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Youtube is a youtube downloader. Everything is a downloader. It's literally impossible to interact with a thing without downloading it and having the data. The

Youtube is a youtube downloader. Everything is a downloader. It's literally impossible to interact with a thing without downloading it and having the data. The difference is that the data is usually deleted later (a silly practice done to trick the lawyers into believing the world is like they think it is, hiding actual reality that would confuse and enrage them).

SoKamil 1y ago
Unless it’s protected by DRM.
- presbyterian 1y ago
  Even with DRM, if you can see it, it's decoded somewhere along the line. There will always be a way to get the raw video out of it if you're committed enough.
  - perching_aix 1y ago
    That's actually an important distinction. You can recapture the DRM protected (and then decoded) video pretty much always indeed, but then you degrade the quality by having to encode it again. Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important. Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium offering, I got a way worse quality output than with yt-dlp, which actually ripped the original stream without reencoding it. I think I saw an idempotent h264 encoder at some point, where you wouldn't suffer generational loss if you matched the encoder settings exactly from run to run. But then you might need the people mastering the content (in this case YouTube) to adopt that same encoder, which they're not going to be "interested" in.
    - kuschku 1y ago
      Even with DRM video you can fetch it losslessly. At some point, some part of your system requires access to the raw, decrypted video stream. As long as that's the case, you can get bit-perfect netflix rips.
      - Marsymars 1y ago
        The problem is that if you have the raw data, you’ve lost the original compression information, so you can’t get it back to a sensible size without double compressing. e.g. Think about what you get when you save a jpeg as a bitmap.
        kuschku 1y ago
        You can get the original compressed h264/h265/etc stream back out, that's the entire point. Even DRM media is using regular accelerated video decode.
        perching_aix 1y ago
        The "entire point" of contemporary lossy-media DRM [0] is to prevent you from doing that. You can only do so if the DRM scheme is circumvented or unsound [1]. That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. In which case your only possible but also guaranteed stage of recapture is at the analog hole, by which point the media encoding is already undone, incurring a generational loss. [0] I consider presently existing and historical DRM implementations deeply flawed and misguided; they severely overstep their boundaries implied by the name "DRM", in certain cases quite disgustingly - hence the many added adjectives for clarification [1] puzzlingly, any access control will actually get you in the same legal situation, regardless of whether the access control mechanism is effective or sound, so this is actually a design decision; but it's pretty universally taken afaik.
        kuschku 1y ago
        > That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. Lol. That is not possible. If I'm able to watch something, my device must be able to decrypt the DRM. If my device can decrypt the DRM, I can take my device apart and figure out how it does this, and do it myself. The most DRM encumbered format is DCP, used my cinemas. Each projector has a unique key burnt into it, the decryption, decoding and watermarking happen on the same piece of silicon, and the entire device is built like an HSM, opening it wipes the keys. There are bit-perfect DCP rips on the high seas, with the original compressed data. HDCP is meant to prevent me from copying HDMI signals. Every conference center and lecture hall has cheap Chinese devices that remove it. Regarding the analog hole, with a properly calibrated professional video camera recording in RAW, with both camera and monitor genlocked and color calibrated, and the proper postprocessing, you can capure the original pixel values exactly. I've done that part more often than I'd like... And worst case, you can then brute force which parameters the original encode used to re-encode your data without generation loss.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    circumventing the DRM is what will land you in legal hot water. storing the DRM encrypted media isn't the same offense
miloignis 1y ago
Agreed, more or less, but I would argue you could make a distinction for a "streaming" situation where say no more than 10% of the data is on your computer at any one point in time, vs "downloading" where the data exists in its entirety at once. You could encode these terms in a contract or something about allowed usage of a service, I believe.
- superkuh 1y ago
  You could. But youtube's website itself would fail this "only 10% at once" test.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    Why? IIRC you can flush the SourceBuffer in Media Source Extention and only keep a small part of the video in the browser's RAM at all time. (It won't work for Youtube shorts though, because 10% of a 30s video just isn't enough for reliable smooth playback)
    - superkuh 1y ago
      I understand now that I was talking about how youtube currently works and you two were talking about how youtube could be contrived to work. Yes, it could. It'd only just waste more bandwidth having to redownload and cause more pauses. But people who buy things (the important ones to advertise to) have fast connections and everyone's locked in so google can focus more on advertiser issues over the lower end network user experience.
charcircuit 1y ago
Downloading videos is a premium feature of YouTube and doesn't delete the data.
- skinnymuch 1y ago
  Can you access those downloads?
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    Yes, there is a downloads button in the app to see your downloaded videos. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11977233 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11977233
    - nativeit 1y ago
      I'm pretty sure they meant, can the videos be accessed as files in the filesystem, which to my knowledge they cannot.
      - dzhiurgis 1y ago
        [flagged]
        lucb1e 1y ago
        Shit? Illegal? It's literally your right on videos like <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSEJApMIrLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSEJApMIrLU>. Expand the description and see at the bottom: license is set to creative commons. The copyright holder permits everyone to remix the video but youtube still does not show a button for you to actually make use of that You need to breach the terms of service (use a downloader) to exercise the rights of the content license that youtube supports
    - skinnymuch 1y ago
      As the other sister comment said. I was replying to you saying YouTube has downloading in a thread about file access. I use the YouTube premium offline access, it’s nice but I only have premium for mobile background.
tshaddox 1y ago
The word "download" is used in two senses. The first is the broader sense you're referring to, where it means "to receive data." The second sense means to collect all the data from a particular file or dataset and store it locally, as opposed to "streaming." That second sense is the one clearly being used when referring to "YouTube downloaders."
- superkuh 1y ago
  If you view the entire file they are the same thing. And they're always being collected and stored locally even if it's hidden from you. And a static mp4 file encoded with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart -start_at_zero can be seeked within in any browser from any static webserver and viewed at any seeking time without downloading the rest. Is this streaming too? Given the first example of fully watching and the second implementation of streaming with a simple static file you can see the streaming/file download distinction you make is much thinner than it first appears. At least from a technical perspective. In lawyer-ese you are making a valid semantic point which I do acknowledge. "Streaming" in lawyer-ese means a corporation is doing it so there's: 1. legal liability 2. lots of abstraction layers involved so they don't get upset and 3. the local files are hidden from view of the user. Unlike the simple streaming example with a properly encoded .mp4 file.

