New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1 | Hacker News Reader

New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1

youtube-dl.org

922 pointsgeophertz303 comments

I had never heard of youtube-dl prior to this whole saga. But I used it for the first time yesterday and it works great.

So maybe I should thank the RIAA for clueing me in!

This is known as the Streisand effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

I have never heard of Barbra Streisand or the Streisand effect. I love how the "Streisand effect" is an example of itself.

Eh, I just looked it up and the Streisand effect was about an aerial photograph of Streisand's mansion which she wanted to hide, not about promotion of Streisand's work. So unless you downloaded that photo, I guess this is an anti-example (as in this case the effect worked in her favor, not against her).

The point is trying to hide something only makes it more known. In her case it was a picture, in this case it's software.

Following that wikipedia link leads to downloading and viewing the picture.

She was trying to take down an image that was on a niche ecological website with six downloads. It is now the example image of a Wikipedia article on a commonly used term. That's a big net loss.

> I love how the "Streisand effect" is an example of itself.

For the Streisand effect to be an example of itself, there would have to be an attempt to ban or suppress the usage or knowledge of the idea of the effect. I don't think that's happened, so I don't see how it's self-referential.

FTFY with the following statement of alternative fact:

the Streisand Effect is fake news.

We should review the wiki article discussion as a data source for this.

I wonder if we could get Barbara's lawyers to C&D any articles mentioning the Streisand effect.

There is a suppression of source code.

Couldn't you consider a (british) super-injunction to be an attempt at suppression?

If Streisand had that kind of power at that time there could well have been no Streisand effect - though perhaps that is unconstitutional in the USA ....

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect :

"It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress the California Coastal Records Project's photograph of her residence in Malibu, California, taken to document California coastal erosion, inadvertently drew further attention to it in 2003."

My point is that more people know about Barbra Streisand and the Streisand Effect because of Streisand's attempts to suppress information.

I'd be willing to say that there are more people that know of Barbara Streisand for being Barbara Streisand than because of the Streisand Effect. That effect is a pretty niche kind of internet term whereas Streisand was proper famous well before the internet existed. Sure, you may have TIL who she was, but let's not swipe that broad brush so freely.

How long before the Streisand Effect outperforms Barbra herself?

One datapoint: I know about Streisand because of the Streisand Effect.

Make that 2. I knew about the effect for years before I learned who she was.

It outready outperformed the topic of this room for example

Not much - she's a boomer icon, but as soon as that generation kicks the metaphorical bucket...

Streisand was 22 in 1964 when her career kicked-off with Funny Girl. I think she (like Marvin Hamlisch) was more popular with the 'Silent Generation' (1928-45).

People 35 and under probably know her better from her effect or as a giant mecha on South Park.

There's also a classic Liz Carroll reel, "Barbra Streisand's Trip to Saginaw": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr2RgTmO1pI (I was in the (Saginaw) audience the night Liz named it.)

I only know her from the song.

This one?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Io3aSEkG_s

Yes but there is a version without the talking

Radio edit? https://youtu.be/OXB-k0oJ48E Yep, it’s a modern classic. :)

Here’s a “pop up” version of the music video with more details about the song: https://youtu.be/i_QOeWflG9g

>it’s a modern classic

I remember first hearing this song playing on someones phone back when the best mobile game was that nokia red ball thing.

He's being pedantic, it's a "what are the odds of Lou Gehrig contracting Lou Gehrig's disease?" joke, except without a punchline.

I am 29 and have a slight clue of who she was, but I know (and known for a long time) exactly what the effect is.

In my opinion, in ten or twenty years this will shift even further and young people will know the Streisand name only because of the "effect".

I'm 57, gay, and I worship Barbra Streisand.

I'm guessing anyone in theater/drama/choir classes in high schools today would also be familiar regardless orientation. Venn diagrams of those groups would probably look very circle-ish.

^Glee show fans

I'm 53, straight (male), and not at all into show tunes.

But I reckon I could still sing along with You Don't Bring Be Flowers Anymore and Woman In Love and get most of the lyrics right.

She's more my parent's era than mine, but like The Beatles and Cat Stevens, I grew up listening to my parents music...

Fwiw i heard the expression first and then assumed it’s something to do with the difficulty of getting tickets

People want to get tickets because ticket are hard to get

I think duck sauce song played a role here, but otherwise the Streisand effect is pretty well known and explainable.

> I have never heard of Barbra Streisand...

Shit, now I feel old.

Then you're one of todays lucky 10000.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I was always surprised it was never referred to by an event that wildly predates the Streisand image: Alyssa Milano suing websites (Though apparently it was her mother filing the suits first) to try to have her nude images removed from the internet.

That was 1998. Streisand was 2003.

https://money.cnn.com/1998/04/30/technology/internet_pkg/

1998 sounded much more reasonable to me than 2003. But that is because, I for some reason thought that the streissand effect came to be following the Mecha Streissand episode of South Park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecha-Streisand

Not directly applicable to RIAA here as they started this by issuing the takedown requests, but I often get around the Streisand effect by ignoring things and then issuing takedown notices later.

Like for example, if something came out that some persons might use to try an embarrass me, I let it stay out for a while and don't really address it. Two to three people tweet it and it doesn't go further, hundreds of people weren't compelled to save it "for the lulz". Then a few weeks or months later I get the service to take it down, the person that posted barely notices or understands that their voice is not strong enough and the bar to change that is much higher and they've moved on to some other issue de jour.

Yes, there is a possibility that it circulates pretty far initially, or that the thing being shared gets ingrained into the consciousness as truth, but in those circumstances providing a reaction involving the law or lawyers would still amplify it.

Does this happen to you a lot?

handful of times

people try ad hominem attacks but nobody cares, or think that I’m vulnerable because I’ve had public facing roles and try to act on that but it’s just them wasting energy

its basically something like "what you can't have an opinion online! I can damage you therefore I'll try to damage you!" and then realize they have no reach and the world doesn't work the way they think it does

Same as what happened to mp3s RIAA is the best marketer of pirate methods, and the dumbest

Isn't marketing something illegal, also illegal? I wonder if some cheeky case could be made here, hah.

There's nothing illegal about youtube-dl, so it can't.

Fair - what word should i have used in place of illegal to describe DMCA?

Youtube DL was taken down because it was DMCA'd, to which we all (mostly?) agree was an abuse of DMCA, but nevertheless the premise seems to be that it was effectively a form of piracy - no? Isn't Piracy (and supporting Piracy/etc) "illegal"? Or is there a better word to use here?

Getting DMCA'd doesn't mean anything more than somebody submitted a letter saying "I believe this content infringes my copyright, please take it down.". It does not establish guilt.

Just because the RIAA cries foul doesn't mean there is actually anything wrong here. Piracy is illegal, but youtube-dl is not a piracy tool, just like VHS recorders were not piracy tools. Making personal copies of videos is absolutely legal, and seems to be the prominent way to use youtube-dl (Why else would you use it? The content is already available for free on youtube itself!).

So what you should call youtube-dl is "Something the RIAA doesn't like", basically.

Right, but there is an implication that if it was piracy it is illegal, no? Lets not play coy.

My comment of illegal isn't a court of law, my intent was clearly discussing the idea that if the RIAA is accusing youtube-dl of piracy (effectively), and then they themselves increase popularity of youtube-dl, they would effectively be promoting piracy, aka something illegal.

Ya'll are getting hung up on the details. It was a joke.

