Hacker News Reader

Comment by hruzgar | Hacker News Reader

So make a nice, good documented blog post for google engineers to understand and fix this issue?? Whyy

The people who created an entire video streaming platform with these blocks and rate limiting are more than capable of reading open source youtube-dl/yt-dlp and probably have been doing so for years.

There's nothing in there that wasn't obvious to the engineers who implemented the throttling.

1. Solve the challenge the same way the browser would. By actually running the JS code.

2. Segmented downloading. Pretty sure they allow that on purpose so starting or resuming a video feels snappy.

> Pretty sure they allow that on purpose so starting or resuming a video feels snappy.

Also for switching to a different bitrate stream seamlessly.

The only real thing they could try to do is to try enforcing video/IP speed cap. They probably don't due to false positives - for example people jumping around a long video also make may "range" requests.

And the other approach is currently in progress - soon logged users won't be able to view videos without watching(or at least displaying/downloading) adds, so the logical next step is to nerf anonymous(as is without google account) viewing. No matter how I look YT has exact problems (and solutions) as all file locker sites. The only difference is that YT is not at mercy of Ad companies, it is the Ad company(at least Google is). So they might try some more aggressive measures, that normally would get a site banned from publishing ads.

There’s plenty they could do. They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users, and they could further enable DRM, as pretty much by now the majority of users are already on DRM-handicapped platforms. Any will-be-called "legacy" users would just get limited to 480p.

> They could flip a switch tomorrow and limit access to only signed-in users

Huge amount of users of youtube are literally babies, they don't know how to read or write so they don't sign in.

I'm starting to also suspect the trend of YTs algorithm insisting on recommending videos you've already watched is also a decision from this huge baby user base.

Their parents will sign in when magic rectangle stops working.

YT-DLP can import cookies to bypass the signed-in user issue. It has to as many videos in the EU require credit card age verification to access.

And YT-DLP could run the extracted Widevine plugin just as Kodi can today but ultimately it can’t spoof attestation and that’s already in the works as well.

So suddenly thousands (millions?) of users are unable to view content on YouTube?

Sounds pretty bad for ad-revenue....

You need a Google account for living a normal life, or perhaps an Apple account but that's about the extent of your options. I'm sure Google can do the math on how many principalistic people are not going to watch videos with ads anymore if they have to log in for it. Most people are already logged in because they needed an account at some point anyway, so the vast majority of viewers wouldn't even notice. Kicking off adblock users won't be a financial loss either, so it's only about the group that was logged out (probably a tech savvy, privacy-aware audience) and didn't use ad blocking (tech savvy privacy people that watch ads? You can count that group on one hand)

I hate to say this because I'd be affected but that's the math I would expect them to use. The only counter argument I can think of, why they might care to keep freeloaders there, is the network effect

They already lowered bitrates for non premium members.

Proof? The news I recently saw, if you're referring to that, actually said they'd offer a higher-bitrate 1080p option for YouTube Premium, not that they'd lock the (then) current bitrate behind YouTube Premium and downgrade everyone else.

Edit: I did some searching. In addition to that, the only relevant news I could find were about Google testing locking the 4K (2160p) resolution behind the Premium doors, which they ceased doing.

I was speaking from anectodal evidence because I've been feeling my 1080p streams look worse than before the new option showed up.

But it seems I'm mistaken [1].

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/23/23612647/youtube-1080p-pr...

They did lower the bitrate back in 2020, IIRC, because there was so much more youtube being watched all of a sudden and they didn't want ISPs to be crippled under the weight. Don't know if they reverted that change since.

That's what I thought too. Don't give away all your tricks to the enemy; even if the information is already available in other places, the extra publicity won't help our side of the war.

>Don't give away all your tricks to the enemy

That's pretty impossible with open-source software. Google engineers aren't clueless; they'll know where to find this information just as well as anyone here.

It's too bad there isn't a legal way of preventing Google engineers from reading some source code.

I’m almost positive that the engineers already know how the throttling is applied and how it could be circumvented.

Downloading the same file used in the official UI and applying/reverse engineering the function is not exactly rocket science.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com