SoKamil 1y ago

Unless it’s protected by DRM.

presbyterian 1y ago
Even with DRM, if you can see it, it's decoded somewhere along the line. There will always be a way to get the raw video out of it if you're committed enough.
- perching_aix 1y ago
  That's actually an important distinction. You can recapture the DRM protected (and then decoded) video pretty much always indeed, but then you degrade the quality by having to encode it again. Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important. Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium offering, I got a way worse quality output than with yt-dlp, which actually ripped the original stream without reencoding it. I think I saw an idempotent h264 encoder at some point, where you wouldn't suffer generational loss if you matched the encoder settings exactly from run to run. But then you might need the people mastering the content (in this case YouTube) to adopt that same encoder, which they're not going to be "interested" in.
  - kuschku 1y ago
    Even with DRM video you can fetch it losslessly. At some point, some part of your system requires access to the raw, decrypted video stream. As long as that's the case, you can get bit-perfect netflix rips.
    - Marsymars 1y ago
      The problem is that if you have the raw data, you’ve lost the original compression information, so you can’t get it back to a sensible size without double compressing. e.g. Think about what you get when you save a jpeg as a bitmap.
      - kuschku 1y ago
        You can get the original compressed h264/h265/etc stream back out, that's the entire point. Even DRM media is using regular accelerated video decode.
        perching_aix 1y ago
        The "entire point" of contemporary lossy-media DRM [0] is to prevent you from doing that. You can only do so if the DRM scheme is circumvented or unsound [1]. That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. In which case your only possible but also guaranteed stage of recapture is at the analog hole, by which point the media encoding is already undone, incurring a generational loss. [0] I consider presently existing and historical DRM implementations deeply flawed and misguided; they severely overstep their boundaries implied by the name "DRM", in certain cases quite disgustingly - hence the many added adjectives for clarification [1] puzzlingly, any access control will actually get you in the same legal situation, regardless of whether the access control mechanism is effective or sound, so this is actually a design decision; but it's pretty universally taken afaik.
        kuschku 1y ago
        > That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. Lol. That is not possible. If I'm able to watch something, my device must be able to decrypt the DRM. If my device can decrypt the DRM, I can take my device apart and figure out how it does this, and do it myself. The most DRM encumbered format is DCP, used my cinemas. Each projector has a unique key burnt into it, the decryption, decoding and watermarking happen on the same piece of silicon, and the entire device is built like an HSM, opening it wipes the keys. There are bit-perfect DCP rips on the high seas, with the original compressed data. HDCP is meant to prevent me from copying HDMI signals. Every conference center and lecture hall has cheap Chinese devices that remove it. Regarding the analog hole, with a properly calibrated professional video camera recording in RAW, with both camera and monitor genlocked and color calibrated, and the proper postprocessing, you can capure the original pixel values exactly. I've done that part more often than I'd like... And worst case, you can then brute force which parameters the original encode used to re-encode your data without generation loss.
- dylan604 1y ago
  circumventing the DRM is what will land you in legal hot water. storing the DRM encrypted media isn't the same offense

