It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me.
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Solving JS challenges using deno
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Downloading challenge solver lib script from https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.solver.lib.min.js
It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command, as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment, and being able to package it up together with the solver before runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start of downloads seems much faster now.
It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
The year is 2041. Google announces that only a negligible fraction of users acceses websites outside of the clean pool. These users are at risk, they claim, due to "all the bad stuff on the free web". They refuse to clarify if this refers to malware or to content not aligned with The Party doctrine. However, they draw the consequence that "free web" sites will no longer be supported by Chrome, to protect the users. Less than an hour later, Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox that also disables access to websites that were not whitelistet by The Party, using the same reasoning.
I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's definitely "heavily censored" and "free".
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Here I am, totally given up on adblockers, and no way I’m paying for premium, but jesus christ the amount of ads I get, sometimes seems to be one every minute, making most videos unwatchable.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
I had the same problem. Make sure you're running the latest version of uBlock Origin. By that I mean you should explicitly check for updates and install the latest version. That fixed it for me.
I've disabled adblock/vpn and can watch maybe 1-2 videos before the video player starts blacking out on each one. Only restarting firefox "resets" it and I haven't been able to find a reason for this happening. Time for yt-dlp I guess
Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
The FTC will not investigate anything that was not reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do care about these issues, if you care enough to take six minutes to report it.
If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting the length expected for the ad to take before streaming you any bytes.
The worst part is if someone doesn’t put 2+2 together and starts blaming their ISP for poor load issues because their Youtube “keeps buffering” because of this continue cat-and-mouse game messing with the player client.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
Well... I have many new, emerging problems with YouTube as of lately.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
It feels like "serving you the video you actually want to see" has become some kind of unimportant side quest, as opposed to serving you the crap (Ads, Shorts, recommendations, comments, sponsored content) that they would rather you be looking at.
Since some days I suddenly get freezes in the tab; these
unfreeze after some time, say 20 seconds or so, but I notice
a delay.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it
has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI
also changed. It is important to point out that while you do
not have any issues, other people do or may.
I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't click the time index bar to move to a different point in the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting out. Bizarre. . .
Airplay from youtube is broken for me. I airplay and instead of english, I get german and no way to change the language. This is not an isolated incident.
I considered it as motivation to switch more from Firefox to Zen, where it works, I guess because Google doesn't recognize it as Firefox and doesn't apply the anti-competition script?
Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when watching videos in a (different) language that I understand.
With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely working"?
I personally use Youtube almost exclusively for my entertainment. I am using Chromium on Raspberry Pi 5. I am running some flavor of uBlock, SponsorBlock, and some Shorts remover extension. It just works.
I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did
As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
> I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.
You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any chromecast device including chromecast homes with the microphone turned off.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
Third option: I don't pay for it, I don't load the ads, and the trillion dollar company figures out a way to live with the economic consequences of their own decisions.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
They limit the buffer to around 30secs or so like all other streaming services but otherwise 95%+ of the time it just plays smoothing with no buffering at all from start to end. YouTube is generally in the top 3 of the video streaming services I use. Even on 4G wireless (which I occassionally use) it works well enough which is impressive as other video steaming services struggle (with the sole exception of Netflix which is probably the only one better than YouTube).
That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
When it comes to video it’s not only the browser. It’s also your gpu, your OS and your gpu drivers.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds more work for them, when the same company is also developing a competing browser?
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.
I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
What environment are you using that:
- Has access to Youtube
- Can run Python code
- Can’t run JS code
If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you’re using Deno).
If you’re using some sort of weird OS or architecture that Deno/Node doesn’t support, you might consider QuickJS, which is written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.) Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain. (You don’t have to trust Google in general to trust that they won’t serve you actual malware.)
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)
I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically, especially things that does network requests sometimes (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of packaging it before I run it, so it's not the end of the world.
No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.
> IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
> > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
> You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.
That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm adding a manifest which controls what this application can actually access, which is basically a VM config, where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part that shouldn't have github.com/* access.
Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of workarounds, so not the end of the world.
> Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from Youtube, right? That’s why we actually needed a JS runtime in the first place.
Restricting or sandboxing software is something I've been looking into recently. Would you mind sharing what you use and possibly an example as well? Perhaps an example for yt-dlp?
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly possible).
It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another.
I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downloading one JS file.
For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval, can't be too positive.
You could serve the files yourself from a server populated by updating them from github after review. You'd need to either sign the domain with your own CA that the host running yt-dlp trusts, or patch yt-dlp to use a different server name, but neither of those steps should be too onerous.
I've just hit the IPv6 problem. I routinely use yt-dlp -6 to cycle through my (basically infinite) set of IPv6 addresses. However when you do this, it tries the github EJS download over IPv6, which fails as github doesn't support IPv6 (because it's still the year 2000 over there).
Actually I think this is kind of a yt-dlp bug, since it doesn't need to use IPv6 for the github download.
You can set up a 'socat' process to listen on a certain IPv6 address and relay traffic to GitHub, and add it to your hosts file, and you don't even need to break TLS since it's forwarding traffic unchanged
A solver running at 50ms instead of 1ms I would say is practically imperceptible to most users, but I don't know what time span you are measuring with those numbers.
$ time ./v8 /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m0.252s
user 0m0.386s
sys 0m0.074s
$ time ./quickjs /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m2.280s
user 0m2.507s
sys 0m0.031s
So about 10x slower for the current flavor of YouTube challenges: 0.2s -> 2.2s.
A few more results on same input:
spidermonkey 0.334s
v8_jitless 1.096s => about the limit for JIT-less interpreters like quickjs
graaljs 2.396s
escargot 3.344s
libjs 4.501s
brimstone 6.328s
modernc-quickjs 12.767s (pure Go port of quickjs)
fastschema-qjs 1m22.801s (Wasm port of quickjs)
boa 1m28.070s
quickjs-ng 2m49.202s
node(v8) : 1.25s user 0.12s system 154% cpu 0.892 total
quickjs : 6.54s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 6.671 total
quickjs-ng: 545.55s user 202.67s system 99% cpu 12:32.28 total
A 5x slowdown for an interpreted C JS engine is pretty good I think, compared to all the time, code and effort put into v8 over the years!
