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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 disapp

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.

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.