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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

The writing is on the wall for easy ripping. If there's any YT content you expect you'll want to preserve for a long time, I suggest spinning up https://www.tubearchivist.com/ or something similar and archiving it now while you still can.

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I agree and feel that the time is now to archive all of the truly valuable cultural and educational content that YT acquired through monopolistic means.

This solution looks interesting, but I am technical enough to know that this looks like a PITA to setup and maintain. It also seems like it is focused on downloading everything from a subbed channel.

As it is now, with a folder of downloaded videos, I just need a local web server that can interpret the video names and create an organized page with links. Is there anything like this that is very lightweight with a next next finish install?

They already had the proper-DRM tech for youtube movies for years, why didn't they already turn that on for all content?

YouTube's delivery scale is enormous and adding additional complexity if they don't have to is probably considered a no no.

But if they decide they have to, they can do it fairly trivially.

It would break many millions of old consumer devices that no longer receive updates, like old smart TVs. They are waiting for that old device traffic to drop low enough before they can force more robust measures.

You already need such things for certain formats.

YT probably HAD to put the DRM on in order to get the license deal with the studios. Nobody is twisting their arm as much so other interests (wider audience, less server side resources, not getting around to it) can prevail.

They actually somewhat did: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563 "DRM on ALL videos with tv (TVHTML5) client"

It's not really a matter of just turning it on when it comes to the kind of scale that YouTube has on their catalogue. It's practically impossible to retranscode the whole catalogue, so you're more or less stuck with only doing it for newly ingested content, and even there the tradeoffs are quite large when it comes to actually having DRM.

I think we can safely assume that the only content under DRM at YouTube today is the content where it's absolutely legally necessary.

DRM is added at the last hop before the content is sent to the client. It has to be, because the key is different per client.

They have to pay a technology license fee per month per protected title.

pinchflat (https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat) is an alternative to tubearchivst. less mature but also less buggy IME

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