I've found having yt-dlp available on my iPhone useful, and used Pythonista to achieve that, but haven't figured out how to get the new requirements to work yet. Would love any ideas people have!
No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it without the flag:
WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Remote components challenge solver script (deno) and NPM package (deno) were skipped. These may be required to solve JS challenges. You can enable these downloads with --remote-components ejs:github (recommended) or --remote-components ejs:npm , respectively. For more information and alternatives, refer to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
Providing one of the flags automatically lets it automatically get what it needs. No need for AUR packages :)
Edit: Maybe I misunderstood, now when I re-read your post. You meant it'll prevent the automatic download at runtime perhaps? That sounds about right if so.
Yes exactly, if you install the package you don't need the download the solver on the fly. AT least that's my understanding of what the package is supposed to do. Personally I have no need for it.
It was just updated again today, and at least for me, when you install it using the package name "yt-dlp[default]", it already downloads both deno and the solver automatically.
yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)
> Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.
A third party is packaging it for PyPI (although yt-dlp doesn't support this, nobody has properly verified it etc.) and the wheel looks to be just a monolithic executable and a "tell me the executable path" wrapper (much like the official PyPI package for uv), so I would assume it can.
Tangentially related. Youtube web is now, as of the last month, strictly enforcing "referrer header" for embedded videos. Even if you spoof it, it doesn't always work. You can't navigate directly to "youtube.com/embed/<videoid>" to watch something without giving google some direct information.
Since when are public-facing error codes just lies?
"Oh Error 15 something went wrong, tee hee."
"Oh Error 153 better try again, (got em, guys!)"
They operated for a while, before finally updating their FAQ stating this is intentional.[1]
Our Terms of Service require embedders to provide a HTTP Referer. If this information is missing, viewers attempting to watch embedded YouTube videos will encounter blocked playback and an error screen (“error 153”). These viewers will still be able to click “Watch on YouTube” to view the video on YouTube. Note that directly accessing the embedded player without an enclosing webpage or context (such as accessing it from your web browser's address bar) will typically not have a HTTP Referer and users will encounter the error screen; the embedded player is only intended to be used within an embedded context."
Pretty much all embeds have done this, increasing over the years. Forget discord embeds. They want the tracking. Sometimes they even make me login "to know I'm not a bot"
Damn that's crazy, nothing a simple static redirector in a single js line can't fix.
Overall cost to implement this shit : likely thousands hundred k
Bypass cost : literally 0
It really is just a way for them to say "we can fuck with you as much as we want and you won't do shit cause what you gonna do ? go somewhere else ?"
I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.
The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.
I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.
I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)
I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.
As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.
Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.
Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)
I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.
Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?
Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.
> You are a digital hoarder.
Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.
It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.
I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.
There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.
I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you
I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.
I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube.
Many of them are fan-made, many already unavailable
I sometimes play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.
I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.
I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all
I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.
Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.
Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.
I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.
So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.
And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.
* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.
* There is a liked videos playlist
Yes, I read your comment above.
Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
how do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently, now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good idea.
> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
I'm also not a fun of such overengineered programs, but using raw yt-dlp alone is not enough for replicating full workflow.
Your command is nice for downloading a single video (I also provide a url from clipboard via xclip), but archiving videos daily from a list of favorite channels would require a bit more scripting. Didn't manage to find anything both minimal and popular to link instead.
It doesn't download just a single video – it downloads all your liked videos with some reasonable sorting.
Put your favorite channels' and playlists' URLs into a text file and use the "-a file.txt" flag to batch download. Use "--dateafter {date of 3 days ago}" to download only the latest videos. Adapt as needed.
I sent the video to my friend, but his phone says "/home/trvz/media/youtube/george hotz archive/20251109 - comma ai ｜ COMMA CON 2025 ｜ George Hotz ｜ Outwit, Outplay, Outlast ｜ President [werrvv0MVXQ].webm" was not found. Plz help!
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
> What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
>
> The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this project.
More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.
Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.
The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.
> Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up..
I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All these big companies keep driving up our cost of living, while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also a cost to not participating, so that's not an option either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their influence on our lives.
> The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.
I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't know how we'll overcome that.
>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.
Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.
Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
That's a fair point. Thanks for the detailed response.
I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous. Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps, shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that are so outrageous.
I also use a malware blocker at all times (to not have one on all computers would be like running an open telnet server: insane), so can't say I have personal experience with it, but there is plenty of anecdotal discussion about blatant financial scams, e.g. [0][1]. That first one OP claims Youtube acknowledged receiving their report, investigated it, and determined that the ad was acceptable. If true, they are admitting they are specifically aware of these ads and that users are raising complaints about them (they don't exist now, but a court could subpoena information about whether OP's story is true).
Additionally, Google has a well known policy of allowing people to take out ads (which look exactly like a search result) for someone else's trademark (defeating the entire purpose of a trademark), and the FBI has a frequently referenced notice[2] to US citizens to be aware of fraud where scammers take out impersonating ads on "Internet search results" to e.g. lead people to the wrong site for financial institutions. It absolutely blows my mind that no one is prosecuted for participating in this.
What do you think about YouTube showing pornographic advertisement to kids? Do you think they could, or do you think they must ensure that it's not displayed ?
Because I don't see how scam are less illegal than showing pornography to children, yet you wouldn't dare to tell me it's fine.
Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
The biggest difference is still the difference between physical stuff that only exist once and information, that just needs to be copied without loosing any value.
There are companies that make money by placing ("out of home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian thought.
It would be like attending a time-share dinner and putting in earplugs during their speech. I definitely think it's permissible to do it, but it's also permissible for them to kick you out for doing it.
It's more like tearing out the ad pages of a magazine before reading it. Even if the magazine has fine print saying "the reader may not tear out the ad pages..." It's still a ridiculous rule and it isn't wrong for people to ignore it.