Aaah, well, thanks for explaining, because the joke went totally woosh over my head :^).

Well not a joke i guess, no punchline hah. But still - humor /cheeky comment about if it's considered piracy ("illegal"), and the RIAA end up promoting it, aren't they themselves promoting piracy. That's all :)

I think the word you are looking for is "allegation."

The RIAA falsely claims youtube-dl is a tool for piracy. This is not reality. Accepting the RIAA's premise is problematic.

The right words here are not "piracy" or "illegal," but it is not clear what statement you are trying to make. I can't recommend any better words without additional context.

Maybe “arguably illegal”? The RIAA’s argument is that youtube-dl is a tool for circumventing copyright protection, which is related to the concept of piracy or copyright infringement, but prohibited by different laws. Marketing a circumvention tool can be illegal even if there are ways to use it that don’t infringe copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-circumvention

It circumvents, therefore it's illegal. See 17 U.S.C section 1201(b).

But youtube-dl is not a "pirate method", it's a neutral tool for downloading video contents. Presumably, you have the right to download those contents.

Does anyone technically have the right to download from youtube in this way? Even if so, it's clearly in the category of software predominantly used for piracy, all of which can also have legitimate uses.

Can you explain what makes you think that even makes sense? Most of the relevant YouTube videos are already available for free to the public, so there is no real incentive to download them from YouTube and upload them to The Pirate Bay. Downloading a copy for personal use would often fall under fair use. Uses with third party video players like mpv aren't even making a permanent copy. Many of the videos are in the public domain (e.g. from NASA) or are permissively licensed (e.g. many university course lecture videos or conference talks).

Who is even using this for some kind of meaningful copyright infringement?

> Downloading a copy for personal use would often fall under fair use.

Downloading a copy for personal use isn't even copyright infringement - for copyright infringement to happen, you'd have to then share that copy you made. For instance, you are allowed to do VHS copies of TV shows, and that was confirmed by Supreme Court[0].

This whole thing doesn't make sense to me either.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

The Betamax case predates the DMCA, which created the “anti-circumvention” laws the RIAA is relying on here. It was also a 5:4 decision that depended on “a significant likelihood that substantial numbers of copyright holders who license their works for broadcast on free television would not object to having their broadcasts time-shifted,” and the copyright holders’ failure “to demonstrate that time-shifting would cause any likelihood of non-minimal harm to the potential market for, or the value of, their copyrighted works.” The opinion explicitly did not cover pay TV, and the court also noted that the cost of Betamax tapes made it difficult to build your own library of tapes for repeated viewing, in concluding that there was no likelihood of harm. I think it’s an interesting and open question whether the typical use of youtube-dl falls under fair use.

What a bizarre revisionist point of view. Radio players quite naturally learned to record to cassettes once the technology was available and no one ever came to raid player manufacturers, nor did anyone brand the kid sitting at home recording the radio some piracy overlord.

Stop repeating this RIAA nonsense.

Unsure if this is sarcasm, if not it sounds like you missed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music

also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

If you publish a youtube video publicly, there is an expectation that the public is allowed to view it.

Is the idea that the author didn't have the rights to publish the video in the first place, due to things like unlicensed background music?

Thus far, Youtube is under the safe harbor principle of the DMCA, and as long as they honor those takedown notices, the end user is not likely to be held accountable. The software they use is even less likely to be.

The new narrative is that obviously you’re not permitted expect in very rare circumstances, so any tool used to aid actual fair use gets slammed with DMCA take-downs.

I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s how they’ve been trying to frame the discussion for a long time now.

Yes, and I'm very surprised at the number of people that are apparently falling for this narrative. It would've been unthinkable just a decade ago, it seems.

It's good to see others recognise it for what it is. It needs to be strongly pushed back.

That's because even a decade ago (well, a decade and a half, factoring in recent memory), the internet was a fundamentally different, much more open place. Now probably 90% of traffic exists in increasingly siloed walled gardens, which all take measures to ensure their content (and more importantly, you) stay there. (Hell, a good portion of that traffic isn't even from some general-purpose browser, it's from an app.) And circumventing that is pretty much the letter of the (poorly worded) law when it comes to the DMCA. It's not really the people that have changed, it's the internet that has.

(Sure, many parts of the internet are still open, but youtube isn't one of them.)

Could we not call it "watch" instead? It's a neutral tool to watch youtube videos.

How exactly the video file gets downloaded into the viewing device is an implementation detail. Whether it's a MythTV plugin, that free Android app, Firefox, or this Python tool isn't important. If one of them is declared illegal in some jurisdiction, they all are.

There’s no technical differentiation between downloading and watching.

Apart from bandwidth being used quicker as the HLS/DASH segments are requested from the server at shorter intervals.

Unsure if that can be configured or not, but if your video content distribution network can’t rate limit or handle bursts you probably have more pressing issues.

Agreed, just mentioning a "technical difference" that could be used to determine if people are watching in real time vs downloading-with-a-tool-that-grabs-everything-as-fast-as-possible. Since this is Google, it's fair to assume they might be interested in anything that causes them to lose Ad revenue.

It's important if a court cares, which would probably be the case. Watching a YouTube video on Firefox is unlikely to be construed as circumventing DRM while downloading the same video with youtube-dl conceivably could be construed as such.

Courts aren't always concerned with technical differences, more often intent.

No court has found any of the mentioned software to be illegal so far, anywhere.

They are all interchangeable. Should one implementation be found problematic, in theory it can be swapped with another.

It's not comparable to DRM, where a particular software can be licensed for a particular digital protection mechanism. In this case either they all are, or none are.

You're still just focused on technical implementation and not the intent behind actions, which is also important and will likely be considered by the courts.

While there is no technical difference, there is quite a difference of intent between watching a streaming video and downloading it to circumvent copy-protection.

That would make little sense because the tool itself doesn't have anything to do with watching videos. It only downloads them, or pieces of them, and does some format and metadata conversion. The name describes precisely what it does: it downloads data.

That's not entirely true. youtube-dl, used as a library in a media player like mpv, is quite literally used for watching videos.

youtube-dl is used for reasons other than just watching videos. For example, journalists use it to download videos from YouTube to edit them into their news stories. Data scientists are using it to download videos for automated analysis in quantities larger than any of the involved scientists could ever watch. Both are not "watching" in the narrow sense implied by the word, but not copyright violations either because they probably qualify as fair use.

The point is that youtube-dl does exactly the same thing as every other method of watching the video. You can't watch the video -- by any means -- without downloading it first. The uses you list may not be "watching" in a particular sense of the word, but they are "watching" in the same sense of the word that is relevant to using a web browser -- the only sense that would apply to YouTube.

It doesn't matter. YouTube's Standard License authorizes certain videos to be viewed only by streaming through YouTube's web player or an authorized client. This is enforced by obfuscating code in the player. By circumventing that code, youtube-dl veers into "illegal piracy tool" territory.

Note that it wouldn't matter if youtube-dl contained no deobfuscating code at all, but merely downloaded and evaluated the JavaScript Google's web client uses to deobfuscate. The result is the same: youtube-dl circumvents copyright access controls and is therefore illegal.

And it made me download a lot of MIT OCW courses which I watched and might watch from youtube. In case there will be a situation when we cannot download videos anymore from youtube, I'm gonna host a Peertube instance and upload all of these awesome materials. NewPipe which I currently use to view youtube has good support for peertube as well, so I won't miss much except maybe the comments.

