai/youtube https://github.com/kkdai/youtube

bassie2 6y ago

I used youtube-dl for my thesis, analysing Twitch streams and capturing hate speech. Downloading complete playlists with youtube-dl was the only reliable solution. Science, journalism and law enforcement will miss this great tool.

jijji 6y ago

banning open source software is like the streisand effect, its probably impossible but a new name will popup tomorro even if it was banned... its funny there is even a law to ban attempt to ban software, which is essentially poetry or speech. any challenge to the supreme court would likely fail on those grounds.

hardsoftnfloppy 6y ago

At this point... this kind of behavior from some lawyer somewhere is about the status quo of existence. However, people have been kind of quiet about Microsoft here. They pretty much cowered and caved with zero effort on their part to even say, no I won't take that down... for a company that probably pays a billion dollars in legal fees a year... fuck microsoft.

johnisgood 6y ago

Do any of you know where youtube-dl developers are continuing?

gitaarik 6y ago

I'm traveling a lot. I usually download videos on Wi-Fi so I can watch them later when I don't have Wi-Fi. Why does youtube-dl get into trouble and not YouTube itself?