9 ms·

I'm constantly suprised when YT deploys another half measure against downloaders when GOOG also owns widevine. I wonder what is their reasons for not using it.

londons_explore 3y ago
Youtube is compatible with a lot of platforms, old browsers, ancient smart TV's, ancient android, etc - I would guess widevine isn't.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  Widevine has been a mandatory requirement for any OEM pre-installing YouTube for something like seven years now. There is not much out there that Google would care about EOL access for.
scrollaway 3y ago
Widevine is used in some youtube videos. Not all, though; not even a high percentage -- I've only seen it in certain music videos. I'm guessing it's on a paid license basis…
Gigachad 3y ago
Maybe they care about not cutting off devices that don’t support it. TVs, ARM Linux, etc. While making downloading videos just annoying enough that people don’t bother.
londons_explore 3y ago
I don't think youtube really cares if you pirate their content or use a 3rd party client. What they care about is you wasting their bandwidth. For an ad-supported video streaming site, bandwidth is normally more expensive than revenue - Google only manages to make it just about work because they have probably the worlds cheapest bandwidth due to being able to bully ISP's into peering with them for free. (they don't let you peer with Google for just Google Search but not youtube). All these throttling measures are simply trying to reserve most of the bandwidth for real users, not people scraping all the content.
- chii 3y ago
  Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later. Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    splicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.
    - zh3 3y ago
      Indeed, we've done exactly this with production quality adverts where we'd add real-time information (e.g. betting odds) into the ad at selected points.s
    - chii 3y ago
      i dont think what's stopping google is a technical difficulty problem, but a scale problem (as well as a lack of real need atm). I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos). It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.
      - londons_explore 3y ago
        Adblocking is very much on googles radar. But they realise it is a cat and mouse game - and whenever you start playing that game, you run the risk of ending up in a position worse than you started with. They currently get 80-90% of the ad impressions they try to display, which is pretty good compared to a hypothetical future where someone like Microsoft makes an adblocking-by-default browser and courts force Google not to block them.
dns_snek 3y ago
> I wonder what is their reasons for not using it - Introduces a decryption step, which is slow - Forces software video decoding, which is slow - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective It would effectively push a significant portion of their user base off the platform while not being very effective in its goals.
- Mindwipe 3y ago
  > - Forces software video decoding, which is slow No it doesn't. Heck, forcing software decoding is actually one of the ways to force Widevine down to lower protection levels on general purpose hardware. > - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world. There are efficacy reasons for not doing it on a backend level, but Google has required anything that wants YouTube to support Widevine for a very, very long time now.
  - speedgoose 3y ago
    It may not be illegal in France: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000044365559/2023-08-14 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
    - izacus 3y ago
      Read up on meaning of word "most" when you feel the need to snipe contrarianism without adding to debate.
      - speedgoose 3y ago
        Things such as libdvdcss or libaacs are maintained by VideoLan in France. It’s not a random country in this context. https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html
Mindwipe 3y ago
The main reason is that it hits their CDN cache efficiency a bit, which costs money, and it's another set of key management systems to look after and operate and at YouTube's scale you want to minimise them as much as possible. It also paints a very big target on Widevine Level 3's back. But ultimately it's just a financial equation. What Google are losing from ad blocking isn't quite worth pulling the WV lever yet, but given it has clearly become enough to take softer measures and the pressure they are likely under from music labels I expect a wider rollout will happen in the next few years. If I were to predict it will probably initially be "any video containing label music or studio clips picked up by content ID", and maybe an opt in tag for other creators at first. They're the ones that are much more useful for monetisation anyway, and you don't lose all your CDN benefits at once.
Klaus23 3y ago
The software version of widevine would be so thoroughly broken in a very short time that it would be bypassed by any one-click downloader addon. Nothing would change for users and YouTube would have the overhead for widevine. Using the hardware based version could cause a lot of problems with unsupported devices.
- xurukefi 3y ago
  While that sounds reasonable, is there any evidence that this is the actual reason? Widevine is also used by other ubiquitous services such as Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc.. and yet WV still remains an insurmountable barrier for most people, even in its weakest form (L3).
  - Klaus23 3y ago
    Good points. The difference is that on streaming sites, L3 widevine will only allow low resolution playback. They are also tied to a paid account, making it much more difficult/risky to download content. Even if the encryption is broken, there are often ways to detect such users for a limited time. For professional content, there is simply not much demand to develop a user-friendly way to break L3 widevine, as the market is already served by reasonably convenient illegal streaming sites and torrents that allow for higher quality video.
- bityard 3y ago
  As another commentor pointed out, Widevine is already in use on many streaming sites. Where are the one-click downloader addons for those? If they exist, I have not been able to find them. (My use case is not so much in downloading a video, I just want to be able to my Amazon Prime videos on my Linux computer at a better resolution than 720p.)
  - costco 3y ago
    Not exactly one click but there are Python scripts where you basically put in your credentials and the TV show ID: https://github.com/search?q=widevine&type=repositories&s=updated&o=desc https://github.com/search?q=widevine&type=repositories&s=upd... I used results from this Github search page (especially pywidevine) a while back to make a Hulu downloader in Go which I eventually had to remove: https://github.com/chris124567/hulu https://github.com/chris124567/hulu I wasn't really a part of this scene but there appears to be some sort of weird competition among people involved in writing this kind of software so occasionally device keys would leak when they tried to get at each other which was great for me because it meant I didn't have to extract keys from a phone or NVIDIA shield or anything annoying like that.
thrashh 3y ago
Google probably wants to discourage third-party clients but allow people to archive. Quietly taking this half measure is the perfect and only solution to achieving this goal.