Thanks, its easy to take for granted that these videos will always be available but a few years back Berkley took down a huge amount of content to try to preempt ADA subtitles legal problems. In the case of some advanced courses self learners can lose access to unique resources.

I hadn't heard about this, what a shame.

https://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/03/uc-berkley-to-remove-mor...

You can possibly also share what you have with r/datahoarders

Kind of a side point, but the video lectures are already available for download from links on the OCW site, probably with one less generation of compression than on youtube, including from the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/mit_ocw

> so I won't miss much except maybe the comments.

You won't miss anything then...

I'd not heard of it, but then I started seeing references to it everywhere. I believe this is the Baader-Meinhof-Streisand effect.

All the explanations of it that I found seemed completely implausible, but that didn't make me doubt any of those sources. This is probably an example of Baader-Meinhof-Streisand-Gell-Mann amnesia.

Here's to hoping the news draws in even more developers!

Everyone using youtubedl is just strengthening the RIAA's now inevitable lawsuit.

The Streisand Effect applies when your attempts to block something simply increases the harm you were trying to prevent. Importantly, their is no remedy for the kind of harm at issue in the Streisand Effect.

But the RIAA does have a remedy: they can sue for a lot of money. And ultimately, as the harm they are trying to prevent is financial, the Stroganoff Effect does not apply

How will the RIAA know how many of us are using it and use that to strengthen the lawsuit?

1) People have been cloning the repo for a week. That's a pretty trivial search to do on Github/Gitlab/etc.

2) They can print out copies of Reddit, HN, other websites to show people bragging about using Youtube-DL to download music videos to "stick it to the RIAA." They only need to establish a specific number for purposes of statutory damages, if the case goes to trial. Otherwise, the specifics don't matter; only that many people are using the tool to infringe on RIAA-members' works.

So it's not "everyone using it" but "some people talking about it" that you're saying is an issue.

I'm not sure such brags prove anything, I certainly don't always tell the truth on the internet.

I didn't know that it supported such a large number of various websites in addition to Youtube. Thank you RIAA!

I literally don’t check anymore, I just smash the URL I wanna rip into YouTube-do. I’m shocked when they _dont_ work.

Put quotes around the site. I learned this recently after years of using. Helps sometimes.

youtube-dl.exe "https://vidsite.com/foo?bar"

Heh he eh, totally with you. The following kind of snippets appear a lot in my command line history (for music):

   youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3  <mediaurl>

I have this in my shellrc, so that `youtube-dl` without arguments takes the URL from the clipboard:

  youtube-dl() {
    if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
      if [ "${WAYLAND_DISPLAY}" != "" ]; then
        env youtube-dl -f best "$(wl-paste --type text/plain)"
      else
        env youtube-dl -f best "$(xsel -b)"
      fi
    else
      env youtube-dl "$@"
    fi
  }

(Replace "-f best" if you just want audio.)

I took this "shell wrapper around youtube-dl" thing a bit further: I have a script that uses youtube-dl to download and enqueue music to mpd. I mainly use it to listen to bandcamp albums that I don't know yet so I can decide whether to buy them or stop listening to them. The script also automatically deletes stuff after a while so I don't accidentally keep listening to albums I haven't bought.

Source here if anyone's interested: https://github.com/liskin/dotfiles/blob/home/bin/youtube-dl-...

Youtube only offer audio in either AAC (in a .m4a container) or Opus formats.

Since lossy to lossy transcodes always cause some degradation due to the way perceptual codecs discard data, it's always best to use them as-is without converting.

AAC is widely compatible these days and is the broadcast industry (ITU / EBU) standard for distribution of end-user audio, the default recording format for most consumer and pro-sumer equipment, and also what Youtube's upload giudelines suggest. Therefore it's better just to get the `-f140 -x` for maximum compatibility, unless you know you can play the Opus audio and have reason to believe the upload was higher quality.

Exactly the same position.

Thank you RIAA!!

This could also be free promotion for the German hosting company Uberspace who hosts the youtube-dl.org website, including its DNS records. (.org is still vulnerable to DMCA of course)

https://uberspace.de/en/about/houserules/

So glad this is updated. yt-dl.org/bug still seems to point to the github DMCA takedown notice. There seems to be an issue on YouTube itself where youtube-dl has been throwing the error:

""token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug"

Considering the current political climate, youtube-dl is going to be my (and many's) literal weapon of choice against disinformation operations. Of course, the conspiracy theorist in me asks, what if that's the reason why youtube videos are suddenly breaking yt-dl? Making a video analysis tool unavailable during one of the most unstable times in history is beyond negligent, it's the kind of mendacity that polarizes and radicalizes people.

Surely an innocent mistake, that happened at the precise moment, at the worst possible time, affecting the one thing opposition would use, and with complete deniability.

"Oops." Indeed.

> one of the most unstable times in history

I can think of far more unstable times in history than the times we’re living in now, recent examples being WW1 & 2, nuclear threat during the Cold War.

The US Civil War is a better example than either WW1 or WW2 with respect to the balkanization of America, and the nuclear threat never went away. ;)

It depends on the continent you live on.

I could be wrong but OP's language suggested that the most immediate worst possible time would be the US election in two days and its resulting aftermath, and its connection to disinformation.

Perhaps I am a little biased as I've been eyeball-deep in weeding through election-focused disinformation and working with people to expose these tactics the past few months and everything looks like a nail to me right now.

How do you think those times became unstable?

Surely info suppression tactics have often played a role?

It was much easier to suppress info back then, and it is much easier to spread misinformation today.

In fact this is probably one of the most stable times in human history.

No kidding. I’m a 48 year old programmer. If today were 1939, y2k was the end of ww1, when I was a 28 year old programmer.

Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family, leave your house to have a cup of tea with a friend; you go walk through a restaurant without a mask on your face.

In much of Europe you can't do any of those things right now, without incurring the wrath of state force.

The next equivalent event in history in western europe to this destruction of civil liberty was the nazi occupation of France.

Yes, in WW1 or WW2 you were able to… oh wait, rot in trenches with a gas mask, or be fighting somewhere in Europe or northern africa or the pacific, or be interned in a concentration camp. That sounds much better than having to wear a mask when you go buy groceries

That's what's called an informal fallacy.

Not at all.

> Well during the cold war, WW I and WW II you could visit your family

My grandmother once told me her dad had to console a German soldier crying in the backyard because he wanted nothing more than being back home in Germany with his wife and children instead of occupying the Netherlands. It's not like he had much of a choice though.

My grandfather's dad (other side) had to work in Germany during the war. He sure as hell couldn't "just visit his family" and there was no realistic option to say no.

And then you have things like Anne Frank hiding in a bloody broomcloset for years. But the above are just two examples of "regular" folk who were not especially persecuted (or indeed, even the occupier).

Good heavens, this has got to be the most ignorant comment I've ever seen on HN. Please, study the daily lives of people in countries occupied by Nazi Germany and you'll find that any comparison to current events is absolutely ridiculous.

I was referring to non deployed persons, obviously.

My great-grandfather wasn't deployed. Anne Frank wasn't deployed. They were just regular citizens.

I think you are confused, I stated the last time any restrictions even remotely similar to this applied was then. But that despite those imposition on freedoms most people in say paris could go visit their parents etc. Which they cannot right now.

You seem to be acting like i'm saying this is worse when i clearly did not

OP probably meant one of the most stable times recent history, as in within most generations being alive today.

