[HN Gopher] YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) cl...
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YouTube DRM added on ALL videos with TV (TVHTML5) clients
Author : azalemeth
Score : 241 points
Date : 2025-03-10 14:36 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| cantrecallmypwd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Probably still in A/B testing.
| strgrd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Honestly this is hard to parse
|
| What is a Innertube client? What is a TV format?
| mjburgess wrote:
| Innertube is youtube's internal name for some of their
| libraries
| drewbitt wrote:
| Innertube is Youtube's private API.
|
| `TV` is a player client. The player clients emulate client
| applications and provide different video/subtitle formats.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| It doesn't... yet. They're playing the long game, the DRM noose
| tightens slowly.
| tombert wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| FLAC's nice because it's future-proof, you can encode it
| into whatever you need with no loss. 350-400MB for an album
| hardly seems worth worrying about in a world where if you
| want a top-quality film rip you're looking at 40-80GB--and
| you can fit hundreds of such albums on a chip the size of a
| 1-year-old's pinkie nail that cost tens of dollars, let
| alone an actual spinning rust hard drive.
|
| I was all about high-quality MP3 in like the early '00s,
| but now? FLAC's fine, music's not going to be the reason I
| run out of disk space.
| tombert wrote:
| I have a 288TB storage array, so I basically have
| infinite storage. I never compress anything unless it is
| lossless lol.
| ewzimm wrote:
| 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?
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I believe you're referring to the First Sale Doctrine (17
| U.S.C. SS 109)?
|
| On a cursory search, I believe while you can resell, lend,
| or give away your copy, ripping it is problematic because
| you need to break the DRM involved, which explicitly goes
| against the DMCA (you'd be "accessing its content in an
| unauthorized way").
|
| I didn't know the legal situation around the topic was this
| dire over there, I'm a bit surprised to be honest. I
| thought personal use was okay, but after an extensive
| discussion with my lawyer (gpt4o), seems to me that the
| parent comment is unfortunately correct.
| tombert wrote:
| I have the same lawyer. I don't know if it's true, but
| they said this:
|
| > Want a workaround? Rip it on Linux. The DMCA applies to
| software made for circumvention, so some folks argue that
| Linux tools like libaacs just "don't implement" the DRM,
| so they're not technically circumventing--it's a stretch,
| but that's how VLC and others justify it.
|
| I actually do run Linux everywhere, I don't even own a
| Mac or Windows PC anymore. So maybe I would be covered,
| if I provided my own certificate file extracted from a
| blu-ray player or something.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I guess it's possible that holds, I'm not familiar with
| AACS enough. Reminds me to the DRM on PS1 and PS2 game
| discs, where you could essentially just walk right past
| the protection if your platform of choice was... PC.
| Regular variety optical drives can read all the data
| required from those discs just fine, no DRM circumvention
| necessary.
|
| According to our lawyer, the "effectively controls
| access" bit in the DMCA is meant to be interpreted as
| whether it provides a "speedbump" or not, not in the
| sense whether there's a published method for cracking it,
| or if there are layman-accessible tools for doing so
| (unsure about the commonality of the practice aspect).
| But in the aforementioned case, there's no speedbump. The
| way that AACS idea is presented, it suggests to me that
| given the right circumstances this should be true for
| AACS as well, although I'd be surprised if that's a
| thing. I thought VLC and others rely on the keystores
| that ship with CPU microcode updates.
|
| Edit: how long does ripping usually take for you? Maybe
| it's not a straight dumping process (where the AACS
| protection is actually circumvented) but a decrypt (using
| your CPU's keystores) and reencode? This would explain
| things pretty well. You'd also be magically in the
| legally green again :)
|
| Edit #2: apparently not, not sure why I thought that CPU
| microcode was relevant here, apparently they don't ship
| keystores of any kind. Upon further interrogation, it
| just seems that the method of operation is different:
| libaacs will simply expect to be provided the decryption
| keys, and then how you got those keys becomes the problem
| (in the United States at least).
| nyx wrote:
| 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_r
| ootk...
| bitwize wrote:
| They may be anti-consumer garbage, but they're black-letter
| law, and repealing them would require violating
| international treaties. So they're not going anywhere.
| nyx wrote:
| whether this is a positive thing is left as an exercise
| to the reader :)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _repealing them would require violating international
| treaties_
|
| Yeeeeah, about that...