The right analogy would be a newspaper delivering you the paper in ~milliseconds when you ask for it, whereever in the world, for free, and then you proceed to rip off the ads and read it.
The reason newspaper do the delivery was the promise that you'll see the ads, and they get to make money from that ads.
If they notice that you do all of the work of providing you the newspaper almost instantly and you dont see the ads, they are either gonna have to a) politely refuse to serve you b) point you to an alternate way of accessing the newspaper ("Newspaper Premium" for $$)
Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.
If they don't want to give me the paper for free, they should stop, but they haven't yet. Their expectation to make a certain amount of revenue from ads doesn't obligate the consumer. If their business model isn't making them the profit they need, it's on them to change their strategy.
Sure. YouTube can put everything behind a paywall one day and I won't complain. But I reject the increasingly common belief that it's somehow wrong to block ads.
The implicit contract is that you see the content while letting the ads that support it play. If you disagree with ads, the ethical choice is to not watch the video, not to leech.
It's also ethical to change browser tabs or leave the room while the ad plays, but blocking it and costing the provider money while not contributing back is not.
YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.
Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.
I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.
PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then later, even when profitable can gradually reduce the quality of the service to the point where users have to pay to get back to an experience they used to have is textbook enshittification.
I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.
adblocking "users" are not Youtube's users. What do you mean blocking ads has no bearing on their service? It sounds like you are saying user experience is "I should get this for free".
Nothing about your response changes the fact you appear to just be upset that you can't get anything you want for free and that content creators deserve to be paid.
I think being in a pitched battle with YT is kind of fun, if you enjoy that sort of challenge, and winning to boot.
I mean YT has perfect knowledge of its adversary's moves and a huge staff and they're still losing. It must at least be satisfying. Also its an important job.
It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but please do not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to execute untrusted code. Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.
But YouTube is the only one that yt-dlp uses Deno for. No other website on yt-dlp's list has put up enough of a fight to merit an external JS runtime; only YouTube.
From the September announcement:
> The JavaScript runtime requirement will only apply to downloading from YouTube. yt-dlp can still be used without it on the other ~thousand sites it supports
I would not put it past them. And I'm not sure I trust the yt-dlp team to implement sandboxing securely. The codebase is already full of shortcuts that lead to vulnerabilities like file extension injection.
I mean, this gives me pause:
> Both QuickJS and QuickJS-NG do not fully allow executing files from stdin, so yt-dlp will create temporary files for each EJS script execution. This can theoretically lead to time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities.
It used to be 100% runtime-level and it was the golden age of browser exploits. Each of your tabs are now a separate process that the OS sandboxes. They can only access a specific API over IPC for anything that goes beyond js/rendering (cookie management, etc...). An exploit in V8 today only gives access to this API. A second exploit is needed in this API to escape the sandbox and do anything meaningful on the target system.
Yes, but browser sandboxing is an absolute marvel of software design that also cost millions and millions of dollars in developers salaries and CVE bounties to develop. Neither Deno nor yt-dlp have anywhere close to millions of dollars to spend on implementing secure JS sandboxing.
Yes, and it's only reasonably secure because of years of exploits being found and fixed by some of the best (and very well-funded) software security engineers out there.
That's not true. It's secure because they are stacking OS-sandboxing on top, forcing attackers to find a chain of exploits instead of a single issue in V8
While you benefit from the V8 fixes it lacks OS-level sandboxing (see above). Chrome is safe because it stacks security layers. Runtime sandboxing is just one of them and arguably the weakest one.
For a long time, yt-dlp worked completely with Python. They implemented a lightweight JavaScript interpreter that could run basic scripts. But as the runtime requirements became more sophisticated it struggled to scale
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
That's awesome. I used VLC only because of the nightmare of codecs back in the day, and worked well for me for ages. I now just use mpv with some UI plugins.
VLC has fallen slightly victim to the “developer team tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and still isn’t done with the rebuild but has stopped maintaining the original for like three years” issue that some software seems to have
I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites.
How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]:
> Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on."
If you weren't using a Mac and wanted to play Quicktime videos? Then you have to install Apple's Quicktime player for Windows which was a piece of garbage.
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci Resolve, not to mention mobile apps behind the TikTok culture. There are also excellent and built-in video players in every browser and every OS.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste are basic OS-level features. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.
I think that happens when the rift between producers and consumers require some learning to jump from one to the other, at least professionally.
Some of the people who produce videos for a living require vastly different tools than someone who needs to trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't be able to effectively do their job.
For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way. You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are professional tools for people who write stories for a living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters, environments and so on, and many professionals do use them.
So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are still professionals who need tools specifically for "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in other areas :)
I used Avid VideoShop back in the day for that, which was Avid's consumer level offering. But I still appreciated being able to copy and paste from Movie Player when I just needed to paste a clip into a different application, which was much quicker when that was all I needed.
> But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents.
I think Word and other text documents are the exception not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always been viewed in different programs than the ones used for editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway view in something different than the editor. Nobody listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.
In fact I can't even think about any other format except for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs was printing)
> What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported standards whenever possible, but you must know that QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the blueprint (sometimes literally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format) for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"
You may be "technically correct" (the best kind of correct), but holy je-BUS was QT NOT user-friendly nor cross-platform-friendly at the height of its popularity.
There's a reason that once alternatives became available, users left QT as quickly as they could.
QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia, and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player (from the Win98 era)?
Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker.
This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.
That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.
> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…
It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.
Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
> It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.
I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.
1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
If you think having a developer mode switch on your smartphone that would enable shell access and a build env is what's stopping "the majority of the public" from "zombifying", either you need to talk with more "majority of the public", or I've been talking to the wrong "majority of the public".
The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functions are what rich people call a dinner party or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.
If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean, you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the majority of the public, but that want to do things that able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It would be great if it were easier because the phones were more open, but at some point you gotta go with the serenity prayer.
There's definitely a mismatch between expectations between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean. We agree that the majority of people are not going to suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more open for development. It's a complex societal issue that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down, content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.
> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all
It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.