The majority of the population, boomers and younger, didn’t live during WW2 and we probably are globally the least stable since then right now.

In recent American history. I was born in 1985 and the breakup of Yugoslavia and ensuing wars happened in my lifetime, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and Ukraine Ukraine, and things like the Syrian civil war, US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan getting invaded by the Russians, then had a totalitarian Taliban rule, and then had the American invasion.

I mean, it sure is significant and all as the US, for better or worse, isn't "just another country", but it's also pretty narrow towards both the current time and specific location.

> Iraq invasion of the US,

That...didn't happen.

The MSM doesn't want you to know!

But we’re not just talking about the US. Tensions in the Asian region are at the highest since WWII as well: North Korea and South Korea. China and Taiwan. China and Hong Kong. Then there’s China and their increasingly imperial motives in Africa and the Asian sea. Plus increasing conflict with the US.

Then there’s Russia and Ukraine. Turkey and Armenia. The Middle East conflict with Israel, Europe, and the US.

So no, it’s not just American history. Globally, things are the least stable since WWII.

The Cold War was a sham, nobody was ever going to fire missiles except by mistake. It was just a way to maintain military budgets (and contracts) when peace broke out after WWII. Any instability in the main was only ever by design.

Look at all the people who went supernova when Clinton downsized the military after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.

"Generals and majors always seem so unhappy 'less they got a war."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiLuYZNzNyc

Stalin would have rolled over Europe if he had half the chance. Nukes like it or not is the reason why we haven't had WW3.

True. Mutually assured destruction is an effective deterrent. But should one nation fire a nuke and the other appeals to neutrals- Behold the lunatics have unleashed world killing weapons on us! - the first nation will become the beligerent state and effectively lose their war.

Were nukes the only way to deal with his appetite?

> except by mistake

No small threat; plenty of room for those, according to Daniel Ellsberg’s book ”The Doomsday Machine”.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-doomsday-machine-978160819...

This may be a silly question, but how do you intend to battle disinformation with yt-dl?

Makes certain types of media archivable when they otherwise wouldn’t be.

It’s rather common for people to take down things that can be used against them later. Very common for youtubers but also somewhat common for politicians who may want to distance themselves from historical points of view.

Also useful for pulling apart fakes where you need the original files to see how they were edited together.

My company does anti-disinformation consulting. We don’t use ytdl, but we do download videos. It helps to:

1. look for artifacts of deepfaking.

2. extract audio for speech to text, translation, and searching.

3. look for patterns that indicate the video is churned out by disinfo content farms.

Sounds like an interesting line of work, and one that could get very sophisticated.

First notice I have of this line of business. I am thoroughly intrigued. Is the deepfake situation that out of control? What kind of scenarios is it used for, in terms of spreading misinformation?

I wouldn’t say deepfakes are out of control, but we see their risk potential to our clients. We support social media platforms, politicians, and large corporations. So far, our social media clients are those most concerned and affected by deepfakes.

Threat actors use deepfakes, along with other forms of disinformation, to achieve their objective. The most commonly discussed are the Russians interfering with US elections, but many other nations are now getting in the game. We have also seen organized crime using elections or other hot-button issues to drive traffic to their ad-laden websites.

We are still in the early days of deepfakes. I am sure we will see many more sophisticated methods as the technology improves. As it becomes commoditized, it will become another tool used moving down market from geopolitical goals, to organized crime, to petty fraud.

I echo the sibling comments and would like to learn more about your work and perhaps have a link to your company or another one in the same industry.

In case you don’t return to this comment otherwise, I wanted to post that responded to the sibling post.

Ytdl is always breaking. That's kinda the reason why it needs to exist. It isn't any more sudden than any other time.

if you live in the US that is.

> "token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason

This is seemingly fixed in commit 6d4733ce - " [youtube] Fix JS player URL extraction" at 2020-10-31 23:52 GMT.

The barbarians aren’t at the gate, Genghis Khan ain’t riding across Central Asia, Japan is unified, America isn’t in the midst of a civil war, and Europe is trying this union thing on to see how that goes, and the relative fallout if it doesn’t work out looks fairly minor compared to the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, two World Wars and the Iron Curtain.

I know I know, recency bias and all that, but the world is pretty great these days, even if 2020 seems a low point in our lives.

It doesn't have to be the worst time in human history to be a bad time in human history, though I think our scale is a bit off if we're saying now is on-par with what was going on in the Middle Ages in Europe, for example.

What was the best time in human history?

Probably around 450BC, when the Eleusinian Mysteries began initiations in Athens.

Athens still had widespread slavery though, so I guess you had to be born in the "right" family, which would have been a minority.

Don't overlook that it's pretty recent that our beds are comfortable and our teeth don't hurt. Men not having extra children and wives to compensate for watching them die is pretty neat as well.

Pick your time post ww2 otherwise forget it. Even the roaring 20s were total and utter garbage compared to when penicillan existed.

In the west, Boomers did pretty well. When they were at their horny age there was this great new pill and STDs were all treatable. We really should rename the baby-boomers the boomer-bunnies. ;-) Probably had it the easiest economically, no world wars.

We sleep on the beds of emperors, kings and queens and banquets from the 4 corners of the earth is our norm.

I would say the early and mid 90s. The iron curtain is gone, economy is going up (without the gaping inequality we have now), and the world was having great hopes on pulling Russian and China into the international community.

The claim was: “one of the most unstable times in history” in reference to the present day.

You can make an argument that maybe this is a bad time in human history, and I would still disagree, but far less so than I would disagree with the claim I was replying to. If you can make the case that compared to just a decent sampling, doesn’t even have to be the entirety of human history, just a good sample, that today actually sucks, I’ll be impressed.

I am always downloading videos when someone repairs something of my interest or similar. Sometime authors take those videos down shortly after uploading because they think these are boring or have mistakes. I find them extremely valuable regardless of their issues. I use ytdl daily. I hope RIAA gets shut down. They don't work for artists and they are suppressing the culture.

Agree! I need to find the video I used to rewire my bedroom light switch. The guys who painted my bedroom somehow connected it so my alarm clock would short out half the house. I watched some handyman’s video 10 times going bayand forth to the outlet!

Was kinda hoping it would be called v2020.11.01.1 - The Streisand Release.

I have permananently blocked youtube on my browser. I use yt-dl to download and watch important videos. It is cumbersome but keeps the addictive tactics employed by yt at bay by increasing friction.

I use Hide Feed [1] and Intention [2] that were featured on HN some time ago (both by the same developer). They are amazing to reduce the addictive mechanisms employed by YouTube and similar sites.

[1]: https://www.hidefeed.com/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936742

Thanks mockingbirdy! Glad you're enjoying them. :)

I have found youtube to have become actually the opposite of addictive: annoying. The recommendations are always the same unrelated, popular garbage. Back in the day the videos were actually from different, related channels.

The front-page seems to be filled with fake-news and videos containing unnecessary jump cuts to keep the the attention of hyperactive 8-20 years olds, that can't concentrate for longer than 5 seconds.

You approach however is the same that I use to ween myself off things that I notice take up too much of my time. It is quite effective indeed.

It is a lot better when you have an account and are logged in. It matches my interests quite well. Though it is quite scary to see the amount of crap there is when you open youtube without being logged in.

I just open them with `mpv`, the keyboard controls are great.

mpv is just using ytdl behind the scenes to enable this! Agreed on the keyboard controls being far superior.

