Hacker News Reader

Comment by 15155 | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the next step should be: "embed a JS interpreter and use Google's own code."

That is in fact, exactly what youtube-dl is doing. They download the JS code provided by Google, then use regexes to figure out which function is the function that Google provides for un-arranging the characters, then they load Google's JS into an interpreter and provide it with the Google supplied URL to get the original signature. See the code here:

https://gitlab.com/HacktorIT/youtube-dl/-/blob/master/youtub...

So yeah, Youtube/Google is doing (basically) nothing to protect the content, and for the absolutely token obfuscation they do use, they also provide you with the way to get right back to directly accessing the data without any protections.

The RIAA is lying in saying that Google is using technical protections, and they're lying in saying that youtube-dl is doing anything other than what Google tells them to do in order to access videos.

Ah: I assumed this was something a la DeCSS - copyrighted numbers or a decryption algorithm or something.

I don't see how this is technically different than implementing any other conforming User Agent. Legally...

Ahem, your honor, please use the gavel to make it official.

Are they lying when they say ‘YouTube’s “rolling cipher” is an effective technical measure within the meaning of EU and German law, which is materially identical to Title 17 U.S.C. §1201 of the United States Code’? That seems quite plausible to me. Executing Google’s code in a regular web browser doesn’t give you a way to save an .mp4 file on your computer.

You can use Chrome's Network Tools to download the files. Hard to argue that it's effective when Google's own software can bypass it out of the box.

Just check the network tab, copy the URL and remove the range parameter. You'll get one for video and another for audio, which you can merge to recover the original file. This is effectively what youtube-dl does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com