Sounds like the don't understand that official music and video content like rental films are DRMed - youtube-dl and other downloads error out when trying to download DRMed content.
Since the purpose of the obfuscated URLs and JavaScript is to gate access to the video and audio through a browser hitting the YouTube site where they can't be saved, this scheme constitutes an "effective" copy protection measure. Bypassing this gating mechanism is thus circumvention, illegal under the DMCA.
Just open up DevTools, look for requests to googlevideo.com, find the request with the video or audio (i.e. content-type response of either video/mp4 or audio/webm), copy the entire request URL, remove the range parameter entirely, open the link, and voila!
The lie that Google et al. try to perpetuate is that if your user agent fails to put their interests over yours then it is illegal.
edit: some quick testing confirms these URLs are temporary, but they don't appear limited to the IP that generated them. Your IP is embedded in the URL though, and you can't modify it without breaking the URL, so I'm guessing some IP limits kick in at some point.
I do not interact with obfuscated URLS, JavaScript, opening any kind of console or dev tools, and no source code.
I save it just as I would save a photo or a pdf.
How is this circumvention? I'm using a feature offered by my browser and using it in a way intended by the creators. The media files are already on my computer (memory or storage, who cares, its been copied already) I am just renaming some metadata like its directory and filename.
But I'm quite confident you can't view or download YouTube videos if your browser doesn't run JavaScript. They require the client evaluate intentionally obfuscated JS in order to determine the video content URL's signature. Whether this counts as DRM or not, I don't know, and I hope it doesn't, but it's clear that YouTube is making it difficult intentionally.
I meant no JavaScript as in me meddling with the js.
You can right click on YouTube videos to download them? That sounds slick! How did you set this up? Is something YouTube-specific happening or is it generalized and just happens to work on YouTube? That's totally something I'd like.
I have no idea what that means legally, but to me it certainly supports the argument that doing something so simple clearly isn't bypass DRM/violating the DMCA. (though I'm sure the media industry would argue that whatever browser/extension making this possible is guilty of defeating DRM. )
What browser is that?
That is, any <video> HTML element can be right clicked and downloaded, at least in Chrome and Safari where I tested. Interestingly this even works when for `<video controls controlslist="nodownload" ...>` elements where the developer tries to prevent downloading. (in Chrome that removes the download option from the video player's controls, but not from right-click)
Firefox is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request, download a video and then show it.
youtube-dl is a user agent. a program with the ability to take the users request and download a video
Youtube has no authentication, nothing is being circumvented.
Browser names/standards/whatever are not codified in law. youtube-dl is no different than Google Chrome in this regard. Good luck proving otherwise. If the video had legitimate copy protection and used encryption, etc. I could understand it, but the videos can be pulled by anything that can interpret Javascript. Ask Oracle and Apple how those lawsuits turned out.
While only paid content and some special videos use the serious DRM that requires browser extensions like WideVine, all YouTube videos require a pretty complex process to download.
Famously, yt-dlp has its own minimal JavaScript interpreter which is needed to evaluate the obfuscated JS script[0] that YouTube provides so the client can determine its actual video download URL. The end of the process does just result in figuring out an obfuscated URL but that URL is temporary and limited per-client. Here's the yt-dlp JS interpreter (though I don't know in which situations it actually needs to use it): https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_d...
[0] Some of YouTube's obfuscated JS: https://www.youtube.com/s/player/bbe1b497/player_ias.vflset/...
Can you give an example of a YouTube video where this happens?
Take for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0ozmU9cJDg
That's a video of a song from the channel of the band that killed the Napster P2P network and software back in the day.
I hear that there is no problem downloading that song with yt-dlp.
Likewise, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FTATjvCJ-Q
That's a video with music from a YouTube channel owned by one of the most copyright lawyered cartoon companies in the world. They successfully made videos of a cartoon mouse stay protected after it was supposed to enter public domain.
Yet, I hear that this video is also able to be downloaded without problem with yt-dlp.
So when these videos are able to download without problem, idk what public videos on YouTube would not be able to be downloaded with yt-dlp.
Parent commenter said:
> Sounds like the don't understand that official music and video content like rental films are DRMed
And that's what I was responding to. Not YouTube Music.
There are plenty videos with music from the original distributors, like those I linked above, on regular YouTube, and which as mentioned will be able to download with yt-dlp.
This is not in reference to copyright. It's in reference to DRM, which isn't present on public videos (but seems to be present on purchased and rented videos).
I believe youtube-dl simulates the browser Javascript client and yt-dlp emulates the Android client, though I'm not 100% sure of the modern workings.