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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, youtube-dl has been uselessly slow for me for over a year. Long since switched to yt-dlp.

You have to build it from source to avoid the 60kbps limit. There hasn't been a release since Dec 2021 and there have been some updates since then that implement the 'puzzle' to get the right value of the url parameter.

It's worth noting that YouTube is trialling a new player and a lot of applications (invidious, new pipe, etc) are experiencing some issues in the last couple of weeks.

It's funny how a trillion-dollar company is playing cat-and-mouse with a few free software projects, and losing most of the time.

I have a feeling Google/Alphabet/YouTube aren't investing a lot of money into this, because they know their opponents have almost infinite resource, of free time and dedication.

Besides how would you like to work in the YouTube "DRM" team, where every few weeks you'd show up to work and the news is "well, they cracked it again, your last few months' of work is useless.".

It is not Google in the courts, it is Sony and Warner, the ‘rights holders’!

Honestly, that does sound kind of fun. Requires more creativity than building CRUD app after CRUD app

> I have a feeling Google/Alphabet/YouTube aren't investing a lot of money into this, because they know their opponents have almost infinite resource, of free time and dedication.

They aren't investing because its a CLI tool. Its not really a threat.

If it was, like, a "1 click download free music from Youtube!" app that was trending like crazy, Google would focus more on fighting it.

The project is balanced between reasonable accessibility and not drawing too much attention from Google. Its kinda like the AI Wars video game, where you undermine a distracted/disenterested AI without drawing too much of its attention.

There are many websites that provide exactly that function. I suspect most of them are based yt-dl{,p}. By killing cli tools, google can effectively stifle such websites as well.

But they are too sporadic to become popular.

Not even just websites. There are many browser extensions that provide exactly that function right in YouTube's web interface.

Well, I really hope that they don't hear about Skytube.

Google, close your eyes!

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/

Bad Google! No dividends for you!

Its not on Google Play, so no worries about mass proliferation.

Other programs can use CLI tools so the poor users don't have to be confronted with the horror that is a terminal emulator.

For example, mpv uses youtube-dl automatically if you give it a URL (or yt-dlp since it installs the same binary).

YouTube doesn’t have DRM on non paid content. If they did, the situation would be way different.

Except in mandatory DRM jurisdictions.

They’ll fix that with the web integrity API.

Eventually, but they could already use EME on the videos if they wanted.

their work cycling between shutout and useless is the norm in many cat-mouse industries such as anticheat, malware, drug precursors, you name it. the funds go to the fight and not the endgame, everyone except denuvo customers seem to have figured that

YouTube has it's hands tied behind its back by the 100s of apps that have been deployed over the last two decades. Shutting down youtube-dlp, but also losing ad revenue from, say, every Roku box in the world, is not a tradeoff anyone is signing on for. So best they can do is nibble around the edges and hope they make it hard on downloaders while not flipping the entire apple cart.

I don't think that's necessarily true. People said that about Blu-ray for ages, and for a while they were right but in the end the industry had people paid to keep updating keys and fixing bugs forever, and the open source world only has volunteers.

Last I checked (which was a very long time ago) the only way to rip a Blu-ray was through a commercial program.

That's probably partly because Blu-ray waned in popularity compared to streaming. Still I definitely think it's wrong to assume that Google couldn't win this battle.

> People said that about Blu-ray for ages, and for a while they were right but in the end the industry had people paid to keep updating keys and fixing bugs forever, and the open source world only has volunteers.

I can rip Blu-Rays easily with freely available tools [0] - even shiny new UHD ones. Doesn't seem the industry won that one.

Pirates don't distribute the leaked device keys anymore so you need to get disc-specific encryption keys derived from that but that's all done automatically for you and I imagine is only because this is currently the path of least resistence - if this was not an option then device keys would leak faster than they can be removed from new releases.

> Still I definitely think it's wrong to assume that Google couldn't win this battle.

DRM is an inherently unwinnable battle. Won't stop anyone from trying and making things worse for regular users in the process though.

[0] https://www.makemkv.com/

We did that at AOL with regards to fighting spam, when I was the Sr. Internet Mail Adminstrator in the mid-90s.