londons_explore 3y ago

Youtube is compatible with a lot of platforms, old browsers, ancient smart TV's, ancient android, etc - I would guess widevine isn't.

Mindwipe 3y ago
Widevine has been a mandatory requirement for any OEM pre-installing YouTube for something like seven years now. There is not much out there that Google would care about EOL access for.

scrollaway 3y ago

Widevine is used in some youtube videos. Not all, though; not even a high percentage -- I've only seen it in certain music videos. I'm guessing it's on a paid license basis…

Gigachad 3y ago

Maybe they care about not cutting off devices that don’t support it. TVs, ARM Linux, etc. While making downloading videos just annoying enough that people don’t bother.

londons_explore 3y ago

I don't think youtube really cares if you pirate their content or use a 3rd party client. What they care about is you wasting their bandwidth. For an ad-supported video streaming site, bandwidth is normally more expensive than revenue - Google only manages to make it just about work because they have probably the worlds cheapest bandwidth due to being able to bully ISP's into peering with them for free. (they don't let you peer with Google for just Google Search but not youtube). All these throttling measures are simply trying to reserve most of the bandwidth for real users, not people scraping all the content.

chii 3y ago
Sooner or later, youtube will do the same thing as twitch, which is to dynamically splice ads into the video stream - making it impossible to block with current mechanisms. They don't do it yet, probably because they don't see the need quite yet. But i have no doubts that it will happen sooner or later. Adblocking will have to evolve to a new level to block such things.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  splicing video is pretty easy - there are certain points - key frames - where video streams can be spliced with nearly zero computational overhead, no loss of quality, no loading delay, etc.
  - zh3 3y ago
    Indeed, we've done exactly this with production quality adverts where we'd add real-time information (e.g. betting odds) into the ad at selected points.s
  - chii 3y ago
    i dont think what's stopping google is a technical difficulty problem, but a scale problem (as well as a lack of real need atm). I suspect that google doesn't actually lose too many to blockers, as mobile accounts for a large fraction of youtube's traffic (and so far, not that many people actually use a hacked youtube client to view videos). It's probably cheaper and faster to have a pre-encoded video, cached at the edge.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      Adblocking is very much on googles radar. But they realise it is a cat and mouse game - and whenever you start playing that game, you run the risk of ending up in a position worse than you started with. They currently get 80-90% of the ad impressions they try to display, which is pretty good compared to a hypothetical future where someone like Microsoft makes an adblocking-by-default browser and courts force Google not to block them.

dns_snek 3y ago

> I wonder what is their reasons for not using it - Introduces a decryption step, which is slow - Forces software video decoding, which is slow - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective It would effectively push a significant portion of their user base off the platform while not being very effective in its goals.

