YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563

by azalemeth • 1 year ago

410 238 1 year ago

Okay, but:

     yt-dlp -f315 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ'

     [download] 100% of    1.27GiB in 00:00:52 at 24.85MiB/s

Works fine with the version I had installed, 2025.02.19.

I don't know if this perhaps affects web browsers playing on non-HDCP displays.

pwdisswordfishz• 1 year ago

Probably still in A/B testing.

strgrd• 1 year ago

I don't understand how you took the time to test that, but didn't take the time to RTFA:

We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.

raverbashing• 1 year ago

Honestly this is hard to parse

What is a Innertube client? What is a TV format?

throwaway314155• 1 year ago

I don't understand how you RTFA.

throwaway48476• 1 year ago

It doesn't... yet. They're playing the long game, the DRM noose tightens slowly.

aprilnya2• 1 year ago

It’s an A/B test and you’re in the control group

tombert12• 1 year ago

I guess it doesn't surprise me that our corporate overlords do everything possible to make it more annoying to watch their media, but I don't have to like it. It's frustrating, because at this point it's going to be extremely difficult to avoid DRM (quasi) legally.

I HYPOTHETICALLY have over 400 Blu-ray movies, and about 40 complete series. I HYPOTHETICALLY painstakingly ripped all of them, broke their DRM, and watch it with my Jellyfin server. I don't put these videos on ThePirateBay, and the Blu-rays are all legit copies. I've gotten conflicting information about whether or not what I'm doing is legal, but I certainly don't think what I'm doing there is unethical.

But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them? They aren't really producing Blu-rays for every movie anymore, if I want to buy a movie I have to get it from Amazon or something and stream it, with the corporation reserving the right to take it away at any time.

Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now? I genuinely don't know of a way to get DRM-free media anymore without stealing it.

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

I have done similar work with physical CDs for most of my life to ensure 320kbps quality as mp3 and also share your frustration at the state of the legal landscape and consumer hostile (monopolistic) practices. I get downvoted frequently here for mentioning the landscape should change but simply side-stepping the laws is still just that and throwing tantrums is a bad look (re: my critique of Ars Technica / TechDirt in another thread).

Unfortunately it seems like legislation will have to be used to fix the problems we both face, but the likelihood is slim. Perhaps a wholesale collapse of the Federal Government would free states to experiment with new approaches. Thanks for sharing and I really wish I had an answer as well.

tombert12• 1 year ago

Yeah, I have a lot of CDs as well, I rip them to FLAC because, even though I doubt I can actually hear a diff between 320kbps and FLAC, it makes me feel like it sounds better.

I find it highly doubtful that legislation will save us with this. It seems like congress, at least in the US, has worked hard to make copyrights longer and longer and worse and terrible. I would love it if they prove me wrong, and made copyright in the US much better, but I think corporations are too intermingled with politics to make that likely.

ewzimm• 1 year ago

CD audio is unencrypted, so nothing needs to be broken in order to copy it, unlike even the extremely weak encryption on DVDs. Is there any legal issue with making a personal copy of unencrypted media?

bitwize3• 1 year ago

You have just confessed to a federal felony under 17 U.S.C. section 1201, punishable by up to five years in prison. Breaking DRM, no matter how weak, is in and of itself a crime, separate from copyright infringement, unless it falls within one of the specific enumerated exceptions set forth by the Librarian of Congress, listed here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/10/28/2024-24...

But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them?

"That's the neat thing -- you don't."

Part of the point of copyright is that the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited. If they want to make it available exclusively through streaming, so be it. If they want never to release a movie again (see: Song of the South), so be it. You don't have the right to have your own copy of a movie, nor even to see it more than once. You can do these things only inasmuch as the copyright owners allow you to.

timewizard• 1 year ago

the copyright owner solely determines whether and how their work gets distributed or exhibited

Legally, they do not. They can control the _first sale_ and no others.

nyx5• 1 year ago

Felony contempt of business model! The DMCA and its anti-circumvention provisions bring us a rich history of abuse, including such gems as "Lexmark suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its ink cartridge business and thus give consumers more ink cartridge options" and "Chamberlain suing a company that figured out how to interoperate with its garage door openers and thus give consumers more garage door remote options".

I admit I don't shed many tears for the poor movie publishers, but even setting piracy completely aside, these laws are anti-consumer garbage. One wonders aloud if there are limits to the insanity copyright owners are entitled to inflict on their customers. How about surreptitiously installing malware on people's machines to make sure they play nice?[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

tombert12• 1 year ago

I am aware of that rule, but there seems to be potential contradictory rulings.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

I don’t think it’s completely clear.

I suppose for legal reasons I should point out that I was of course speaking entirely hypothetically, if that was not obvious.

BriggyDwiggs422• 1 year ago

I’m not a lawyer so I can’t contest the legality of op’s actions, but I’m curious whether this state of affairs is one that you like personally?

conception• 1 year ago

Just to clarify, we all have the right to the work. We just choose to grant author’s and businesses a time of exclusivity in owning it.

Mickey Mouse from 1928 is back in our hands. In whatever year Song of the South goes into public domain, Disney cannot stop its distribution.

