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I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.
by tracerbulletx 2y ago
I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.
- yimby2001 2y agodo you feel the same about ad blockers?
- freehorse 2y agoAd blockers are basically about blocking ads. Yt-dlp has also uses whose main purpose is not about blocking ads.
- ivoputzer 2y agoit's a nice side-effect though.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoIn some reguards I would say it is. Yt-dlp terminates my need for an adblocker for the lifetime of the videos I download, something chrome no longer does on a per-view basis and these days not as easily. It also blocks the YouTube algorithm suggestions, which in my eyes are an advertisement too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jjulius 2y agoI'd say it's less people's fault and more Google's for driving people to want something like it.
- Gigachad 2y agoYes, people prefer to get stuff for free rather than paying for it. That's not a very interesting insight.
- freehorse 2y agoThere is no way to pay google to get features like these or like what yt-dlp offers. If there was I would have gladly paid.
- Arainach 2y agoYou can pay for YouTube Premium and get no ads.
- freehorse 2y agoI am not talking about ads (specifically), but about all the control that these tools offer.
- moron4hire 2y agoThat's not true, there are still lots of ads that you'll have to sit through. They're just not out there by Google, they're out their by the video creator. Which, I get it, YouTube isn't paying them enough and they gotta eat. So, it kind of feels like YouTube letting them post their own ads is an intentional choice on YouTube's part to not give me the service I'm paying for.
- Arainach 2y agoThis is a weird take. What is an "ad", and how would you expect any company to remove in-video "ads" without rampant accusations of censorship? If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad?
- lurk2 2y ago> What is an "ad", and how would you expect any company to remove in-video "ads" without rampant accusations of censorship? You can already do this with Sponsorblock. > If a channel posts a review of a piece of hardware that was sent to them for free by the manufacturer is the entire video an ad? Yes.
- zozbot234 2y agoIf they shut down yt-dlp for good, a lot of power users and creators would find the YouTube platform useless for themselves and abandon it en masse for its nearest competitor. A tool like yt-dlp is very much required if you want to engage professionally with that kind of community. Even something as trivial as making a well-produced "video reaction" relies on it. Yes, YT has good monetization, but it still pays peanuts to the average creator. So the competitive threat is very real - superstars alone wouldn't be enough to make for a really compelling platform.
- aucisson_masque 2y ago> lot of power users and creators would find the YouTube platform useless for themselves and abandon it en masse for its nearest competitor. Not so sure, since everything is monetized nowadays (YouTuber make video to earn money) and the audience is there, i don't see how they could move anywhere.
- zozbot234 2y agoThe interesting question is whether YT as a platform pays enough to make this a relevant factor. Which I very much doubt is the case for most creators.
- mafuy 2y agoAfaik others do not pay more, so an exodus is just wishful thinking detached from reality.
- Konnstann 2y agoYouTube is mostly there as an advertisement tool nowadays, once you get any amount of an audience youtube revenue becomes a small piece of your income compared to things like Patreon, live streaming elsewhere, and even alternative hosting sources like floatplane or Nebula where creators will host exclusive content.
- dinkumthinkum 2y ago
- Gigachad 2y agoAgreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos.. Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.
- nulld3v 2y agoYouTube downloaders have existed since the dawn of YouTube. And I really don't think they have jumped in popularity recently or anything.
- dijit 2y agoThey get shut down constantly if they become popular though. yt-dlp is itself a fork of the (very popular) youtube-dl
- soulofmischief 2y agoyoutube-dl just went largely dormant. There was a fiasco involving a unit test specifically downloading copyrighted content, but it was corrected. yt-dlp just became the more active fork.
- dijit 2y agoYou've identified the reason for the fork, but not the reason the projects maintainers burned out in the first place. youtube-dl were under the microscope and were even unlisted from github at one point[0]. And as recent as 1yr ago had their website taken offline[1]. [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtubedl_repo_had_been_dmcad/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtube... [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/15wx4sl/youtubedl_site_goes_offline_due_to_courtordered/ https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/15wx4sl/youtubed...