It's not a question of being technical enough. It's actually a question of being too technical. You're here, which for me garners youa base level of respect if only because I've had the creators of certain subjects of discussion have responded directly to me grousing here.
Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less, you get into building web apps. For what people want to do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.
Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better than nothing.
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
Oh fuck you, I didn't have the $1,500 I just spent on Amazon for one of those! I've been waiting forever for them to make one with a finger print sensor, and I thought you were responding to a different comment so I looked it up and thank you :)
That's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.
Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as they do today.
There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.
Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some point by Apple at least.
I think it'd be biased more in the direction of the Ipad. If anything there's one feature apple's trying to avoid and that's Macos' waning ability to run third party binaries
There's a double edged sword here. Not even talking about DRM.
I would love to be able, myself, decide if it's fine to capture a screen for an application but I'd also would love to protect me or my non-tech-savvy relatives from accidentally share sensitive info (e.g. banking) when screen casting.
In my opinion there should be a waiver buried deep in the settings that allows me to disable such protections with a grace period of a week or so. Grace period is crucial because scammers are able to make people do virtually anything under stress and hurrying.
No, it's also iOS that's arbitrarily restricting it. I opened a bare .webm directly in Safari and got nothing on long press and nothing in any of the control widgets to save it.
A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser: the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth.
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.
> They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetization up to them
A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.
There are lots of platforms where people pay for their distribution, but they're not as successful.
The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT provides.
As someone who's spent many years building streaming platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and this kind of massive over simplification is really sad.
There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which has paid out billions to creators.
I think companies always prioritized their own interests.
A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal information to third parties.
Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they thought they'd get richer that way.
I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that you can get away with #2 so they do that.
We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
We do of course still have this in modern computing with Linux/KDE. Stable, snappy, and does exactly what you ask. The computer doesn't get in your way, nor does it try to get you to do something else. It just does what you tell it to do, immediately.
Yup, desktop Linux and other FOSS systems like ReactOS and Haiku are the last bastions of personal computing that haven’t been made into platforms that nag and upsell us.
> first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was
My first accounts were on Linux 1.x. It was glorious. Simple, sensible, and with manuals one command away. And it allowed you to just get things done. And there were tools. So many tools. 80's home computers and DOS crap and Macs that couldn't even open a file if it hadn't been tagged as the property of some application... Hells I would never have to be a part of any more. Except for work and school. But for personal computing, a brighter future was coming. In 30+ years since I've never had to step away.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
A media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not really obvious how to create a business that deals in media without some kind of protection over the copying and distribution of that media.
I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information.
I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.
Experience with video is excellent for most people. All the complexity is hidden from the end user, unless you are trying to hack something. In the 1990s, streaming effectively didn't exist because people didn't have enough bandwidth (it was mostly dial-up), and there was very little legal offering, and the little that existed was terrible. Home video was limited too, as few people knew how to make video files suitable for online diffusion.
Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001.
I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now, back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
It took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.
I mean, PeerTube is already halfway there. The problem is that it's a pain in the ass to host, last time I tried. Which sums up the whole problem as to why we have YouTube in the first place.
Guess why it was asymmetrical in the first place ... Telcos wanted to sell the upload bandwidth to streaming companies. Another double dipping Telco monopoly squeeze and customer boxing / enshitification from very early on.
Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
I also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
Probably just the typical nefarious activities of YouTube. Either "accidentally" driving users to switch browsers, or experimenting with circumventing ad blockers, or negligence in testing, or who knows what.
If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people.
One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
I've always found it insane how much software development web sites are willing to undertake, just to avoid using the standard video, audio, and img HTML elements. It's almost hilarious how over engineered everything is, just so they can 'protect' things they are ultimately publishing on the open web.
Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.
I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).
I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller niche video sites aren’t even implemented properly. On some sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL and cookies in the request, and download it to view locally.
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
RealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was around the times things really got bad.
Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.
Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.
It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
Chrome desktop has just landed enabled by default native HLS support for the video element within the last month. (There may be a few issues still to be worked out, and I don't know what the rollout status is, but certainly by year end it will just work). Presumably most downstream chromium derivatives will pick this support up soon.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
Any serious video distribution system would not use metered bandwidth. You're not using a VPS provider. You are colocating some servers in a datacenter and buying an unmetered 10 gigabit or 100 gigabit IP transit service.
Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.
I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc
I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
> Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices?
This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when then this sort of limitation will be removed.
I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is certainly part of the equation.
I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on doing so.
Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.
Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.
Yeah, it's pretty much to support backwards compatibility with old smart TVs and the like. They already enforce stricter rules on new hi-res content, and once those old devices cycle out of service you can expect the support to go away.
It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you really, really have to.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS server.
It's been working great by itself for the most part since the beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the way.
We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.
(I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)
Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429 until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to have resolved things for the most part.
Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as big of an issue as it is today.
What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal users that YT is optimized for.
I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve the bulk of the blame imo.
This will happen in the real world when the robot mass production gets going. We'll climb the exponential till we run into the resource limits of the planet at meteoric speed.
Yes, the regulators will try and manage it, but eventually every decision about who can use the robot/AI genie for what will go through them because of the robot/AI genie's enormous strain on natural resources, and you'll be back to a planned economy where the central planners are the environmental regulators.
There are hard decisions to make as well. Who gets to open a rare earth processing plant and have a tailing pond that completely ecologically destroys that area? Someone has to do it to enable the modern economy. It's kind of like we won't have a good AI video generator and will always be behind China if some Youtube creators refuse to license their content for AI training. Same goes for the rare earth processing tailing pond. Nobody can agree on where it's going to go, so China wins.
>I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube.
certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.
enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.
>I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general.
even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks - there's nowt so queer as webshits.
>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare
Lol, that's so true.
>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,
Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.
For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.
Hopefully most of what the bots are ruthlessly scraping is all the AI slop that is filling YT. Hopefully garbage in - garbage out will kill off all the AI nonsense.
yes, "AI" can be useful, but nonsense and slop are not.