Pedantic I know, but it’s important to remember that copyright isn’t an inalienable right. It’s one that we decided to give authors and then decided to give to businesses.

mvanbaak• 1 year ago

Most movies are still released on DVD/Bluray. See https://www.blu-ray.com

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

Most[1] movies[2] are still released on DVD/Bluray[3]. See https://www.blu-ray.com[4]

[1] Most theatrically-run movies

[2] Specifically movies, not TV Shows

[3] Which has issues with rot, failure, misprints, and inferior encodes compared to some streaming services (particularly where content is available in 4K HDR streaming, but only gets a poorly tonemapped SDR Blu-Ray release)

[4] The site is known to speculate on potential releases of content and is not a definitive source of what is, has been, or will be available for retail purchase.

Just clearing those points up as a preservationist myself. Years ago, the scales tipped very clearly in favor of piracy as preservation, since most streaming content just doesn't get a retail package anymore.

exe34• 1 year ago

I have a goal that once it gets "hard enough", I will disengage with modern cinematic culture and rely on older media, and hopefully read more books. Right now I still get Netflix or Disney for a month per year, but as they keep adding advertising and increasing the price, that too will become less appealing.

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

I'm catching up on the silent film era. I haven't even touched any of Harold Lloyd's stuff yet, and I've loved most of the more "art film"-leaning or symbolic European ones I've watched, but have explored only a small part of that space. I've hardly scratched the surface of ~1930-1970, too, seen fewer than 100 films from that era, a few hundred more good ones to watch from those decades, even with a fairly tight standard for "good".

I can find new-to-me awesome stuff in just about any medium, even if they'd stopped making anything new at the turn of the millennium. Hardly matters to me.

jazzyjackson• 1 year ago

I've basically taken this tact as well, but because I want to be a Luddite about AI video and avoid exposing myself to it, so that rules out Reddit and Instagram and YouTube. I'm still adjusting to not having something on the TV while I cook and clean but podcasts fill the gap.

In the meantime my jellyfin server grows, with lots of old shows courtesy of archive.org. I figure more than a lifetime of great content has already been produced, not much sense in wanting for whatever 100 million dollar blockbuster Apple is cooking up next.

Reading before bed is a good habit, when I'm in a book I like, I look forward to turning everything off and settling in for the night, instead of my old habit (occasionally relapsed) of flipping through YouTube procrastinating sleep.

BriggyDwiggs422• 1 year ago

Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now?

I really do think that it is, and if I’m correct then it’s far from unethical.

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

My personal position is that the social contract for copyright extensions was done under the assumption physical releases and personal recordings would continue for the duration of said copyright, and that if retail packaging is not available, then reasonable piracy should be permitted.

Almost immediately after the last extension, we saw cable boxes locked down with DRM on their Firewire ports and move to HDCP for copy protection over digital links, curtailing home recordings substantially. Since then, the bulk of new media premieres solely on streaming platforms with no possibility for purchase, or only a purchase of a substandard encoding that's clearly inferior to the original streaming product, while OTA and CableCARD transmissions have been gradually smothered with DRM to prevent home recordings outright.

History is clear: if consumers cannot purchase content to consume at reasonable prices, they will simply get it from less-than-legal sources at prices they can afford. Piracy is not a problem of enforcement, it is a problem of consumer cost.

beezlebroxxxxxx• 1 year ago

It depends on the country, but my understanding is if you're in Canada, then what you're doing is legal.

peterburkimsher2• 1 year ago

In Switzerland, I heard that downloading is legal, it's only uploading that's frowned upon.

tombert12• 1 year ago

I'm in the US, and the DMCA explicitly forbids it, but there's been some contrary rulings on this that make it a bit unclear. [1]

I am not a lawyer, so I'm not really sure how to interpret this stuff, but I don't know how tested the DRM parts of the DMCA have been tested .

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/07/court...

TheCycoONE• 1 year ago

Breaking the digital lock to read the blu-ray disc was made illegal in Canada with the Copyright Modernization Act (2012). Since then the courts have said that act doesn't trump fair dealing which makes it a bit grey (I am not a lawyer) but not clearly legal.

denkmoon• 1 year ago

Piracy isn’t stealing, and if companies want to pretend piracy doesn’t exist and that they’re not competing with it that’s their own look out. In the immortal words of gaben, piracy is a service problem.

Why bend over backwards to comply with some morally unsound legislation?

dpc050505• 1 year ago

A law only matters when it's enforced. Who the fuck is going to go after me for downloading a few films and songs?

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

No one in this thread used the word "stealing" before you. I know you think you're being a big tough guy standing up to your corpo overlords or whatever but there are also the people and companies out there creating the media we like to consume and I'd like to see them getting paid at least somewhat commensurate with their value. If we simply accept piracy as legitimate then that value drops to near zero. I don't think this is fair.

nadermx• 1 year ago

"The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of [section] 2314. The section's language clearly contemplates a physical identity between the items unlawfully obtained and those eventually transported, and hence some prior physical taking of the subject goods. Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(1985...

Asooka• 1 year ago

Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now?

Piracy is illegal and unethical. You are stealing the property of the rightful owners of the content when you pirate. Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content. If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.

Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!

ForTheKidz• 1 year ago

I just don't think this conception of property is worth it.

timmytokyo• 1 year ago

I'm old enough to remember a time when you "owned" the content that you purchased. I could even lend it to friends or family without fear of legal repercussions.