How do you permanently blocks YouTube on your browser?

You could add the domain to your adblocker's block list.

Here's how I watch YouTube right now. Maybe it helps someone:

1. Use RSS to subscribe to your Channels [1]

2. On iOS, use Shortcuts to forward to either HookTube, Invidious, or use YouTube PIP [2]. When you want to open a YT-Link, hold it, select share and then select your shortcut.(It seems cumbersome but it's actually faster than going to the website and dismissing the stupid sign-in prompt every time)

3. Use DDG !v and inline playback as an alternative player.

[1]: I love Reeder, but I'd also recommend Lire, NetNewsWire and FieryFeeds [2]: https://routinehub.co/shortcut/6622/

Neat. I compiled and installed the new release.

Compiling saves 1000ms of load time.

  $ time python youtube-dl-original --version                                                                                                             
  2020.11.01.1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
  real    0m1.474s                                                                                                                                                             
  user    0m1.356s                                                                                                                                                             
  sys     0m0.111s                                                                                                                                                             
  $ time python youtube-dl-compiled --version                                                                                                             
  2020.11.01.1                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
  real    0m0.380s                                                                                                                                                             
  user    0m0.328s                                                                                                                                                             
  sys     0m0.049s

It might be nice if youtube-dl would be compiled to bytecode before release.

So where is the development continuing with all this?

https://github.com/blackjack4494/yt-dlc Community version with much better support.

I think the question was about where development of the original youtube-dl was happening since there is a new release, not "which fork do you like the best."

This project seems to be merging most of what comes its way, but it's not what YT-DL needs now. It needs certainty, security and accountability showing that this isn't harmful fork, there is real person behind the project. You're not getting it by accepting PR that have title "ignore." or "ignore the second.." or by merging 20PR in 8 days.

The original author moved to gitlab and started GPG signing commits with his real GPG key. This gives packagers certainty they can replace old github links with new gitlab links, it tells us this project hasn't been compromised and is safe to be redistributed, unlike blackjack4494/yt-dlc

> The original author moved to gitlab and started GPG signing commits with his real GPG key.

Signed commits from them go back at least 1 year. So its not "started", but rather "continued" signing.

The package index version updated too. That is as certain as it gets.

Youtube-dlc was discussed here before all this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450560

This fork has existed for a long time (under blackjack4494), it isn't some random fork. I don't believe it merges PRs just randomly either, it's just a more active maintainer. This is explained on the README.

I'm not totally sure which tool I should use, but I'm leaning towards the fork, because it has more support in general, and has fixed things faster.

Official author moved to GitLab and his commits are GPG signed with his key https://gitlab.com/dstftw/youtube-dl/-/commits/master

I wonder why they called it a "Temporary youtube-dl repository". Are they still planning to go back to GitHub if things work out?

We can't open issues or PR there, it is a read-only repo.

TBH given the state that the issue tracker on GH used to be in, I would understand if they never opened up the issue tracker to the general public again.

That issue tracker was a great way to lose faith in humanity, just from the sheer number of people who couldn't follow instructions to search for existing issues before opening new ones, or to provide all the answers the issue template asked for.

Open source is bad enough. When open source meets the general public you can enjoy a nice disaster cake.

A neat way to solve this is with a team of bug triag-ers.

Get the developers to never look at a bug unless it has the "triaged' label. Then have trusted volunteers who read each bug, assist the bugreporters to get stack traces and whatever is necessary, dedup, and then finally apply the label.

It's a good task for people who have some technical expertise but aren't yet confident to be submitting their own PR's.

Sounds like something a bot could be set up to handle...

Duplicate stack trace? Close and link. Missing relevant info? Close.

I'd like there to be a platform/plugin part where people host site patches and fixes and the user can integrate what they'd like. A decentralized approach.

It supports dozens of sites btw. That's what I'm specifically referring to.

Github MUST get it back. Otherwise this will initiate the potential collapse of their service

> Otherwise this will initiate the potential collapse of their service

I think you are overestimating the amount of repositories that are affected by DMCA takedown threats (erroneous or legit).

I think they're not referring to number of repos affected. I think they're referring to the stain on GitHub's reputation as a reliable place to host open source projects (controversial or not).

It already is for me. I preferred other hosts tbh, but i was using Github mainly because it was a popular resume-oriented host for the projects i'd like to advertise as such.

However given that i work on some P2P services that could be argued scrape and/or distribute, i'm heavily debating moving. A nice host for a potential employer to view is not worth being DMCA'd.

I hope this causes a lot of additional desire to decentralize these portions of the dev workflow stack. Potential solutions exist, but no one cares.. i hope we collectively start caring more, and adopting solutions.

Why exactly? Gitlab will take down the repo due to DMCA all the same. (Along with any other US ran service, and even many European ones)

If you want to escape US law, feel free to use gitee.com located in China. Or, push your politicians to change the laws.

Microsoft has no way of overcoming the DMCA law themselves, other major companies have continued to lose lawsuits. It doesn't help that mega monopoly entities like Disney want it to stay taht way and will bribe politicians and others.

>Microsoft has no way of overcoming the DMCA law themselves

...assuming the DMCA request was valid. Some commenters in earlier HN threads were arguing that it wasn't.

The DMCA should have no power to take down youtube-dl without a court order. The takedown section only applies to posting copyrighted material without permission, which youtube-dl was clearly not doing.

The ban on circumvention tools allows for a claim in civil court, during which a judge may restrict availability of the program.

>this will initiate the potential collapse of their service

I, for one, heard a few too many times "this was the last straw" for every single privacy breach that happened in the past decade and resulted in no meaningful change for the better, so I find it hard to take this kind of statements seriously anymore. Is there any kind of basis that you'd like to provide for your speculation?

I don't think it's that.

I think it's because it's a stretch of the law and can then abused to block a LOT more.

The law wasn't stretched. From reading the DMCA and the fact that youtude-dl had examples of how to download copyrighted videos it seems that a DMCA was valid.

I still think it is bullshit (and so is DMCA) but that is how the law is written.

How many last straws is reddit up to now?

I could see them hosting their own git instance in a country where DMCA requests are worth jack-shit.

The commits aren't gpg signed though? The verified thing seems to be some weird gitlab stuff.

eg if you clone that repo, and run

   git log --show-signature 34299510b

git says the commit is unsigned.

That said, I have been able to find clones of the youtube-dl repo elsewhere with HEAD 416da574e, and the 3 commits the gitlab repo adds on top of that seem innocuous.

   git log -p 416da574e..HEAD

just shows a regex fix and then version bumps.

It would be interesting if we could make a youtube-dl that dynamically fetched the latest working version, cached it, and ran it, and the latest working version, or a link thereof, is stored on the blockchain so it can't be deleted.

That way the command would "just work", "always work", and it can be switched from one host to another anytime without breaking that.

The blockchain that is immutable and can't ever be retroactively changed (until a big fish loses money, see Ethereum DAO fork).

I think hosting the development repository in a country that doesn't respect the DMCA is a simpler solution. Git is a blockchain too, after all.

Right, just keep shoving the latest version onto the end of the blockchain, and point some wallet at the latest revision. Point is nobody will be able to DMCA it.