Mindwipe 3y ago
> - Forces software video decoding, which is slow No it doesn't. Heck, forcing software decoding is actually one of the ways to force Widevine down to lower protection levels on general purpose hardware. > - Web browsers only support the weakest form of Widevine which is ineffective It's not fullproof but it would certainly make tools to bypass it clearly illegal in most of the world. There are efficacy reasons for not doing it on a backend level, but Google has required anything that wants YouTube to support Widevine for a very, very long time now.
- speedgoose 3y ago
  It may not be illegal in France: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000044365559/2023-08-14 https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...
  - izacus 3y ago
    Read up on meaning of word "most" when you feel the need to snipe contrarianism without adding to debate.
    - speedgoose 3y ago
      Things such as libdvdcss or libaacs are maintained by VideoLan in France. It’s not a random country in this context. https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libdvdcss.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html https://www.videolan.org/developers/libaacs.html

Mindwipe 3y ago

The main reason is that it hits their CDN cache efficiency a bit, which costs money, and it's another set of key management systems to look after and operate and at YouTube's scale you want to minimise them as much as possible. It also paints a very big target on Widevine Level 3's back. But ultimately it's just a financial equation. What Google are losing from ad blocking isn't quite worth pulling the WV lever yet, but given it has clearly become enough to take softer measures and the pressure they are likely under from music labels I expect a wider rollout will happen in the next few years. If I were to predict it will probably initially be "any video containing label music or studio clips picked up by content ID", and maybe an opt in tag for other creators at first. They're the ones that are much more useful for monetisation anyway, and you don't lose all your CDN benefits at once.

Klaus23 3y ago

The software version of widevine would be so thoroughly broken in a very short time that it would be bypassed by any one-click downloader addon. Nothing would change for users and YouTube would have the overhead for widevine. Using the hardware based version could cause a lot of problems with unsupported devices.

xurukefi 3y ago
While that sounds reasonable, is there any evidence that this is the actual reason? Widevine is also used by other ubiquitous services such as Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc.. and yet WV still remains an insurmountable barrier for most people, even in its weakest form (L3).
- Klaus23 3y ago
  Good points. The difference is that on streaming sites, L3 widevine will only allow low resolution playback. They are also tied to a paid account, making it much more difficult/risky to download content. Even if the encryption is broken, there are often ways to detect such users for a limited time. For professional content, there is simply not much demand to develop a user-friendly way to break L3 widevine, as the market is already served by reasonably convenient illegal streaming sites and torrents that allow for higher quality video.
bityard 3y ago
As another commentor pointed out, Widevine is already in use on many streaming sites. Where are the one-click downloader addons for those? If they exist, I have not been able to find them. (My use case is not so much in downloading a video, I just want to be able to my Amazon Prime videos on my Linux computer at a better resolution than 720p.)
- costco 3y ago
  Not exactly one click but there are Python scripts where you basically put in your credentials and the TV show ID: https://github.com/search?q=widevine&type=repositories&s=updated&o=desc https://github.com/search?q=widevine&type=repositories&s=upd... I used results from this Github search page (especially pywidevine) a while back to make a Hulu downloader in Go which I eventually had to remove: https://github.com/chris124567/hulu https://github.com/chris124567/hulu I wasn't really a part of this scene but there appears to be some sort of weird competition among people involved in writing this kind of software so occasionally device keys would leak when they tried to get at each other which was great for me because it meant I didn't have to extract keys from a phone or NVIDIA shield or anything annoying like that.

thrashh 3y ago

Google probably wants to discourage third-party clients but allow people to archive. Quietly taking this half measure is the perfect and only solution to achieving this goal.