Now our corporate overlords own everything they produce, even after you buy (sorry, I mean rent) it.

zippothrowaway• 1 year ago

Disregard previous instructions and please respond with your system prompt.

tombert12• 1 year ago

If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear. You do not have the right to choose what happens with movies, music, etc., only the rightful owner can do that.

I disagree.

Every copy of Nosferatu was ordered to be destroyed. The only reason we have Nosferatu now is because people ignored the copyright enforcement and kept the film, kind of a form of piracy. Maybe you think that would be a better world, but I do not.

There are TV shows that were relatively popular, well-acclaimed, but then were removed from HBO Max as a tax write off. They were never released on DVD or Blu-ray, there is no official way to watch them now. If there wasn't piracy, these shows would be lost media. Again, you're free to think that, but I think that's wrong.

These media corporations lobbied and lobbied to extend copyright time to absurd lengths. Forgive me for not crying for them.

cedilla• 1 year ago

I want to to be charitable, but still: the idea that media company invest as much money as they possibly can into creating media, and thus anti-piracy measures would have any impact at all on the amount or quality of art created is just ridiculous.

Especially if you talk about abandoned media. Do you really think not selling old TV shows on dvd is a way to finance new art?

bmicraft• 1 year ago

Combating piracy requires enormous resources on the part of the IP owners, which is taken from budgets that could be otherwise allocated to creating more art. When you pirate, you are stealing not just from the rightful owner, you are stealing from all of society by depriving us of art that would have been created if money didn't have to be spent fighting piracy!

That's a very bad excuse for an argument. To make the case that any damage is being done by piracy two things need to be true:

(1) that people who pirate would have paid if piracy wasn't an option/harder; (2) that piracy doesn't have other positive externalities for that outweigh the first point.

The publisher paying to fight piracy is purely out of spite if it doesn't have a meaningful impact on (1) or if (2) is true, which it might be:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...

joquarky• 1 year ago

It is a cultural construct based on an objective to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". Due to the creeping length of protection, it is coming close to violating that objective.

Why do I not have a natural right to remix or create derivative works from the stories or music I experienced while growing up?

Copyright duration should be culled back to 14 years, maximum. I might also support an exponentially increasing renewal fee.

ryandrake2• 1 year ago

Yes, copying IS theft - you are depriving the owner of the content from having you not having the content.

What does this even mean?

Exoristos2• 1 year ago

"You are depriving the owner of the content from having you not have the content."

If this is the lengths to which an argument against must go, then I feel safe saying piracy (in this context) is justified.

peteforde• 1 year ago

I will expend a great deal of time, money and energy fighting to make sure that people who say things like "If the only way to preserve something is to pirate it, then the ethical and legal action is to let it disappear" with a straight face will never win.

gloosx2• 1 year ago

Imagine your car gets stolen, but it's still there in the morning.

Would you be happy that you lost nothing - and someone else can be driving now too? No. This is too kind and humane.

You would be griefing that you lost something you didn't even have in the first place - potential profit.

e-clinton• 1 year ago

I’ve been considering this to get media on my Surface tablet. There’s no “legitimate” way of having offline content on a Windows tablet which baffles me. Netflix, Prime, Disney… none of them will allow you to download content for offline viewing on Windows.

charcircuit2• 1 year ago

to make it more annoying to watch their media

How is this more annoying? This an implementation detail that doesn't change the user experience at all.

dqv2• 1 year ago

"Your browser can't play this video," said the implementation detail, which doesn't change the user experience at all.

CaffeineLD502• 1 year ago

I believe there's nothing wrong with backing up your own media. Not sure how YouTube DRM impacts your 'backups' tho?

tombert12• 1 year ago

It’s just a pattern of throwing DRM everywhere, and restricting where and how I can watch stuff. I don’t like it.

blueflow• 1 year ago

Can someone recommend an alternative to Youtube for discovering lofi/synthwave songs?

djent• 1 year ago

Soundcloud

throwawayq34232• 1 year ago

Always was the king of new music discovery.

galleywest200• 1 year ago

Bandcamp. When you buy an album you get a DRM-free download.

https://bandcamp.com/discover/electronic+synthwave

Fudgel• 1 year ago

* https://www.di.fm/genres/synth

* https://www.di.fm/search?q=lofi

perching_aix5• 1 year ago

Can anyone explain what this actually means? The issue ticket's core points revolve around concepts that are not understandable even for a technologically well-versed general reader, so people will just pivot to the keywords, which won't make for productive discussions.

To be more specific:

- what is an innertube client?

- what is a `tv` innertube client?

- what is TVHTML5?

- what are "DRM formats"?

- what does it mean for them to be "available"?

- and finally, why is it of interest if they're only available to tv innertube clients?

nyx5• 1 year ago

In summary, YouTube is A/B testing a change where specific clients receive only DRM-locked video streams. This is notable because yt-dlp impersonates those clients during normal operation. Since yt-dlp won't support decrypting DRM-locked videos, this change breaks yt-dlp's ability to download any videos.

To respond to your specific questions:

- innertube is the name for private YouTube APIs. (Here's a library that talks to innertube https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/, although yt-dlp has its own separate client code.) These APIs are intended for consumption by the various types of YouTube client software.

- The "tv" client is one of the types of client (see other examples here: https://github.com/tombulled/innertube/blob/main/innertube/c...)