We would put in weeks and months of work to come up with a new method of fighting spam that would actually work [0], and over the span of a weekend after launch, the spammers would already have worked around it.

[0] As opposed to the random crackpot ideas that every damn stupid AOL VP came up with that started with "Why don't you just ...". If I had a nickel for every damn stupid AOL VP crackpot idea, I'd be a multi-millionaire by now.

> [0] As opposed to the random crackpot ideas that every damn stupid AOL VP came up with that started with "Why don't you just ...".

I hope you used https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt as your resignation letter.

We had a similar document that we had developed over time which I believe pre-dated this one. Ours may even have been the inspiration upon which this one was based.

For me, by that time AOL had become a sufficiently toxic place that we came to a mutual agreement that it was time for me to leave.

If it hadn't been for that, I would never have gotten a chance to work at Collective Technologies, where we had more O'Reilly authors on staff than any other company in the world!

This seems normal when lawyers are involved; they're slow and to act quicker they sometimes shoot in the dark by pushing for excessive measures and/or draconian laws that ultimately could backfire against their clients image. Also, they cost a lot more than say the cost of opening a new site, so resistance in this context is not futile at all.

They don't have to win in absolute terms. They only have to prevent people from adopting alternative players en masse.

I guess you missed the "not" Google proposal for the Browser Attestation API? No need to put too many respurces fighting for a single site when you can just lock it down to blessed browsers.

In order for web DRM to be feasible, it has to work without issues for 99% of average users while blocking the few who will go to great lengths to simulate attestation. That’s a hard goal.

TPM1.2 (used up until a few years back) is already broken because it uses SHA-1. If someone finds an exploit for TPM2.0, a dedicated team could manipulate the entire sandbox down to the hardware to simulate a “blessed browser”, making it even harder for google to detect until nearly everyone moves to devices which don’t even exist yet.

Last I heard, sha-1 isn’t broken for any arbitrary hash.

Except few people use the tool, so it is not hurting them much.

If this were to change, then I'm sure the battle would look very different, both legally and from a technical viewpoint.

Shh… don’t tell anyone about the other project.

The wider internet has some kind of brain damage where they think spreading stuff like this is a smart way of protesting.

I agree and I don't. We can rip dvds almost precisely, because spreading stuff beyond the ability for it to be easily controlled under single point of failure.

Nothing could really be done about DVDs because the hardware was immutable and already out in the wild.

Highlighting a still operating service though just draws legal attention to it.

It's like finding a crappy bar everyone hates that stores beers out back in a alley. You can keep it to yourself and enjoy it for years, or you can "protest" the bar by telling the whole town about it.

See ad-blocking for a real world example of this.

I absolutely get your point and I personally struggle with this as a concept, because, well, I was young once. There is a benefit to knowledge staying from being too... easily distributed, especially if it is used poorly. But.. having benefited from it in terms of general knowledge, I am not sure it is my place to lock the gates behind me.

Ad-blocking is definitely an interesting story, but, to me at least, it seems like another cat and mouse game resulting from lack of any pro-consumer enforcement. Corps have legal batting for them. What do we get? Control over our computers and even that is being eroded daily..

I still remember the first time I looked at the log from raspberry pihole. I am not much of a revolutionary, but seeing it all was a radicalizing moment for me. And it wasn't the childish 'I want to see X'. It was 'the fuck is all this on my network'?

Overall, I think you are wrong. Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now. Just like with music, pirates actually forced an adoption of somewhat sane standards..

> Were it not for people drawing attention to this, we would not even have legal streaming now.

Streming is not exactly an improvement over what we had before. If you bought a DVD or VHS you could rewatch it whenever you want and share it with your friends. With streaming services you own nothing and content disappears all the time.

I bought a tshirt with the decss key on it when that went public.

I think I still have mine somewhere.

Almost precisely? The bits are correct or they're not.

I apologize, I may have not expressed myself clearly. What I meant to indicate was that the bits being distributed the way they were was the likely reason we were able to rip dvds based on the fact entities trying to quash distribution of they key stopped.

Lol I mean it has ~53k stars on GitHub. Not exactly a secret. :p

https://github.com/ytdl-patched/youtube-dl/

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