The problem with this is that DMCA isn't the only option the RIAA has by a long shot. The DMCA is a tool to get a platform to stop hosting content the rights holder believes is infringing. There's nothing stopping the RIAA from sending a DMCA notice and suing all the contributors. In other words, the project doesn't just need to be hosted in a country that is outside the reach of the US legal system, but the maintainers and contributors as individuals need to also be outside the reach of the US legal system. In fact, I'd be shocked if RIAA doesn't go after the maintainers and major contributors individually if they haven't already (I haven't been following this very closely).

Interestingly, the DMCA notice RIAA sent GitHub isn't a typical DMCA notice either. It seems to be more of a cease and desist along the lines of "we noticed this repo is a tool used to infringe on our rights -- sure would be a shame if you were to get caught up in the legal shitstorm that's about to happen, thanks!"

What do you mean by "the blockain"?

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there seems to be a logic gap in your proposal.

Let's take this objective:

>it can be switched from one host to another anytime without breaking that.

... that flexibility of any unknown host in the future then breaks the following code:

>if we could make a youtube-dl that dynamically fetched the latest working version

... and youtube-dl would download the latest version from where? What kind of "intelligence" does one put in the code to download from a future unknown http source?

One could try to be clever and embed a "intelligent algorithm" inside youtube-dl to scan the Google SERs[0] for the latest host source but that's not foolproof. Google may also later block results with the all-too-common censorship message "In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 6 results from this page."

Would youtubel-dl scan a well-known Twitter account or SMTP mailing list server to find the latest version? (My previous comment exploring that[0])

Storing binary blobs in popular blockchains like Bitcoin or Ethereum would be near impossible because of technical and architectural limits. (E.g. youtube-dl binary is about 1.7MB and thus miners will reject your non-standard transaction.)

I'm unaware of a foolproof way to share future versions aka future sources that can be programmed into deterministic code. Discovery will have to involve humans coordinating in some way. E.g. PirateBay moves from host to host but humans (not code) spread the new location.

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube-dl+latest+download

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24930317

You could probably post a gpg-signed url to the blockchain, and scan the blockchain for new urls signed by a known gpg key. Or something like that.

The gpg approach doesn't seem that reliable. Let's look at the paragraph about history of youtube-dl from wikipedia[1]:

>History youtube-dl was created in 2008 by Ricardo Garcia.[4] Initially, only YouTube was supported, but as the project grew, it began supporting other video sharing websites.[5] Ricardo Garcia stepped down as maintainer in 2011 and was replaced with phihag, who later stepped down and was replaced with dstftw.[6]

Would that be 3 different gpg signatures?

- gpg for Ricardo Garcia

- gpg for phihag

- gpg for dstftw

What would be the deterministic programming code algorithm to find the future unknown gpg signature for the latest non-malware version of youtube-dl on the blockchain?

Conceivably, one could create a project-specific gpg signature (private key shared with future authors) instead of human-author-specific gpg signer. Is that collaboration scenario common?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youtube-dl#History

That's how android apks work. An app is signed with a public/private key combo, updates must match the same key. Surely something similar could be conceived. Keys could have an expiration date and someone would just need to post a signed update before it expires that implements an additional new key, then you could even upgrade extremely old versions through a couple of steps.

Have each outgoing maintainer sign a string "I approve <new maintainer> whose public gpg is <public gpg key>"?

Doesn't work if latest maintainer loses access to their private key or dies or anything like that though.

> I'm unaware of a foolproof way to share future versions aka future sources that can be programmed into deterministic code.

This is entirely possible :)

You would use an "USK" ("updatable subspace key") address of Freenet to achieve that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

Also see my other comment to the parent for an explanation of why Freenet would be preferable to blockchains here.

You do not need a resiliant method of distributing youtube-dl; just a resilient method of distributing the location where you are distributing youtube-dl, which is probably just a URL.

This is small enough that embedding it in a major blockchain is entirely feasible. There is also the much more boring option of hardcoding many different locations to find the URL.

> or a link thereof, is stored on the blockchain so it can't be deleted.

A blockchain is overkill for this:

Its central goal of providing a clear ordering of events by the time at which they happened (t1 < t2 < t3) is not necessary to distribute software updates.

You merely want to be able to sort things by a number, the version of the software, which their author has provided on their own.

Remember, the blockchain was invented so Bitcoin could prevent double-spending of the same coins. I.e. if someone attempts to send the same money to multiple different addresses and thus fool multiple people into believing they were paid it can use the blockchain to determine which attempt was the first and ignore all others.

Such attacks would happen within milliseconds typically, hence the need for a strong mechanism against them.

This is not needed for merely distributing downloads:

You already trust the author enough that you would run their code, so you can as well trust them that the number which they say is the latest version in fact is the latest one. That's also because they have no incentive to fool you into using an older one, there's no money involved.

What you'd want instead is Freenet, the goal of which is preventing censorship and providing anonymity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

It's "updatable subspace key" (USK) address type is suitable here.

Erm, you seem to be saying something sensible about blockchain. Don't you know that's just not the done thing these days ?

I thought blockchain mania had passed and it's all about AI these days?

It's all about AI running on the blockchain

> Its central goal of providing a clear ordering of events by the time at which they happened (t1 < t2 < t3) is not necessary to distribute software updates.

I guess that's not strictly necessary just to provide a binary update, but this feature could also be used to make the blockchain itself host the repo and its commits. Branches, pull requests, reverts, and everything could be stored as events on the blockchain. Differential commits do need that clear ordering of time to work.

Basically, imagine a decentralized version of Github.

I think you are describing git.

git itself doesn't support a decentralized push as far as I know, or rather that decentralized hosting infrastructure hasn't been built to seamlessly work with git.

Yes it does, you can either push to multiple remotes individually, or setup multiple pushurls for a single remote.

I'm a blockchain skeptic with the best of them, but this does not solve the problem GP is describing. Yes, git supports multiple remotes, but there is no durable, decentralized hosting infrastructure for arbitrary repos that I am familiar with.

Unless I misunderstand git-ssb does this.

No, they do not need ordering of time, they need the precise ordering their developers chose for them to make sense:

Code is a well-chosen piece of logic to make sense as a whole. You can't just arbitrarily take to pieces of code and mash them together just because two random developers on the planet happened to write them one after the other in a sequential fashion of time.

E.g if you ask a classroom "What's 1 + 1 ?" then someone might say "3" right after you asked but before someone else says "2", but that does not make "3" right.

Proper order of commits is established by a MUCH more simple mechanism in fact: A git commit includes the hash of the previous commit in the history.

So the plain aspect of "storing some bytes" is needed, not a blockchain :) As someone else said, Git provides just that.

FWIW, censorship-resistant networks such as the aforementioned Freenet can and are used to publish Git repositories in a robust fashion. But no blockchain magic is required here either :)

Okay, point taken. I guess with blockchain though it might "moon" and you might make a few bucks off the "whales" who "hodl" or whatever. LOL.

> That way the command would "just work", "always work", and it can be switched from one host to another anytime without breaking that.

Sounds like what you actually want is IPFS.

https://ipfs.io/

"It would be interesting if we could make a youtube-dl that dynamically fetched the latest working version ..."

I think a better strategy would be to separate the youtube-dl core "engine" from the set of rules/exceptions/offsets that it uses to iterate and download the media.

So the core youtube-dl could not download anything (or, perhaps, only a simple file at a static URL) and you would add a set of rules, or specs, that give it the ability to download from youtube or vimeo or whatever.

Then you would not worry about blocking youtube-dl or having it barred from github, etc. and all of the "rules" could be simply shared, or published, as simple text via pastebin or email or whatever.