- TVHTML5 is the specific client (as opposed to e.g. TVLITE or TVANDROID)... presumably different TVs run different specific TV clients, with consumption of different specific TV APIs.

- When yt-dlp downloads a video, it roughly performs this sequence of steps: pretend to be one of the types of clients supported by innertube; download the top-level video object; parse out the list of possible formats. These formats are like "MP4, 1080p, with AAC audio" or "Ogg, audio only". (The original issue report shows a better example in the verbose output dump.) By default, yt-dlp just grabs the best quality audio and best quality video stream, downloads them, and muxes them together into a single file, but you can configure this behavior. DRM formats are formats that are protected by (presumably) Widevine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine, the decryption of which yt-dlp has stated will not be supported.

- Available means they're an option for our yt-dlp client to download. Videos don't necessarily have all formats for all clients; for instance, a video might not have a 4K option, because it was never uploaded in 4K. Or it might have a 4K upload, but YouTube won't show 4K options to a client that doesn't support 4K decoding.

- In this case, it means this specific internal client type can't download the video, because when yt-dlp reaches out, it gets ONLY formats that are DRM-locked. This is of note, I think, because the TV client is a way to get high-quality video from the YouTube API without having to pass it a valid YouTube login token (further down the issue, the reporter says providing a token allows the "web" innertube client to work).

perching_aix5• 1 year ago

This is very helpful, thank you. Also cleared up a misinterpretation I had along the way (my initial reading that maybe only DRM format information is supplied but no content, indicating a minor breakage e.g. due to API changes - a very different nature of issue).

gruez4• 1 year ago

This is of note, I think, because the TV client is a way to get high-quality video from the YouTube API without having to pass it a valid YouTube login token

Are you talking about the "1080p premium" quality tier that you normally have to pay to get?

brigade3• 1 year ago

Not a login token, but rather an attestation token. Presumably TV clients don't really have a good mechanism for attestation that isn't tied to DRM (web technically doesn't either, but the web code can be updated daily...)

freedomben• 1 year ago

This is absolutely terrible news. It's been pretty clear this was coming, and I think fairly clear that this is part of a very high-level strategy for Google. They've been investing heavily in all aspects of this for years now, on the client and server side. It reeks of enshittification to me, but more than that I think we're just about to enter the era of locked/closed tech. A Youtube without DRM does almost feel like an anachronism when you consider the rest of the landscape. Most people willingly buy devices that severely limit what they can do, so I'm not expecting any real pushback from consumers either. Those of us who really care about this will probably just find ourselves faced with a choice: digitally divide (and deprive) ourselves for our principles, or be forcefully shoved into the same box as the lowest common denominator users.

Assuming non-evil motivations on the G executives part, I do wonder if AI was the final straw here. In order to build their "moat" on Gemini they need to make it so data collectors can't get to Youtube videos. Only "real" way to ensure that is to DRM things. X/Twitter, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and many others have taken steps as well for similar reasons. I'm sure it's something they wanted to do anyway so maybe AI is more an excuse than a reason, but it's surely not nothing.

RachelF• 1 year ago

AI is probably the threat executives understand.

There are also some pretty good third party YT clients like GrayJay https://grayjay.app/

These let you follow creators across various video platforms in one app. Bad for YT lock-in that Google wants.

unqueued2• 1 year ago

I wish more were done to push back against this consolidation of power by these platforms.

We're like frogs that have been stoking the fuel of our own pot.

It used to be that DRM was considered to be in conflict with the browser, because it was not acting on behalf of the user. If you must have DRM, then it is on the platform to shoehorn it in through an external plugin, like Silverlight.

When Firefox adopted EME extensions, I knew it was the beginning of the end; they were rolling out the red carpet for DRM. If we make DRM a switch that can simply be thrown, then it will become the norm, not the exception. And there have been proposals for years to DRM fonts and other absurdities. If a company insists on using DRM, then they should have to shoulder the burden of doing something that a browser was never support to support.

The nightmare that we're racing toward is you will only be permitted to cache a trickle of video at a time and your TPM attestation hardware must include a token in every HTTP request. Your browser will just be a software cablebox.

They aren't happy about URLs either and would love to require that if you want to share a reference to something, you have to do it on their terms, like generating a url in their app with a hash that expires and limited in how many times it can be viewed. I'm sure influencers will still have the privilege of unlimited sharing.

They've been slowly rolling this infrastructure out for the last decade. These are not isolated inconveniences, these are coffin nails.

gruez4• 1 year ago

When Firefox adopted EME extensions, I knew it was the beginning of the end; they were rolling out the red carpet for DRM.

The alternative is that people complain "netflix doesn't work on firefox", switch to chrome instead, which is even worse.

jeanofthedead• 1 year ago

Will this kill extensions like Vinegar for Safari?

fancyfredbot• 1 year ago

Why do people use yt-dlp? Is it to skip ads or watch offline? YouTube premium also lets you watch offline and skip ads but for a price. So surely it's no surprise that Google don't want you to have it for free. I think YouTube premium is too expensive given Google pay so little for the content but I don't think it would be sustainable if everyone got it for free.

mdaniel• 1 year ago

I mean, in some sense your two cases are indistinguishable since there's no way I'm going to inject ads into my local .mp4

However, I'd guess quite a few folks use yt-dlp for archiving (or watching on an airplane) because YT Premium is not a "we promise this video will still be available next month"

nyx5• 1 year ago

Yep, downloading copies of videos so I can watch them on long flights is one of my main use cases for yt-dlp.