"Support for YouTube without a JavaScript runtime is now considered "deprecated." It does still work somewhat; however, format availability will be limited, and severely so in some cases (e.g. for logged-in users). "
The devil is in the details
There are some formats, perhaps the one(s) the user wants, that do not require a JS runtime
Interesting that "signing up" for a website publishing public infomation and "logging in" may not always work in the user's favor. For example, here they claim it limits format availability
"Format availability without a JS runtime is expected to worsen as time goes on, and this will not be considered a "bug" but rather an inevitability for which there is no solution. It's also expected that, eventually, support for YouTube will not be possible at all without a JS runtime."
It is speculated that this format availability might change in the future
How long until it comes with a DRM AI and then my anti-DRM AI will have to fight it in a virtual arena (with neon lights and killer soundtrack, of course)?
Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once.
Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled into a native executable that can run without having to install Deno separately.
Alternatively, I'm not sure if this might be an impetus to move the bulk of the codebase itself to TS/JS and just use Deno/Node/Bun or otherwise to move to Rust with rusty_v8 or deno_core directly.
From what I can tell, it basically includes the JavaScript to run, and then the main program tells it which engine to feed it to. From some issue tracker discussion, it does the latter in the common way of "look up an executable on $PATH or use a user-provided path, and shell out to it". I didn't check where the logic is located for building the command line needed for each supported engine.
It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.
What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those creators can upload wherever they want.
And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or something?
Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic, arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of it are actually not that great and a potential government system might actually be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
I will say that is something I would not have considered reasonable prior to watching his video.
I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against, but the fact that big corporations are built on top of the work of volunteers (curl, ffmpeg) who mostly have to beg for funding is a known fact.
Nobody "has to" beg for funding, because nobody is forcing them to work! You are underfunded if you are forced to accomplish a task and are given too little money. In community driven projects this is not the case. The only thing keeping the developers from taking a nice vacation is their abstract own sense of duty, which is their prerogative, but completely optional
Frankly I think this is inevitable- it's practically one of the laws of computing: any sufficiently complex system will ultimately require a turing-complete language regardless of its actual necessity.
See also:
"""Zawinski's Law states: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.""""
and
"""Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:[1][2]
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."""
(from the above I conclude that if you want to take over the computer world, implementing a mail reader with an embedded Lisp).
Someday it will have to launch a VM with a copy of Chrome installed and use an AI model to operate the VM to make it look like a human, then use frame capture inside the VM to record the video and transcode it.
> if using QuickJS, version 2025-4-26 or later is strongly recommended for performance reasons
Oh, I wonder if they got performance to a reasonable level then? When the external JS requirements were first announced, they said it took upwards of half an hour, and a QuickJS developer wrote in the ticket that they didn’t see a path towards improving it significantly enough.
I wonder how the whole thing works when I open a youtube video from a preview inside a chat application on my mobile phone.
It looks like the video loads and starts playing in some kind of in-app browser, but there is just full-screen video and nothing else. I also never faced any ads in this "mode" of playing a video, yet recently some strange things started happening where the playback would start together with an audio-track from the advertisement. The video itself would start playing but the sound would be replaced with the sound from ad which seemed very odd and much like a bug, only when advertisement audio track ends it will be replaced with audio track from the video itself.
I'm genuinely curious how is the whole playback process different when I watch a video from the Telegram preview, can I somehow achieve the same "just fullscreen video" kind of playback on the desktop as well? Does anyone have any insight?
You can get ad-free, fullscreen video on mobile right away by opening it from a chat message preview. You also just get the full-screen video, no way to minimise it and see Youtube UI, no ads visible. I was just wondering how it works and can you simulate that on the desktop.
I'm glad there's a streaming service that pays independent creators for their hard work, but the player is glitchy almost to the point of being unusable.
Actually, it's completely to the point of being unusable. For several videos now, I've watched halfway through and suddenly playback stops and the video is replaced with "Error." And every time this happens I have to just pray the videos on youtube because, without exaggeration, it will never work again. Even after checking a week later.
This is where I would guess the world destroing AGI/ASI will come about. The neverending cat-and-mouse game of ads/blockers driven by profit motive. LLMs will used by both sides in a escalating game, with humans with its attention and wallet stuck in the middle.
In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.
maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only would get them pretty much all the way there.
They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in sandboxes and their content would be safe.
Of course, the same can be said for FB, Tiktok, instagram, Pintrest, reddit, ... and I'm sure the list keeps going. Frankly, Youtube is pretty damn good about this, really.
Well, there used to be a lot of economic theory about how stupid it is to have marketplaces (like Youtube fundamentally is) be owned by anyone but the government. Entire books.
I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more professional approach based on external recording.
Wonder if you could train a neural net to take camera recordings and basically reconstitute the original. For a given setup, the distortions should be pretty consistent.
I might be recalling it wrong,but I remember reading that there was some old hardware that refused to record protected TV/Movies probably a VCR or a DVR.
Camera manufacturers can easily refuse to record a stream of they detect it is protected, may be via watermarks or other sidechannel.
HDCP is how modern digital displays (and digital display recorders) do it.
You might be thinking of Macrovision, which was integrated in a lot of DVD players and would embed pulses into the vertical blanking interval of the analogy video output. These pulses could be detected by compliant DVD recorders and used to refuse recording. The pulses would also cause playback defects in some older VCRs and TVs.
I remember connecting my first DVD player to an old TV via a VCR (effectively using the VCR as an RF modulator) and being plagued with the image brightness constantly lowering and rising. At the time, I fixed this by switching to a dedicated RF modulator. I now suspect Macrovision is what caused this.
> HDCP is how modern digital displays (and digital display recorders) do it.
But that's inside the system. I'm talking about recording the physical output, i.e. the screen itself. With a controlled environment, known screen characteristics, I would hope that an external recorder + post-processing can create high quality images or video.
Old VCRs looked for a hidden signal that rental videos put out so you couldn't record them. But it was easy to block with a cheap device that you put in the middle.
Macrovision worked by outputting signals that were just barely out of spec, such that TVs would be able to correct for the issues just fine but VCRs would constantly lose sync.
