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Comment by bspammer | Hacker News Reader

I know this is quite selfish but the more accessible youtube-dl is, the more likely Google is to see it as a business threat, and the more likely they are to add some sort of content DRM. Just something to think about

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It's coming regardless, as soon as Google can get their CDN efficiency to a point where they can do on the fly encryption of the stream (or post encryption insertion if they can figure out a way to do the key management) with the advertising embedded they'll push the switch anyway, to prevent ad blocking.

That capability is truly scary. Once the ads are baked in and everyone has that capability, there will be no escape. It'll be worse when they DRM HTML itself and force the ads down our throat.

It feels like we've backslid by miles and miles since I first got on the Internet in the late 90's. I no longer like this Internet.

I agree, ideally youtube-dl would remain obscure, but YT has been on to it for a long time. It's somewhat of an arms race right now. I have to update youtube-dl every few weeks or it will simply stop working.

I would not be entirely suprised if Youtube one day just requires actual browser DRM to work at all. That would likely break every single smart TV out there, which is probably the only reason why they haven't yet done it. However, as they progress further on their path away from amateur content towards corporate-only content, I'd say there is a decent chance they'll pull that switch eventually. And die shortly after, of course.

Which also sounds like a good reason to make copies of everything interesting on YouTube now, while we still can.

Indeed. I'd go further and say that it's generally a good idea to make backups of all the cloud stuff you're using. The assumption that it'll always be there is fundamentally flawed. While there might well be outliers, companies who keep content archived for virtually ever, most platforms will go away at some point.

Personally I think Youtube is a likely candidate for this. They may very well just remove all "legacy" content one day. They have absolutely no idea what to do with the platform, except offer it to music companies to feast on. They're at war with the majority of their content creators, I'd be very surprised if they didn't go for the nuclear option at some point - maybe after a large legal scandal...

That's exactly what I do, I make a copy of every video I watch.

I'm inclined to start doing it too; I'll try to wire something up this week that saves to my NAS over LAN. From time to time, I browse my "Liked" / "Favourited" videos on YouTube to find something I've seen years before, only to discover that it's gone.

Frankly I wouldn't mind making a browser extension that does exactly that, and then if you go back to a video you've already downloaded before it plays it from disk as opposed to from the network. Something I've thought about.

I agree, YouTube-Dl already has 50k stars on Github, it's certainly not obscure anymore. Although I'm not suggesting breaking the TOS if people are going to be using it to archive content then the best bet is probably to have the content archived as quickly as possible rather than trying to keep youtube-dl lowkey (ship has sailed) so as to not trigger DRM from YouTube

> That would likely break every single smart TV out there, which is probably the only reason why they haven't yet done it.

It wouldn't, support for Widevine has been mandatory in order for Google to let TV manufacturers have a YouTube app for about four years now, and if you play back a Google Play film on the YouTube application on your smart TV it's already using Widevine DRM.

But it probably isn't used in the YouTube apps and using it would require pushing an update. Smart TV manufacturers are not famous for pushing updates promptly.

> But it probably isn't used in the YouTube apps and using it would require pushing an update.

It is used in the YouTube apps, for playing back Google Play film purchases and rentals inside YouTube. Google does not allow YouTube to be installed if the YouTube apps cannot call the requisite APIs.

> I would not be entirely suprised if Youtube one day just requires actual browser DRM to work at all.

maybe not at all, but I definitely can see them offering the option to (some?) authors.

Maybe they already have? `youtube-dl` has been breaking a lot for me lately. I've been using the Fedora repo build for many years and don't remember it ever breaking, not once. Now in the last couple of months it had suddenly stopped working 4 or 5 times, which forced me to install the official build from `pip`, which is updated more frequently.

youtube-dl is one of those rare programs that you shouldn't download from a repository. Do this instead:

- Download from the project page and put it anywhere in your path (it's a single file)

- Subsequently do 'youtube-dl -U' whenever you want to update. It updates itself in-place with the latest release (there's usually 2 or 3 released per week)

What's the difference to installing 2-3 updates per week over the distro? One should be installing distro updates daily anyway.

Distro repositories can't keep up with the number or timeliness of updates. When youtube deploys an update that breaks the tool (happens on a semi-regular basis), you want access to the fix ASAP.

Yes. That!

I quickly learned the difference. Downloading from YouTube breaks. No distro update. But updating only the script is quick and easy.

Initial installation is also very easy. Two one-line recipies to install it are provided. One using CURL and one using WGET.

https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/index.html

I have been using it with ffmpeg on a google pixelbook on cruoton for over a year and love it.

You are right and there is nothing selfish about this.

Better few than none.

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