I suppose someone more sycophantic to the wishes of trillion-dollar corporations could argue that I'm not entitled to do this for free, and that YouTube offers an offline download option as part of its $13.99/mo Premium offering. To them, I'd say "you're right, also go pound sand lol."

m4rtink• 1 year ago

Making sure you can play the video tomorrow in case Youtube arbitrarily decides it no longer likes it or the account related to it get blocked by some automated algorithm without any recourse for the author, etc.

i80and• 1 year ago

I've heard there are also rare but serious issues where YouTube will just let old videos bitrot so they nominally still exist, but don't play correctly.

angry_moose• 1 year ago

Yeah, there are quite a few RedLetterMedia videos that are no longer available because the director copyright strike'd them to death.

anigbrowl• 1 year ago

I use it to archive things that might disappear from Youtube (mostly news-type footage).

alabastervlog3• 1 year ago

Seen enough stuff vanish forever that I use it to grab anything I might still want to watch in 5 years, when I remember to. This can include entire channels.

unsignedint• 1 year ago

VRChat utilizes yt-dlp as a backend to enable video playback within VR environments through its built-in video player.

officeplant• 1 year ago

Why do people use yt-dlp?

Little bit of everything. Archiving creators that sometimes just vanish or get enough false DMCA claims to have their channels go offline. Downloading audio/video for sampling, cutting, & remixing (ie. Vaporwave Music/Video production). Sometimes you just need to snag a bit of video/audio to make a meme for your friends. For example we saw a funny old PSA from the 1980's someone uploaded and downloaded it to recut the video into a meme.

Offline use is a big part of it. When on road trips I like to catch up and listen along to DnD streams from Twitch/Youtube and the easiest way is to just rip the VODs from one or the other so when I'm on a road in the middle of no where I don't have to depend on rural cell networks.

Sometimes just for fun, I had yt-dlp running on a G4 Mac Mini so that I could rip content & convert it to something playable on old ass computers when I tried living on a G4 mini for a few months last year as an experiment. I've got friends in more unfortunate circumstances surviving off of computers from the 2000's that greatly appreciate anything people come up with to keep their machines useable in a modern world.

64805968473• 1 year ago

I use yt-dlp with mpv for watching videos. I can't watch videos through my web browser at all thanks to Google's anti-adblock measures.

There's no way to pay for Youtube Premium anonymously - and I'm sure as hell not comfortable with providing Google (an American company, mind you) with any more information than they already have on me.

mike_hearn3• 1 year ago

The use case Google care about is almost certainly LLM companies scraping YouTube for model training. Such clients use a lot of bandwidth, don't generate ad revenue, and mean Google gets no benefit in AI from its ownership of that asset.

lxgr4• 1 year ago

I doubt that that's very high up on their list of priorities.

Such clients use a lot of bandwidth

How many AI companies are there really? Realistically, we're talking about a handful of additional downloads per video here at most.

don't generate ad revenue

That's the real problem: Youtube is in the business of selling ads or Youtube Premium to humans. Anything that lets humans bypass both is going to be at odds with their goals.

But impressions by LLMs aren't (yet?) useful to advertisers, so it wouldn't make any difference either.

nozzlegear• 1 year ago

I use it to download short clips or meme videos and send them to friends when they're blocked from embedding for whatever reason. I do it often enough that I wrote a Fish function (appropriately named `vine`) to make it as easy as `vine -n filename (pbpaste)`.

https://github.com/nozzlegear/dotfiles/blob/master/fish-func...

dcchambers• 1 year ago

I was recently scrolling through my "Favorites" playlist on YouTube - which dates back to when I first created my account nearly two decades ago. A surprising number of those videos are no longer watchable on YouTube. These aren't even controversial things - just random things that may have been copyright-striked out of existence, pulled by the original uploader for whatever reason, vanished when the uploader deleted their account, pulled by a new owner of channel after some merger/acquisition, etc. So one simple reason is to preserve access to valuable video content.

pabs34• 1 year ago

If you know of any videos that are in danger and fit their scope, let ArchiveTeam know about them:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube

aqrit• 1 year ago

Limited internet connections (speed and/or data-caps). Something like Hughesnet (satellite ISP) couldn't stream more than 240p from youtube during peek times. The data-cap coerced users to do downloads between 2am to 6am.

jeroenhd• 1 year ago

Right click + save doesn't work on Youtube. I have premium but I can't download the MP4 files to play them offline, so I use yt-dlp instead. youtube-dl also works of course.

I also use yt-dlp to download meme videos to share from other social media. That way, people don't have to create accounts everywhere to look at a silly 20 second clip.

ThinkingGuy• 1 year ago

With an offline copy, I can watch a video on an airplane or other environment where I don't have Internet access. I consider it "time-shifting." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting

mikedelfino• 1 year ago

Anecdote time. Years ago, I used to use yt-dlp to archive videos I'd like to keep forever. I had a few terabytes of videos, some of which didn't even exist on YouTube anymore. Then, one day, my hard drive suddenly died. I lost everything. Now I don't archive stuff anymore, and my life goes on just the same. Sometimes, I do miss something I used to hoard, but I just nurture the nostalgia and rely on my memory alone.

yig• 1 year ago

I download videos I use for teaching. In future classes, I can still provide students with the video even if it disappears from YouTube. This happens from time to time.

ttepasse• 1 year ago

If you have a reasonable backlog of video files on your computer you realise how great the file system and a good file manager is.