They find devices that are easy to hack (and I mean rip and tear) and extract the decryption keys from each of them, from what I have heard cheap chinese tvs and set top boxes, they extract the keys from the chips (hardware hacking, heard some even use microscopes to read the keys by hand), and then use them to decrypt streams, I heard that they catch them pretty fast to they use like 1 device per season. This is why they use mostly stollen devices.
The really shitty thing is that vulnerable devices get blacklisted en masse, so all legitimate users get stuck with 480p video content on streaming services. The Nexus 5 got this treatment, as I understand it, because it was too easy to extract the keys.
Not a Netflix user here: Are you saying that paying customers get cut off from higher video quality, that they are possibly paying for, and pressured into buying new devices? That shit should be illegal!
Search for widevine decrypt. You’ll find code and forums where at least some L3 (software) keys are publicly shared. For high resolution on some platforms, you need L1 keys, but as far as I understand the decryption process basically stays the same once you have a working key.
You won't find a ton of up-to-date info that would let you do the same - the scene groups hold their methods closely specifically because of this cat-and-mouse game.
I.e I know that hdmi stream can be encrypted so I guess for Netflix you can't juste have a "hdmi splitter"? Do you need to go as far as plugging yourself just before the lcd pixels ? And if so , is it the moment where its easier to have a high def camera pointed at your lcd screen with post processing?
Breaking HDCP is a lot easier than breaking the other things. You don't have to attack the torment nexus directly. This is not the most ideal option but it is information theoretically correct assuming your capture rig is set up properly.
You can only get a WEBRip that way, not a WEBDL, since you'll need to re-encode and introduce some generational loss. The gold standard for streaming piracy is stripping the DRM from the original compressed bitstream, remuxing it to mkv, and uploading that as-is for maximum quality.
I knew of this chrome bug which could allow netflix to be ripped. I had heard it in comments of some section of youtube and I might need to look further into it but its definitely possible.
Yes, it's called: Web Environment Integrity + hardware attestation of some kind
> "the technical means through which WEI will accomplish its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a server can ask a third-party "verification" service to make sure that the user's browsing environment has not been "tampered" with. A translation of the policy's terminology will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way from Google's accepted browser configuration" [1]
Let's say the only devices you can get that will run YouTube are running i/pad/visionOS or Android and that those will only run on controlled hardware and that the hardware will only run signed code. Now let's say the only way to get the YouTube client is though the controlled app stores on those platforms. You can build a chain of trust tied to something like a TPM in the device at one end and signing keys held by Apple or Google at the other that makes it very difficult to get access to the client implementation and the key material and run something like the client in an environment that would allow it to provide convincing evidence that it is a trusted client. As long as you have the hardware and software in your hands, it's probably not impossible, but it can be made just a few steps shy.
The decryption code could verify that it's only providing decrypted content to an attested-legitimate monitor, using DRM over HDMI (HDCP).
You might try to modify the decryption code to disable the part where it reencrypts the data for the monitor, but it might be heavily obfuscated.
Maybe the decryption key is only provided to a TPM that can attest its legitimacy. Then you would need a hardware vulnerability to crack it.
Maybe the server could provide a datastream that's fed directly to the monitor and decrypted there, without any decryption happening on the computer. Then of course the reverse engineering would target the monitor instead of the code on the computer. The monitor would be a less easily accessible reverse engineering target, and it itself could employ obfuscation and a TPM.
I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me.
Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
That 'moderation' is in the same spirit as 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' at Guantanamo Bay, 'Administrative Segregation' in US prisons or Russia's 'Special military operations' in Ukraine. Tomayto, tomahto.
Disclaimer: To anybody getting ready to be offended by these references, don't be selectively blind to the word 'spirit' above. If you still can't make it out, I'm obviously referring to euphemisms here and no additional equivalences are implied. Anything else you attribute to my statement reflects your own views and is your own responsibility. It's such a shame that I have to explain such basic facts with a disclaimer that's longer than the comment itself. But the reality is that some people are so sensitive that they insist on imposing their version political correctness to not just implied speech, but also to unimplied speech, language and even thought, while totally disregarding others' cultural perspectives. I leave this here just in case I have to explain my intentions to someone again.
And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.
In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.
What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly.
But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go)
And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher)
That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)
> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them.
You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from YouTube.
If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.
Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.
The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway.
Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.
But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.
And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing.
I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.
I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.
I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point).
The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?”
Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.
Just because the balance shifts doesn't mean the desktop/laptop stops being supported.
Laptops aren't going anywhere. Even if phones and tablets replace them for a third of tasks, or a third of people.
The idea that laptops with browsers would become so rare that YouTube would drop support, within any reasonably predictable future timeframe, is pure fantasy.
>within any reasonably predictable future timeframe
I think given the pace of technological advancement and given how every generation we see at least one major piece of electronics completely wipe out generations of predictions, this statement doesn’t serve a productive purpose other than to make “I don’t agree” sound like some variation of “it’s an objective fact that what you said is impossible.” You’re just spiking the conversation, even if that is not your intention.
I didn’t say this is definitely going to happen. I’m just saying clearly the way we engage with computers is shifting and that means companies will adjust accordingly. It’s not that far fetched.
As for “within any reasonably predictable future timeframe,” for all we know YouTube will become a relic.
That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario is far-fetched. This isn't between two comparably plausible scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent where a popular site like YouTube would remove support. It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on current actual trends.
I’m not too proud to admit that I am way out on a limb and probably wrong. I’m just kind of musing and thinking out loud about a broader question. I don’t mind you disagreeing, I don’t mind being wrong, but I don’t know man…maybe try and ease off the gas a bit?
No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I’d argue it’d helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for corporate videos. Yeah there’s other solutions but the number of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.
Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.
Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.
Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?
And nobody's saying you're getting paid to watch YouTube all day. But video links get sent around, and people check out whatever 3 minute video. They watch during lunch. You know how it is.
Working in infrastructure design (specifically railways), cab ride videos are often useful to fill in gaps in as-built plans or the pictures you took on a site visit (you'll always miss out to photograph something that'll be of major interest later), especially in early planning phases. Plus there's the odd software tutorial video here and there, too, of course.