How about a command line tool for working with Merkle DAGs of changes to text files and that also supports "pushing" and "pulling" these changes in a decentralized fashion? I can think of a really popular one...

Thank you. It seems like a great tool that I including everyone in our family will now start to use as well!

Wow, does this mean I can download YouTube videos and watch them without ads? That would be life changing.

Running uBlock Origin [1] and NextDNS [2], I can't remember when I last saw an ad on YouTube. I recommend you give it a try.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock

[2] https://nextdns.io/

Unfortunately, on mobile. At least on iOS

You can use a DNS based solution on iOS. It's easy for WiFi and there are apps that can change it for the cellular network as well.

They increasingly use the same servers for ads, so a DNS-based solution won't work well.

You don't need a DNS based solution, you can just use the "AdGuard" app, which will block ads in Safari.

However, neither Adguard nor DNS based blocking will block ads in the iOS Youtube App.

I have run a pihole at home for a while now. YouTube ads still show.

I was previously considering to make my next phone an iPhone (better integration with my MacBook), but I recently discovered Youtube Vanced and realized that if I'm ever going to watch non-trivial amounts of Youtube on my phone it might be worth it to stay on Android just for that app.

Both Vanced and NewPipe are pretty good YT alternatives.

Vanced is a modded YT app, while NewPipe is open source and has a background player too, with download feature.

Pythonista on iOS can run yt-dl, works well

YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube reasonably believes that its provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.

I've never ever heard of this happening. I feel like there's almost no chance this isn't just bluster

That's in terms on service. Google may start enforcing this clause whenever they want.

Good thing I don't have a persistent Google account.

You don't have to log in to use newpipe

NewPipe as a replacement for youtube's default player, at least if you're on android. And uBlock works on Firefox for android.

I recommend going with the APK version of NewPipe as the FDroid install often takes a while to catch up to breaking changes on youtube.

https://newpipe.schabi.org/

You can add the NewPipe repo to bypass F-Droid official repo.

https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=E2402C78...

Great to see they have a repo up now, I imagine I can switch from the apk to that directly as they have the same signing key?

Thank you. It was just two presses on my phone to add the repo.

NewPipe’s instructions on adding this repo to F-Droid: https://newpipe.schabi.org/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-.... Note the warning to export your data from your current version of NewPipe before upgrading.

You can but using an ad content blocker such as uBlock origin would be far easier.

https://ublockorigin.com/

Sure. And you can extract the audio track if you want to listen to lectures without having to play video (on your phone, say).

You can also do this on Android with NewPipe. Unlike the official app you can lock your screen or use other apps without the audio pausing.

Does newpipe provide off-line access?

It has downloads too.

Yes

Yes! And it has more useful features than official YouTube app, e.g. users can change size/aspect ratio - quite useful in portrait mode; or brightness/volume with a single swiping up/down.

FWIW, I subscribe to YouTube Premium which lets me download videos, watch them without ads, and also includes YouTube Music (essentially like Spotify but without as good a recommendation engine).

If, for some reason, I really wanted to download a video to have a copy of it forever, I'd use youtube-dl

YouTube premium lets you “download” videos but I don’t think it doesn’t actually let you get an MP4 file. It just lets you watch the video offline.

True. That's a good clarification to make

But normal YouTube videos aren’t DRMed at all so you should be able to find the file in cleartext somewhere on your hdd

I don’t think you can use that feature on the web. It’s mobile app only. Maybe you can use adb to grab them off an android device but it’s not nearly as easy as youtube-dl. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were DRM’d in that scenario anyway.

In another thread someone explained that the videos were stored in their original chunked format, so it wouldn't be that easy to just extract it.

Yeah, and many apps are based or borrow code from YouTube-DL to achieve this.

For example NewPipe (Android) and FreeTube (Windows MacOS, Linux)

VLC too. [0]

As someone pointed out recently, [1] this presumably breaks the YouTube terms of service, as presumably does any use of youtube-dl.

[0] https://github.com/videolan/vlc/search?q=youtube

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24894425

Where does one host sites like YouTube-dl.org?

How do you host a thing so Uncle Sam’s (US)powerful hands can’t touch it?

Site is hosted on Uberspace... A great place for anyone looking for entry level stuff/personal website

Someone already suggested ideas for the future:

https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/jktx5b/how_to_an...

Reposting comment from thread about youtube-dl's RIAA issue, of 8 days ago. It started with:

"As a technical aside (to the main topic of this HN thread), I had written a blog post some years ago, describing some uses of youtube-dl, and some commentary giving an overview of what its source does:"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24876617

So I guess this means development will continue even without Github? Good to know. All they need to do is put up an issue tracker/PR tracker, and then a git link to the repo where people can push feature branches to, and there is no need for github at all. Plenty of free issue trackers they can self host, and self hosting git is fairly simple.

Fossil at https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki has all of those built-in. If youtube-dl were to pick it up, it'd finally gain some traction.

Interesting, MS Edge flags the download as an unsafe file.

Not too surprising, it's a bare .exe file with a URL not seen in the wild before, and unsigned.

One of the many reasons I got out of the world for providing random tools for Windows users was this sort of pain.

does youtube-dl -U still works?

Yes it does. Why do you even ask instead of just trying?

Auto-update didn't work for me either.

  Updating to version 2020.11.01.1 ...
  ERROR: unable to download latest version

Go HERE: https://youtube-dl.org/ and download the youtube-dl.exe file directly this will give you the 2020.11.01.1 version https://youtube-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl.exe

Its not outside the realm of possibilities that someone familiar with the command might not be at their computer and therefore unable to test it at the moment, all the while the curiosity burns.

Thanks for confirming

I get "ERROR: can't find the current version. Please try again later."

Worked for me.

    Updating to version 2020.11.01.1 ...
    Updated youtube-dl. Restart youtube-dl to use the new version.

Is Youtube-dl here to stay? Or are they forever going to fight legal battles.

the only reasonable alternative if gitlab gets dmca'd again is to use gitee based in china.

To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion.

i don't understand? this is a pretty simple solution since these large megacorps are quick to enforce their own will on the FOSS community for bs IP reasons.

> To use anything based in China will only cause more oppresion.

How? It's not like China has the greatest respect for intellectual property.

That's not the point. It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee.

> It'd be a symbolic admission of defeat to anyone from the US or a Western country to have to move to Gitee.

Maybe that's the point.

If all the valuable engineering projects leave the West because the West's laws are that dysfunctional, maybe the West will be forced to reevaluate them.

It's not actually necessary to use a Git hosting service.

Git itself works just fine without one.

There are many other project hosting alternatives as well. E.g. Canonical's Launchpad, GNU Savannah, etc.

the dmca's were a result of 'intent' which the law is more than willing to enforce imaginary IP laws. this becomes an eternal cat and mouse game where the foss community will tend to lose against these leeches.

It's not technically required with direct pulls, but practically there has to be some way of coordinating patch exchanges. Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown.

Also, aren't both Launchpad and Savannah both code hosting repositories too?

>Even when using mailing lists for sending patches, the list hosting provider is subject to disrupting development in the event of a takedown.

But my inbox, and everyone's inbox that participates in it, would have a copy.

I think mailing lists solve A LOT of problems that we are having now.

Or https://codeberg.org or https://sr.ht/ or just a bog-standard git repo served over HTTPS on https://youtube-dl.org/.