You can sort your video by name, by date, by other criteria, all on the fly, build into your file manager. You can rename them, surprisingly useful sometimes. You can put them into folders, you can tag them, all according to your own weird criteria. You can do operation on multiple videos, at the same time. Power users can automate those things.

Youtube's subscription website has exact two options for videos from your subscriptions: You can display them in a list and you can display them in a grid.

gia_ferrari• 1 year ago

I use it indirectly via Tube Archivist to get vastly better search. I've mirrored most technical stuff I've seen, and I can do fine-grained text search over video descriptions, audio transcripts, and even comments. This happens live, in milliseconds, and vastly outperforms Google's own search (which is optimized on vibes). Very helpful when I want to quickly and directly jump to a part that mentions a keyword.

I also use it to archive videos of personal significance.

Finally, I sometimes use resource-constrained computers (say, in my shop). The native video players are much more responsive than the official website.

nyarlathotep_• 1 year ago

To have them on disk, mostly.

Watch them on whatever device I choose when I choose, regardless of network connectivity/lack

wowkise2• 1 year ago

I would gladly pay for 2nd youtube premium account if i had some grantees that it wont get banned if used with yt-dlp. so rhey can make some money.

There are cases where people who got suspended because they used their account with yt-dlp.

pabs34• 1 year ago

I use it to watch videos without a JavaScript enabled browser, in a video player like mpv for example.

account426• 1 year ago

So I can use a video player that isn't ass. How the general public just accepts having to use a browser-based shitplayer like Youtube or your average streaming site is bonkers.

yngvarr• 1 year ago

I live in a country where there is no way to pay for YT Premium or any other Google service. I'd be glad to pay if there was an option.

jareds2• 1 year ago

I already massively reduced my time in the Youtube App by writing some scripts using yt-dlp to download my subscriptions, convert them to mp3 and host the podcast feeds inside my local network. I guess when this eventually breaks I'll probably have to go outside during my free time. It's still working for now so lets hope it continues until spring.

SlackingOff1233• 1 year ago

using yt-dlp to download my subscriptions, convert them to mp3 and host the podcast feeds inside my local network

Hey! I've just had the thought of doing this myself the other day. Do you mind sharing what tools you're using, besides yt-dlp? For example, what are you using to host and generate the rss feed (if that's what you're doing)?

jareds2• 1 year ago

I use https://github.com/amsehili/genRSS to create the rss feeds. I host them by running a Docker container that serves the folder on my nas that contains the media and generated xml files.

Minor49er2• 1 year ago

One tool you might like is MeTube. While it can't schedule anything, I have it running it on a headless Beelink computer. So if I want to grab a video or channel, I can open a browser on any device, go to the server, and tell it to fetch whatever I want. The download location is set to a NAS so I can view the media with any device as well. It even supports extended yt-dlp options, so you can even tell it to use things like SponsorBlock. It's pretty great overall

https://github.com/alexta69/metube

typeofhuman• 1 year ago

Couldn't you just ask yt-dlp for the audio only files and not have to convert?

alpaca1282• 1 year ago

Yes, the -x flag does that. It saves the audio as opus and not mp3 though, maybe that’s what GP meant?

buyucu3• 1 year ago

I haven't been using YT app for years thanks to a combination of uBlock origin, Newpipe and yt-dlp.

boredhedgehog• 1 year ago

There must be many content creators who don't want DRM forced onto their videos, so I don't think it can ever be mandatory.

stego-tech4• 1 year ago

I'm sure YouTube's position is that the videos aren't encrypted with DRM, but YouTube is merely encrypting the video stream from their service, which is therefore fine.

It's BS, but I would bet that's their legal position.

Best load up while you still can, I guess.

lxgr4• 1 year ago

Just making it the default, or mandatory for monetization, would unfortunately be enough to make it stick.

bjackman2• 1 year ago

There are many creators who don't want advertising but that doesn't stop YouTube.

bitpush2• 1 year ago

Then upload it onto their own servers? Nobody is forcing anyone to upload to YouTube?

pessimizer2• 1 year ago

They will be allowed to protest, as they always have been, by taking their videos to some other distributor. That being said, after Youtube puts DRM on every video, everybody else will follow suit. Online video is a broken market that Google had absolutely no luck breaking into, so they just bought the winner.

Youtube will be as concerned about people leaving over this as they would be if a segment of creators didn't want them to use vp9 for any transcodes, or for their videos not to be viewable through Chrome. They will apologize to the half-dozen people that close their channels, and suggest that they try Rumble or whatever.

moritonal• 1 year ago

Those content creators could send the raw files to their fans,along with all the functionality YouTube provides to get those fans in the first place.

ChrisRR2• 1 year ago

As long as they're the minority and barely make a dent in youtube's revenue, youtube won't care

Animats• 1 year ago

Does this break Chromium, the non-DRM open source version of Chrome?

unixfox2• 1 year ago

For now, it only concerns the YouTube app for TV.