I think it would give me a life crisis and I'd feel like a failure of a boss if I learned my otherwise productive employees felt they couldn't watch sloptube the clock. A sysadmin that isn't constantly jacked into nethack is hardly a sysadmin at all. You should really demand more humane working conditions if you feel like you have to micro-optimize your work day.
"yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
> Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
It would still be possible with native apps. Somebody will have to reverse engineer it continuously. So it will be slower, but still possible.
However, that won't be the case if they start using some secret (like a private key) that you can't access directly from an app, or if they decide that you can't run custom/modified apps. That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
> That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.
YouTube has gotten so bad that even normal people are complaining about it now. A middle-aged woman who volunteers with me was saying how she did not feel comfortable using YouTube due to the number of inappropriate ads. I ended up giving her links to a few Invidious instances and she loves them even if they are slower and not entirely reliable. She also understood the concept of a front-end without much explaining on my part.
Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.
Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.
Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them elsewhere.
I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...
I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).
It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.
It depends on a lot of factors. But even if it works in a virtual machine, your CPU is going to be pegged at 100% the whole time to handle the re-encoding. Unless you use a hardware h.264 encoder, but then the quality is pretty terrible since it's explicitly optimized for speed over quality and isn't tunable the way software encoders are.
It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You always just want to access the original compressed bitstream if possible.
I think the real key is to only compress enough initially so that you don't blow out your storage in terms of size and throughput... Once you have the stream captured at a higher quality, you can always recompress more optimally.
A relatively low compression with hardware h.264 will still take up a lot less space and throughput than mpeg-2 or raw.
In the current times yes, you can basically record your screen with whatever tool you fancy.
But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders" are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from the hdmi cable output for example.
Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
> Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?
To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.
It's a lost battle in the purist sense, but impure things can go far in real life. DRM is like my lock on the door. I'm sure it's a joke for LockpickLawyer and even a good many more people out there, but, it has successfully defended my household so far.
DRM just raises the bar a bit for access. For example in gaming, it gives the publishers a head start over pirates. If the game is unavailable for pirates during the largest hype, a lot more people buy the product than otherwise.
Also, sometimes DRM wins. For example, right now, Denuvo is undefeated. Some hardware dongle authenticated software are also unavailable in pirated form. Of course one could argue that eventually these would be defeated as well, but, DRM still served its purpose, in defending the product from unauthorized copying in times when it was most desirable.
To me, DRM hasn't made sense when I was looking at it from a Free Software standpoint, but it now makes sense from a product management standpoint.
With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording software sees a blank screen.
I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.
I imagine there would be ways around this. I know from personal experience that Kazam screen recorder on Firefox on Ubuntu can record anything and everything, including YouTube as well as DRM content on Disney+ and Prime Video.
I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I don't think that even Google could demand changes like that to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably circumvent that.
And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
Why is this relevant? To be clear, I'm asking from a place of ignorance. Are you saying that because the video player can have the video decoding happen entirely on the GPU, screen recording software can't pick it up? Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point.
I don't know if Youtube cares, but other website do attempt to block this as well. They will either black your screen or prevent playback if you try to screen record, even encrypting to prevent recording the HDMI/DP output.
If corporations could stop being dicks, that would be great. Between this and the Reddit API change feels like they all get together and plan this. Thank god for FOSS.
I do not understand why Google doesn't just explicitly permit people who pay for premium to use yt-dlp or other tools to watch YouTube however the fuck they want. Put that in your terms, Google -- so people aren't afraid they'll lose their GMail because they wanted to watch a video -- and you'll get more paying customers...
Youtube used to have working download buttons on any video that the uploader licenced as creative commons.
The version of their app that used their V2 API also allowed downloading any video (local to the app, not easily copied) or even setting it to auto-download all of your subscription feed as videos came out.
Knock on wood not to jinx it, but I wonder why this manages to stay up on github when eg paywall-busting chrome extensions get banned from there (because of DMCA takedowns I guess?)
there was already an attempt to take it down back in 2020/2021 [0]. The DMCA claim's main argument was that ytdl was circumventing Techincal Protection Measures (TPMs) in order to access the content. Thanks to a letter from the EFF [1] which explains how ytdl accesses content in the same way that a browser does (i.e. it does circumvent anything such as DRM), github rejected the takedown.
this is also why ytdl has stood firm in saying they will never attempt to be compatible with anything protected by DRM.
Am I right in saying they need to be able to run JS code from YouTube to be able to get the download URL at this point? Deliberate obfuscation I'm guessing? I guess Deno makes the code fairly safe to execute and I guess the chances of YouTube daring to download spyware onto your machine is minimal :-)
For me the principal issue with Youtube (for many years was copyright overreach, yeah ok safe harbor, but you can't tell me that they couldn't have done a better job) has been censorship/demonetization which is effectively censorship
Everything from that follows, the entire philosophy of the product
Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just add another flag to the invocation:
It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me. It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command, as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment, and being able to package it up together with the solver before runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start of downloads seems much faster now.Glad to hear it’s faster now!
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable
They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot".
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.
> It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two.
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it. Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X] Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
Free speech doesn't die with this. Host your own site.
The year is 2041. Google announces that only a negligible fraction of users acceses websites outside of the clean pool. These users are at risk, they claim, due to "all the bad stuff on the free web". They refuse to clarify if this refers to malware or to content not aligned with The Party doctrine. However, they draw the consequence that "free web" sites will no longer be supported by Chrome, to protect the users. Less than an hour later, Mozilla releases a new version of Firefox that also disables access to websites that were not whitelistet by The Party, using the same reasoning.
Press fork.
For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
What's so clean about YouTube, Discord, X etc? It's full of low quality content, scams, malware, influencers, advertisers and other scum and villainy.
I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's definitely "heavily censored" and "free".
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
You can say Roblox directly you know, Death Eaters aren’t coming after you for saying the name.
Mullvad Frankfurt 102 seems to always be OK in this regard.
it's already like that
I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari), and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video plays.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.