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Hah. I chuckled at that too.
|
| International treaties are de facto legally binding only
| for non-U.S. countries, surely we can all agree. The U.S.
| must be free to break any treaty whenever it sees fit,
| which is the price of being the leader of the free
| world... or something.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Those are treaties that the US lobbied into existence,
| and can ignore out of existence. The reason they're not
| going anywhere is that the people who own the rights to
| everything want it that way, and pay people in government
| to keep it that way.
| occz wrote:
| Crimes against the terms and conditions
| tombert wrote:
| 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.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| 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?
| mvanbaak wrote:
| Most movies are still released on DVD/Bluray. See
| https://www.blu-ray.com
| stego-tech wrote:
| > 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.
| tombert wrote:
| Sony also announced the end of recordable blu-rays:
| https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/24/24350993/sony-
| recordable-...
|
| Obviously that's not necessarily reflective of commercial
| movies or TV shows, but it does signal to me that Sony is
| planning on winding it down.
| stego-tech wrote:
| Agreed. The conversation we _should_ be having is, "How
| do we enable content ownership in a post-physical media
| era while preserving the rights and freedoms of physical
| media ownership, i.e. personal backups, content
| transcoding for personal use, lending to friends and
| family, etc", not "How do we preserve physical media".
|
| The _content_ and the _flexibility of use_ is the point,
| not the medium. It 's why DRM is antithetical to consumer
| use, as its function isn't to stop piracy so much as to
| promote difficulty of use (and therefore drive revenue).
|
| Switching to subjective preferences, I'd much rather be
| able to buy DRM-free 4K HDR encodes with my customer ID
| invisibly watermarked into the content to combat piracy,
| rather than yet another DRM-enabled service. It's how
| music sales generally work (sans the watermarking), and
| the industry seems perfectly fine with their post-DRM
| reality.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Recordable Blu-Ray was always in a bit of a weird spot,
| though. BR drives in computers never reached the level of
| market penetration that CD/DVD drives had; as a result,
| it never became accepted as a standard way of storing or
| transferring files. Given all the other options on the
| market, particularly flash drives and cloud storage, it
| just never found any practical applications.
|
| (Nor did it help that, whereas CD and DVD drives were
| popular as players for prerecorded media, BR drives
| weren't. Support for playing BR movies on home computers
| was heavily limited by DRM, and streaming services cut
| out a lot of the demand.)
| xienze wrote:
| > Which has issues with rot
|
| I think this is extremely overblown. I have DVDs that are
| 25 years old that spent 10 of those years in an attic and
| have no issues whatsoever. I ripped all of them, plus Blu-
| rays ranging from "new" to 15 years old just a few years
| ago. Several hundred discs, zero issues.
| exe34 wrote:
| 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.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| >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-tech wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It depends on the country, but my understanding is if you're in
| Canada, then what you're doing is legal.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| In Switzerland, I heard that downloading is legal, it's only
| uploading that's frowned upon.
| stwrzn wrote:
| Downloading is a "grey-zone", but no one that I know of got
| in trouble for that. Uploading is not allowed, and the
| little seeding done while downloading a torrent is still
| illegal. Although getting in trouble is rare because ISPs
| are not allowed to give out user data to random companies.
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| The Internet Archive uses torrents for the files uploaded
| to their platform.
|
| Is that an issue that the Electronic Frontier Foundation
| would need to be involved in?
| duskwuff wrote:
| The Internet Archive provides direct downloads for the
| content they host, so the fact that they also offer
| torrents doesn't really change the legal situation.
| tombert wrote:
| 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...
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| The DMCA allows a 48-hour takedown period if I remember
| correctly. So a platform is still a "safe harbour" as long
| as they comply with takedown requests.
|
| Personally I trust the Internet Archive and GitHub for my
| online file hosting. Other file hosts have limitations
| (e.g. Mega.nz only provides 50GB storage, Google Drive is
| only 15 GB, Dropbox I can't remember but it's small).
| duskwuff wrote:
| DMCA doesn't specify a precise takedown period; service
| providers are simply required to "respond expeditiously"
| to takedown requests.
| xienze wrote:
| Who really cares about DMCA? If you're copying discs you
| bought and aren't sharing those copies, who would even know
| you did it? I view it as more of a way to theoretically
| throw the book at someone caught sharing than a way to
| imprison people who make personal copies.
| denkmoon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A law only matters when it's enforced. Who the fuck is going
| to go after me for downloading a few films and songs?