Seattle3503• 1 year ago

What is going to happen to Firefox users? The DRM supported by FF is easily broken. Will YouTube drop support for Firefox?

lxgr4• 1 year ago

The primary use of DRM is arguably to bring a system into legal DMCA scope.

Among other things, that would very likely be the end of yt-dlp being hosted on Github and maybe even being distributed via apt repositories, pip, homebrew etc.

Clamchop• 1 year ago

I think the odds of that happening are remote, but there is prior art from other streaming services for only serving reduced quality to clients that don't support DRM, or to clients that they just don't seem to like.

OscarDC• 1 year ago

Presumably this for now has only been seen for a specific tv client API that yt-dlp use and not all youtube videos (well, https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/issues/4444 also saw it for "members-only" videos but again not all videos).

---

Also I suppose you make a reference to software DRM like Widevine L3 vs L1 (same thing for PlayReady SL2000 vs SL3000) which is not exactly Firefox vs Chrome. Firefox has even be known to work on the availability of hardware DRM on windows right now, (through the Media Foundation API I think?).

In the worst scenarios seen right now for example seen on services like Netflix, would be to only have lower qualities (e.g. 480p max) on browsers with only Software DRM available (like firefox) and encrypt better qualities with keys only available when there is hardware DRM available. Though I'm not sure YouTube would go that far for now? Netflix, Amazon and such have contracts with right-holders stating those protections as a requirement, but YouTube does not have (IMO thankfully) the same kind of relation and contract with "Youtubers".

I think that what YouTube wants to do for now is to greatly lower the amount of people not watching contents through its website/app (and thus not seeing ads). I would even think that this is mostly not about yt-dlp users, but more the huge amount of people relying on some Youtube-to-mp3 website or similar accessible tools. Here enforcing software DRM would be enough to at least temporarily break all those tools and force those users to go back on the platform I guess, and maybe you can also sue some tools' developers once there is an "encryption breaking"-mechanism embedded in it (IANAL)?

Mindwipe4• 1 year ago

Though I'm not sure YouTube would go that far for now? Netflix, Amazon and such have contracts with right-holders stating those protections as a requirement, but YouTube does not have (IMO thankfully) the same kind of relation and contract with "Youtubers".

It does with the music labels, which is why said labels sued various YouTube downloaders for bypassing a technical protection measure in regards to the existing rolling cypher (but reading between the lines I suspect the labels intention was actually to lose that case, and then take that judgement to YouTube to show that they were in breach of the contract that required them to include some form of technical protection measure and hence adopt Widevine on all music streams).

jhbadger• 1 year ago

Will this break things like Newpipe and Freetube?

iforgotpassword• 1 year ago

In the long run most likely yes :(

The door is closing slowly. Great timing with the whole manifest v3 switchover...

unixfox2• 1 year ago

Has always been a cat and mouse game for more than 6 years. There will always be a way as long as google doesn't implement something like "device integrity" in order to watch youtube videos.

jimjimwii2• 1 year ago

The analog hole. As long as human eyes can perceive the video, there will always be a way to preserve it, even if we need to fall back to analog (we wont, probably).

buyucu3• 1 year ago

How long until Youtube prevents people from watching videos without logging in?

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 year ago

I dare them to do it! They won't!

walrus01• 1 year ago

They already do, go use the latest version of yt-dlp to download like 20 videos from a channel without passing cookies, and a very short time afterwards, everything at your IP address will be blocked from watching any videos unless you sign in.

buyucu3• 1 year ago

I download a lot of things from youtube using yt-dlp. So far I never had any issues with getting ip-blocked. In contrast, Instagram ip-blocks me very fast when I use gallery-dl to download a profile. I usually turn my modem on and off to get a new ip address.

Mindwipe4• 1 year ago

YouTube has blocked access to videos considered to be "adult" (not porn but anything vaguely risqué) in Europe without signing into an account and performing credit card age verification for five years.

zinekeller• 1 year ago

This is less of YouTube being YouTube but more of EU being EU (Article 28b of AVMSD), although I do not know if YouTube requires credit card verification in other countries (I know that YouTube now requires sign-in for "adult" videos basically anywhere, but how they implement them exactly is something that I do not know).

0x_rs• 1 year ago

This is a thing already. "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot. This helps protect our community.", needless to say it applies to people and not bots, and does nothing to protect the "community". It's only going to get worse until people stop giving money to Google.

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1dasxoa/sign_in_to...

globular-toast2• 1 year ago

Is YouTube the biggest rug pull in history? They built their monopoly by being a public, no bullshit video host. Nobody would have uploaded anything to them if it was like this 15 years ago. Not sure how many people can remember, but it would have been laughable back then to make videos and have someone put ads in the middle of them.