Well, maybe, but a DMCA doesn't really give the RIAA any legal means to request the takedown of something they don't own the copyright to (i.e. youtube-dl's source-code).

Not sure what RIAA's endgame is though. I'm somewhat fearing that they are coordinating with Youtube in an attempt to prevent any organised effort against youtube's next obfuscation or something.

I have already encountered a video that the latest version of youtube-dl fails on.

It has never been perfect, there have always been some uploaders where some of there very long videos would fail for me. I suspect if I toyed with the formats requested it would work, but generally just don't try.

Not sure about "legal battles", but I don't think it will be quite as it was. It was always wise to keep existence of youtube-dl sort of public secret, since our, ehm, data sources were never keen of it in the first place. Even promoting it on a large platforms like HN or reddit was pretty sketchy. But now basically everyone knows about it, user base is going to grow even more, which will be even more of a problem for sites like youtube. And, consequentially, there will be more pushback.

And, yeah, by the way: let's not forget that it's youtube and the likes of it who are actually the enemy of youtube-dl. All these RIAA notices and stuff are just tools.

Youtube-dl enables things that should just be allowed across the internet. The "hope it doesn't get noticed" strategy is optically terrible and generally set up to fail.

Even if you are against these downloads, there are laws that let you prohibit such downloads by using DRM. Ignoring those laws or trying to claim that publicly available links count as DRM means these programs should be allowed.

The concept of streaming always seemed a bit dumb to me, in terms of environmental costs and just plain efficiency.

The constraint on the majority of cases is bandwidth, not storage.

For mobile, that is not necessarily true, I concede.

From a purely technical perspective, streaming makes little sense.

This is really a manifestation of legal constructs.

My guess is that RIAA will pursue it until they either win legally or exhaust and frighten everyone away from it and it becomes a much less powerful tool. It's not like DMCA notices are their only option after all (and I'm not sure the DMCA notice sent to GitHub is really even a DMCA notice anyway). I would imagine they're either already in the process of or are ramping up to also go after the individuals involved as maintainers and (major) contributors. I think that could actually be a really interesting legal case to see if something like youtube-dl is found to be something more like a VCR or more like Napster, but I don't know if RIAA would ever take the chance of letting that happen on the chance that they lose. I think the more typical strategy for them would be to start sending everyone they can track down the real identity of scary letters and maybe drag a few into court and settle so the rest run away.

I personally wouldn't touch contributing to youtube-dl right now with a 10 foot pole, but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side :).

> but I'm also a bit on the paranoid side

It sounds like your perspective is of someone paranoid and from the US. But it seems the author is not, he's like from Russia or something, and most contributions don't seem to come from the US either, and international community outside of the US doesn't care about DMCA, RIAA and US laws. There doesn't seem to be a way for RIAA to get their way and kill the project.

That's a good point. I definitely have too much of a US-centric view on this as I'm not very familiar with the project and was assuming at least a few of the major people involved are living in the US or a country friendly enough with the US that the RIAA has major reach. Russia is a member of a few major international copyright agreements, but I have no idea how that will play out practically speaking. I'm not sure to what extent various member countries actually cooperate. Maybe the RIAA will just give up after they get GitHub and GitLab and any other major platforms with a US presence to stop hosting it if the main people are in a country that's enough of a speed bump for them.

Will Linux distributions update it?

I think the youtube-dl folks need to talk to a lawyer quickly.

Like many products, youtube-dl can be used for legal and illegal purposes (just like a baseball bat can be). However, it was foolish to include links in their documentation to works where infringing uses are more likely. They should have pointed to the MANY works released under CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. Here's one I posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC1g8FmFcUU

If this is a real DMCA takedown, then GitHub doesn't really have a choice, GitHub must take it down. youtube-dl should immediately file a DMCA counter-claim. A lawyer can help with this.

I think it's clear that youtube-dl has many non-infringing uses. I've posted many videos on Youtube where I own the copyright, & I really hope that people use youtube-dl to download and see those videos. But youtube-dl needs to do a better job making it obvious that it has many clearly legal uses.

The infringing links were not in the documentation, they were test cases for different kinds of video download protection.

There were no such links in the documentation. Rather, various youtube partners like VEVO have special encoding schemes and the youtube-dl test suite includes tests for handling these schemes. Because the different styles are only used on partner content it isn't possible for those specific test case to use a CC-BY(-SA) work. Moreover, the test cases only download under 1 second of video and don't even store it.

AFAICT all the documentation examples are test videos uploaded by the youtube-dl authors themselves and ones by the Linux Foundation.

The complaint submitted to github was not a DMCA takedown (17 U.S. Code § 512), though it was superficially formatted like one. It was a complaint regarding 17 U.S. Code § 1201 anti-circumvention. There is no counter-claim (or takedown, for that matter) provision in that law because there is no safe harbor.

Moreover, your description of a §512 takedown is simply incorrect. Github is not obligated to take down a work when they receive a well formed DMCA notice: rather, they obtain an immunity from lawsuit for that particular infringement if they follow the procedure. In cases where there is transparently no infringement that immunity isn't worth much. In all cases it's simply a business decision to accept the liability or not vs the interruption in customer relationships, distrust, and loss of goodwill that can result from cutting off a user... no different than the decision to take on liability in any other business activity.

Maybe try avoiding such strong language when you haven't personally researched the subject in great detail?

It seems like yt-dl should move that functionality into a plug-in, so that maybe it can be fully supported but kept at an arm's length.

Changing something at this point feels like an admission of guilt. I can't imagine a better case for de minimis use than this.

Part of the value of youtube-dl is that its reliable. If it randomly didn't work on some URLs it would make it much less useful.

Moreover, there would be a risk that unethical actors would exploit the URLs that don't work in order to conduct unarchivable fraud.

It's not very reliable because it can't be, any of the sites can change on any particular day, but they really try their best.

Sorry, I did read the complaint and it appeared what I said earlier was correct. It sounds like I misunderstood things; thanks for the correction!

My main point still stands, though: They need a lawyer.

I did say, "If this is a real DMCA takedown...".

You are legally correct that GitHub in isn't obligated to take down a work if they receive a DMCA notice. But that would be very bad advice to take. GitHub handles millions of repos. GitHub could take a huge gamble by keeping the material posted after a DMCA request, or just take it down, wait for the DMCA counterclaim, and put it up after the counterclaim was filed. A CEO could easily get fired for risking the entire company when there was a no-risk alternative with the same result. The legal penalties are so stiff, and so easily avoided, that it would be improbable for a company to do anything else. This apparently isn't a DMCA takedown anyway, but I thought I should comment on your response.

Anyway, I'll repeat myself yet again: They need a lawyer.

Yet companies ignore DMCA complaints all the time.

Github is unusual in my experience in that they act on even transparently fraudulent DMCA notices (I am reminded of a few years ago where they took all of Mozilla's repost offline because of a obviously bogus DMCA complaint filed by a intern that was furious that their changes weren't merged or something along those lines).

And while copyright penalties look pretty stiff, they're pretty non-threatening compared to ordinary state product liability-- which is almost completely non-disclaimable. Liability is just one of the consequences of doing business.

I certainly wouldn't suggest that Github should be ignoring DMCA complaints as a general practice (though plenty of providers sure seem to do so), but in this case I think they could make a calculation that the risk might be worth it: I know quite a few parties that have moved off github as a result of this incident.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com