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Comment by milankragujevic | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is interested, I'm working on a free online YouTube client website that doesn't show ads, has a separate login system that allows you to subscribe to users, without YouTube knowing anything about that. I need help with building the website, so anyone doing design / PHP is welcome to contact me.

edit: Forgot to add, the website uses no JavaScript and doesn't track you at all. It also tries to implement most of YouTube's functionality, so you don't loose anything by using the website instead of YouTube.

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If you're building such a website, Google will shut it down quickly. It probably breaks some laws too (i'm not a lawyer).

It doesn't break any laws since I don't play any videos which have forbidden embedding. Plus, technology like that has been mainstream in VLC, youtube-dl, etc, for ages. It uses the official YouTube API, and respects mosts of the Terms of Service, except the video fetching, which doesn't use the API at all, just loads the page on the server and catches the video stream.

Embedding and scraping into a video tag aren't the same thing.

As soon as you store any of their content on your server, even if in just RAM, you're fucked, because that's copyright infringement.

Do you always give people legal advice based on your wild fantasies about how law works?

Correct me, if you think I'm wrong.

Please don't be uncivil on Hacker News, whether someone else is wrong or not.

> you're fucked, because that's copyright infringement.

Tell this to the hundreds of online youtube downloaders which are downloading youtube videos to their servers and then making it available for the user to download it from them: https://www.google.hu/search?q=online+youtube+downloader

@imaginenore: They're not, but if the video is licensed for embedding that means that I can't be sued for copyright infringement, plus the standard "linking != infringement" applies.

You are breaking several of YouTube's TOS (https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)

> (5A) you agree not to distribute any part of or parts of the Website or the Service, including but not limited to any Content

By downloading and sending the videos from your servers, you are distributing their content.

> (5C) you agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Player, or such other means as YouTube may explicitly designate for this purpose

Downloading a video via CLI is not using the YouTube player.

> (5D) you agree not to (or attempt to) circumvent, disable or otherwise interfere with any security related features of the Service or features that (i) prevent or restrict use or copying of Content or (ii) enforce limitations on use of the Service or the content accessible via the Service

By removing ads you are interfering with the restriction that users must watch ads.

> (5L) [...] not intended to be downloaded (either permanently or temporarily), copied, stored, or redistributed by the user.

Should be obvious.

> (5M) You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content

You are copying and distributing the content.

Tbh, Im not distributing anything, they are, I just hotlink the video file. Also, anyone using an adblocker is also doing the same thing, yet youtube isnt blocking adblockers.

How are you going to play YouTube videos without ads?

The server fetches the video page from YouTube, and embeds the VP8+Opus video URL into my site's page with a <video> tag.

Your server will probably get blacklisted for heavy usage or some arbitrary API violation. Do you have a plan to remedy or circumvent it?

Does he really need to lay out a plan for that? Getting a new IP is absolutely trivial these days, and if you need to move around between subnets, that's easy too.

@amadeusw: I'm just planning to rebuild the VPS any time it gets blocked, if it gets blocked. Given that YouTube downloader websites have worked for so long without going down, I don't think that would be an issue.

Ha. So you're stealing content and then offering it up for free (and presumably you're on the hook for bandwidth bills)?

Exactly what's the goal of your ill-fated plan? You're going to get blocked/banned and when you continue to circumvent it, you're going to get a C&D. This is an absolutely terrible idea.

My goal is to use YouTube on an Intel atom single core netbook without waiting minutes for the video to load in their stupid DASH player.

Will that work? For some reason, I guessed the YouTube video URL was a function of the first two or three bytes of your IPv4 address, to prevent exactly this case. I did something like that back when I designed a CAPTCHA system for LimeWire.

(The LimeWire website only ran PHP (soft requirement), the credit card processing box only ran Perl (hard requirement), no shared network drive between website and credit card box (hard requirement), so none of the existing Open Source CAPTCHA implementations worked. So, I made the CAPTCHA answer a cryptographic function of a shared secret, the user's /24 network, and a user-supplied timestamp rounded to a 32 or 64-second boundary. Timestamps older than 15 minutes were rejected, and messing with the timestamp would mean that the captcha answer wouldn't match the image you were given. I watched an attacker solve a CAPTCHA for an IP in Virginia and a couple seconds later try replaying it thousands of times from an IP in England. A few IP addresses for US navy satellite ground stations in Virginia (NAT for tons of deployed sailors) had to be white-listed from the replay checker.)

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