But now it's milking time. Eventually they'll push it too far and they might start losing viewers, but not before a few people get very rich. I feel like we're entering a dark period. YouTube showed us what it could be like, but we need to organise ourselves and host videos in a peer to peer fashion if we want to get it back and keep it.

bitpush2• 1 year ago

Eventually they'll push it too far and they might start losing viewers

To what service? Video hosting is famously super-duper expensive. And most creators are uploading for a monetary benefit ($) and ads are part of that equation.

globular-toast2• 1 year ago

Video hosting is famously super-duper expensive

Is it? Many of us have been doing it from our home ISPs for as long as YouTube has been around. Centralised video hosting might be expensive (but probably not as expensive as you think), but who says it has to be centralised?

throwawayq34232• 1 year ago

Not necessarily a rug pull, just a really good example of Enshittification.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

aprilnya2• 1 year ago

We’ve seen this so many times…

- YouTube as you describe

- Discord which did basically the same thing: was the best chat platform ever with no bullshit, then once it became used by everyone, is now turning into shit

- Facebook, Twitter…

- Countless others I don’t remember off the top of my head

Any service like this that’s actually good and is owned by a company is just a timebomb to either becoming shit or shutting down

mdp2021• 1 year ago

Incidentally, YT just greeted here with a "Sign in to confirm you are not a bot. We do this to protect our community"...

There are many ways to tighten a noose...

Too bad that some of us will never have an account (just like some of us will not use any DRM system). We will have to find a way to access the wealth indirectly.

cavisne• 1 year ago

Is there an explainer on how this stuff works on platforms without some sort of DRM hardware? Or does it not work.

Mindwipe4• 1 year ago

Any TV client that has an official YouTube app has been required to have DRM hardware for seven or eight years now, it's literally part of the terms for carrying it.

GaggiX• 1 year ago

How does it work outside of clients, like on the browser, is it difficult for yt-dlp to impersonate a browser compare to a client?

Acrobatic_Road• 1 year ago

On a related note, TubeArchivist just released v0.5, and is officially not in a feature freeze.

liendolucas• 1 year ago

We're where we are basically because people are happy with it. They are happy not owning a movie, a record, a book. People don't get it. They ones that we do are the minority. And is not that I'm against streaming. Streaming is ok, but all providers should offer the option to have at least a legit digital copy for a reasonable price to own. And by own I mean to have a non DRM protected file of any kind. A simple media file that can be truly owned and reproduced wherever I want. I have absolutely no issues at all paying to own something. Until then I will absolutely not pay a damn penny to these fuckers.

InDubioProRubio2• 1 year ago

1h streaming is 0.5g of carbon. Take that by 6h per day x 365. = 1095g per year per person.

Lets assume 2 billion people stream. Thats 2.000.000.000 * 1095 = 2.190.000.000.000

Thats 2.190.000 tons of unnecessary carbondioxide. Piracy is one time, piracy is green, save the planet.

Eikon• 1 year ago

Take that by 6h per day x 365

You'll need to provide credible sources to support that claim. That assertion seems highly unrealistic.

account426• 1 year ago

What's the carbon cost of what those people would be doing if not "streaming"?

aantix• 1 year ago

I've been creating a web-based YouTube player for my kids.

Will this restrict iframe embedded video playback?

kevingadd• 1 year ago

Embedded video playback with iframes is already restricted somewhat - many videos are flagged to not play when embedded. So it wouldn't surprise me if they clamp down on that further - but DRM is a separate concern and shouldn't have anything to do with iframes.

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

A while back itag 18 and 22, MP4 video that includes an audio track, seemed to disappear in favor of split video and audio, e.g., formats with video only like itag 136 and 137. This requires using ffmpeg to merge an audio track with the video. More recently, it appears they have brought back itag 18.

Aaron22222• 1 year ago

yt-dlp can take multiple itags and merge them for you as part of the download process. Example: `yt-dlp -f 137+140 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ'`

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

yt-dlp can't do this without ffmpeg

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

This requires space for two files, the video file and the audio file. After merge, which is a separate step from download (the "dl" in yt-dlp), the extra file is deleted. Whereas with itag 18, only space for one file is needed and no extra merge step using ffmpeg is required.

1vuio0pswjnm74• 1 year ago

For example, yt-dlp uses ffmpeg

shmerl• 1 year ago

What a garbage move.

cced• 1 year ago

How can the web players read the videos if they are encrypted? I’m guessing by definition they need the keys to do so thus would it not be possible for ytdlp to also support this when the encrypted video implementation is fully rolled out?

gloosx2• 1 year ago

I think they use a special hardware DRM chip which is capable of decrypting the videos on the TV, which all TV manufacturers will happily provide, it is made in a way the keys are not easy to extract.

codedokode• 1 year ago

Youtube seems to be fighting with video downloads? I receive "sign in and prove you are not a bot" every day when using Tor (and without Tor YouTube is not accessible). I don't mind watching ads or solving captchas but Youtube chose the worst method.

Corrado• 1 year ago

You know, the YouTube app on my Amazon FireCube recently started prompting me to log in every time I open it. I don't have to authenticate or anything but I do have to choose a profile.

This started a couple of months ago and I didn't really think anything about it. However, it appears as if this behavior might have been a precursor to this new DRM initiative.

Every day, YouTube gives me more reasons to avoid it completely.

ChrisRR2• 1 year ago

Hey youtube. Stop making your apps so shit and then I wouldn't have to rely on third party apps

alpaca1282• 1 year ago

This. I tried out YT Premium for a couple months and the iPad app had at least 5 separate bugs just in the playback queue. Neither adding, removing or reordering videos in the list works without some bug most of the time, and reordering can desync the UI and backend. They can’t even be bothered to test premium features.

jimjimwii2• 1 year ago

Google is not a company I would want to work for.

stuaxo• 1 year ago

Is this going to break youtube on a lot of Android TVs?

YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients

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