miloignis 1y ago

Agreed, more or less, but I would argue you could make a distinction for a "streaming" situation where say no more than 10% of the data is on your computer at any one point in time, vs "downloading" where the data exists in its entirety at once. You could encode these terms in a contract or something about allowed usage of a service, I believe.

superkuh 1y ago
You could. But youtube's website itself would fail this "only 10% at once" test.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Why? IIRC you can flush the SourceBuffer in Media Source Extention and only keep a small part of the video in the browser's RAM at all time. (It won't work for Youtube shorts though, because 10% of a 30s video just isn't enough for reliable smooth playback)
  - superkuh 1y ago
    I understand now that I was talking about how youtube currently works and you two were talking about how youtube could be contrived to work. Yes, it could. It'd only just waste more bandwidth having to redownload and cause more pauses. But people who buy things (the important ones to advertise to) have fast connections and everyone's locked in so google can focus more on advertiser issues over the lower end network user experience.

charcircuit 1y ago

Downloading videos is a premium feature of YouTube and doesn't delete the data.

skinnymuch 1y ago
Can you access those downloads?
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Yes, there is a downloads button in the app to see your downloaded videos. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11977233 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/11977233
  - nativeit 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure they meant, can the videos be accessed as files in the filesystem, which to my knowledge they cannot.
    - dzhiurgis 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - lucb1e 1y ago
        Shit? Illegal? It's literally your right on videos like <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSEJApMIrLU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSEJApMIrLU>. Expand the description and see at the bottom: license is set to creative commons. The copyright holder permits everyone to remix the video but youtube still does not show a button for you to actually make use of that You need to breach the terms of service (use a downloader) to exercise the rights of the content license that youtube supports
  - skinnymuch 1y ago
    As the other sister comment said. I was replying to you saying YouTube has downloading in a thread about file access. I use the YouTube premium offline access, it’s nice but I only have premium for mobile background.

tshaddox 1y ago

The word "download" is used in two senses. The first is the broader sense you're referring to, where it means "to receive data." The second sense means to collect all the data from a particular file or dataset and store it locally, as opposed to "streaming." That second sense is the one clearly being used when referring to "YouTube downloaders."

superkuh 1y ago
If you view the entire file they are the same thing. And they're always being collected and stored locally even if it's hidden from you. And a static mp4 file encoded with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart -start_at_zero can be seeked within in any browser from any static webserver and viewed at any seeking time without downloading the rest. Is this streaming too? Given the first example of fully watching and the second implementation of streaming with a simple static file you can see the streaming/file download distinction you make is much thinner than it first appears. At least from a technical perspective. In lawyer-ese you are making a valid semantic point which I do acknowledge. "Streaming" in lawyer-ese means a corporation is doing it so there's: 1. legal liability 2. lots of abstraction layers involved so they don't get upset and 3. the local files are hidden from view of the user. Unlike the simple streaming example with a properly encoded .mp4 file.