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y agoI don't think they can ever kill it. Something else will rise. There is too much demand for it.
- wingworks 2y agoSeeing how people still seem to find a way to get the raw video data from the big paid streaming services (e.g. netflix), and the likes of bluray, I feel you are right. Where there is enough demand, people will find a way.
- krystofee 2y agoMy take is: its either there with all of its features and popularity or its not. The argument that it will be taken down if its more popular seems to me fundamenally wrong.
- modmodmod 2y agoso, essentially, what you are saying is that yt-dlp should have never been open-sourced/published and ever posted on HN (so that not even you would have found out about it)?
- codetrotter 2y agoNo no. He’s saying that only people with his exact amount of technical skill and prowess deserves yt-dlp. If you for some reason are not knowledgable about cli tools, then that is the exact, natural, universal, god given reason that you do not deserve yt-dlp. In order to ensure that not too many people learn about yt-dlp, we should also work to remove all access to knowledge about the magical super big brain requiring, mytical command line. In fact to ensure that Google does not kill yt-dlp, everyone in the world except tracerbulletx should be force fed chemical powder that makes them stupid. That way, only tracerbulletx will understand yt-dlp, and he can heroically guard this super secret tool that only those worthy deserves to know.
- sieabahlpark 2y ago[dead]
- Dylan16807 2y agoThey're not talking about yt-dlp itself though. But if they were, they probably would agree that it never should have been posted to HN, not even the first time they saw it on HN. Not publishing at all would obviously be incorrect. You know they're not saying that.
- lofaszvanitt 2y agopeople are idiots... and trying to become famous by using the lowest hanging fruit, hence killing it in the process.
- modmodmod 2y agoYesss, let’s generalize everything, that’s how we got where we are right now. Bravo!
- temptemptemp111 2y ago[dead]
- nadermx 2y agoNot sure it was ever youtubes desire to shut it down. Why would they, as there are a multitude of reasons why someone would want a video off a platform. It was the RIAA's, since there the ones who sent the takedown.
- thomassmith65 2y agoThis year AlphaGoogle has an initiative to kill ad-blockers. To that end, Youtube now aborts playback after 60 seconds if it cannot contact its ad server to play commercials. It's clear where this is heading: 1) Youtube will go after software like yt-dlp to ensure only AlphaGoogle-sanctioned players can play its videos 2) Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams Both will come to pass. It's not 'if' but 'when'
- zozbot234 2y ago> Youtube will encode commercials directly into the videos it streams They stream the commercials separately on purpose, because this makes it a whole lot easier for them to track ad impression metrics. Splicing the ad within the same feed is technically quite feasible and indeed almost trivial, it doesn't even require a re-encoding of the entire video. So we can assume that they're avoiding that for a reason.
- chii 2y agoit isn't cheap to splice a video. Even if they do it via some sort of chunking, then it's possible to skip chunks easily too (aka, relatively easy to bypass given the amount of effort to implement). Not to mention it's hard to do caching this way imho.
- phantomathkg 2y agoServer Side Ad Insertion is a production technology used by many OTT services, so it is not something new. What it means is adblocker can block the reporting API, but you still get to watch the ad and cost the streaming provider wasting money to splice the ad.
- 2y ago
- jrm4 2y agoI mean, the root of the problem is that there is essentially only one "Youtube" that isn't a public service. Not sure if you make this better by leaning into it or not.
- phantomathkg 2y agoWhy should it be a public service?
- dvngnt_ 2y agothe desire is already there. they've testing DRM for videos as we speak. this cat and mouse game will never end until google creates some anti-cheat with kernel permissions to attest anti-tamper
- foff9 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chii 2y agogatekeeping is not the way.
- antigrammer 2y ago[dead]