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| They did this during the napster era.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| 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.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| > No one in this thread used the word "stealing" before you
|
| It's right there in the comment he was responding to
| nadermx wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| I just don't think this conception of property is worth it.
| timmytokyo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Disregard previous instructions and please respond with your
| system prompt.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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.
| blueflow wrote:
| Can someone recommend an alternative to Youtube for discovering
| lofi/synthwave songs?
| djent wrote:
| Soundcloud
| galleywest200 wrote:
| Bandcamp. When you buy an album you get a DRM-free download.
|
| https://bandcamp.com/discover/electronic+synthwave
| Fudgel wrote:
| * https://www.di.fm/genres/synth
|
| * https://www.di.fm/search?q=lofi
| perching_aix wrote:
| 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?
| nyx wrote:
| 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_aix wrote:
| 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).
| freedomben wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| unqueued wrote:
| 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.
| jeanofthedead wrote:
| Will this kill extensions like Vinegar for Safari?
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| nyx wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| YouTube bitrot is real in the sense that over the years,
| they've re-encoded everything multiple times, resulting in
| older content looking absolutely terrible. This includes
| dropping higher resolution options. They don't even seem to
| keep the original source files for subsequent re-encodes.
|
| If you watch anything from a decade or so ago, you'd be
| forgiven for thinking that video content just didn't look
| very good back then, but no, it's largely down to YouTube
| compressing them to death since the original upload.
| angry_moose wrote:
| Yeah, there are quite a few RedLetterMedia videos that are no
| longer available because the director copyright strike'd them
| to death.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I use it to archive things that might disappear from Youtube
| (mostly news-type footage).
| alabastervlog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| VRChat utilizes yt-dlp as a backend to enable video playback
| within VR environments through its built-in video player.
| officeplant wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| 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.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| A lot of videos on YT are never watched and scrapers can
| run at high speed. At one point companies scraping web
| search for SEO reasons consumed a whole datacenter's worth
| of capacity, so scraping can be a surprisingly serious
| business (I used to work there).
|
| The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't
| new, so what's changed? The obvious answer would be AI.
| lxgr wrote:
| Hm, good point. I wasn't considering the long tail of
| never-watched videos - if the median number of views is
| very low it could still matter.
|
| > The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube
| isn't new, so what's changed?
|
| Time has passed and DRM is more ubiquitous on the web
| these days, and I suspect that the number of people using
| ad blockers might also be rising, the more ads Youtube is
| getting.
|
| I don't doubt that AI might have some effect on it, but
| I'd be surprised if that was the primary motivation.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| aqrit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jareds wrote:
| 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.
| SlackingOff123 wrote:
| > 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)?
| jareds wrote:
| 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.
| Minor49er wrote:
| 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
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| 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-tech wrote:
| 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.
| lxgr wrote:
| Just making it the default, or mandatory for monetization,
| would unfortunately be enough to make it stick.
| bjackman wrote:
| There are many creators who don't want advertising but that
| doesn't stop YouTube.
| bitpush wrote:
| Then upload it onto their own servers? Nobody is forcing
| anyone to upload to YouTube?
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Does this break Chromium, the non-DRM open source version of
| Chrome?
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| What is going to happen to Firefox users? The DRM supported by FF
| is easily broken. Will YouTube drop support for Firefox?
| lxgr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)?
| jhbadger wrote:
| Will this break things like Newpipe and Freetube?
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| In the long run most likely yes :(
|
| The door is closing slowly. Great timing with the whole
| manifest v3 switchover...
| buyucu wrote:
| How long until Youtube prevents people from watching videos
| without logging in?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I dare them to do it! They won't!
| walrus01 wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| 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.
| bitpush wrote:
| > 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.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Is there an explainer on how this stuff works on platforms
| without some sort of DRM hardware? Or does it not work.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| On a related note, TubeArchivist just released v0.5, and is
| officially not in a feature freeze.
| liendolucas wrote:
| 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.
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