Google does A/B testing for anti ad blockers.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Here I am, totally given up on adblockers, and no way I’m paying for premium, but jesus christ the amount of ads I get, sometimes seems to be one every minute, making most videos unwatchable.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
For the last two days I haven't been able to watch youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.
I had the same problem. Make sure you're running the latest version of uBlock Origin. By that I mean you should explicitly check for updates and install the latest version. That fixed it for me.
I've disabled adblock/vpn and can watch maybe 1-2 videos before the video player starts blacking out on each one. Only restarting firefox "resets" it and I haven't been able to find a reason for this happening. Time for yt-dlp I guess
I disable youtube instead when this happens.
If I care enough I'll yl-dlp it to my jellyfin server, but yeah I mostly just don't bother.
Recently I've found Youtube to just show a white screen if it detects Firefox+uBO.
There's probably scripts you can add to your ubo to combat this.
Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
The FTC will not investigate anything that was not reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do care about these issues, if you care enough to take six minutes to report it.
YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian. What's the issue you're seeing?
If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting the length expected for the ad to take before streaming you any bytes.
Same here. Still, I prefer to wait instead of suffering those aggressive ads.
The worst part is if someone doesn’t put 2+2 together and starts blaming their ISP for poor load issues because their Youtube “keeps buffering” because of this continue cat-and-mouse game messing with the player client.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
I've seen that too, but it's still better than somebody yelling in your face about toilet paper.
I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on both Linux (Debian 12) and on Android to watch Youtube without ads and it works without issue.
I'm using Firefox.
I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?
I am constantly having serious issues running YouTube (Pentium II, IE3, Windows SQL Server 2003)
Well... I have many new, emerging problems with YouTube as of lately.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
It feels like "serving you the video you actually want to see" has become some kind of unimportant side quest, as opposed to serving you the crap (Ads, Shorts, recommendations, comments, sponsored content) that they would rather you be looking at.
This is the essence of enshittification. The good fast useful free offering is the bait, and this... stuff... is the switch.
YouTube is currently A/B testing some real annoyances:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868987
Are you using Chrome or a Chromium browser? From experience and reports I’ve seen, that seems to make a huge difference.
Firefox
There are dozens of us!
Since some days I suddenly get freezes in the tab; these unfreeze after some time, say 20 seconds or so, but I notice a delay.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI also changed. It is important to point out that while you do not have any issues, other people do or may.
I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't click the time index bar to move to a different point in the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting out. Bizarre. . .
I had that happen some week ago too! I had to clear site data + cookies for YouTube in Firefox before I got it to work again.
Airplay from youtube is broken for me. I airplay and instead of english, I get german and no way to change the language. This is not an isolated incident.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtube_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab only for video itself to load, while rest of the page doesn't?
That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.
That sounds pretty nice. Is there a way to do it on purpose?
I know that's a tongue-in-cheek joke, but just in case I'm fond of the plugin unhook.
I experience this, but only with YouTube Shorts. Video loads, but none of the elements around it.
This has happened to me frequently.
Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.
I've never seen that. I use Firefox.
That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.
Hah. I always assume it's them actively trying to make the experience worse on anything that is not Chrome.
Are you running any extensions that modify content?
Yes happens sometimes to me, Vivaldi.
I have, and recently, i nothing is loading until i open a new video in another tab, then all of a sudden both pages start loading and playing :s
Only if you use Googles Chrome Browser. Other browsers have issues like Firefox[1].
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517
I can no longer watch videos on YouTube with Firefox.
When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.
I considered it as motivation to switch more from Firefox to Zen, where it works, I guess because Google doesn't recognize it as Firefox and doesn't apply the anti-competition script?
[dead]
Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
This absolutely screams graphics card drivers problems to me.
Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being downloaded?
On Linux? One can dream But if the correct drivers are installed and work, I think it will solve the issue.
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.
And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.
I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when watching videos in a (different) language that I understand.
With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely working"?
I personally use Youtube almost exclusively for my entertainment. I am using Chromium on Raspberry Pi 5. I am running some flavor of uBlock, SponsorBlock, and some Shorts remover extension. It just works.
I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did
I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly.
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
> I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
[2] I hate YouTube corporate.
Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in recent years.
I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music).
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
> I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced
there's a lot of iphone/ipad users out there.
> Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already
I don't use it but ui probably. ads maybe. plenty of people have money and don't want the inconvenience of trying to get around it.
No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.
You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any chromecast device including chromecast homes with the microphone turned off.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
You get music discovery, radios, go to album, go to artist
For me, it just comes with Premium, and I buy Premium to support the creators I watch often without having to watch ads. I want them to get paid.
Quick, everyone start sending unwanted junk mail to this guy's house, he'll pay you to stop!
Heaven forbid someone pay for an online service they use and enjoy.
Their point is that it's not "paying for" but it's "paying off".
Sure, it's just a poor analogy. YouTube doesn't show up at your door unprompted as junk mail does. You go there intentionally for the purpose of watching a video. You can pay for that video with your time or your money. No one is being "paid off" in that scenario.
Third option: I don't pay for it, I don't load the ads, and the trillion dollar company figures out a way to live with the economic consequences of their own decisions.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
I do, but not for services that treat their users (and content creators!) like YT does.
No one ever got a promotion for maintaining software
They limit the buffer to around 30secs or so like all other streaming services but otherwise 95%+ of the time it just plays smoothing with no buffering at all from start to end. YouTube is generally in the top 3 of the video streaming services I use. Even on 4G wireless (which I occassionally use) it works well enough which is impressive as other video steaming services struggle (with the sole exception of Netflix which is probably the only one better than YouTube).
No issues here for me with uBO, logged in or not, no premium
No idea what you are talking about. I don’t have premium and use in both logged in and logged out.
If I'm logged out, I get "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" about once a week from both home and the office.
That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
When it comes to video it’s not only the browser. It’s also your gpu, your OS and your gpu drivers.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds more work for them, when the same company is also developing a competing browser?
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
It's not 2003, the browser isn't the battle.
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.
I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.
Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
Brave is a series scam company.
you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you’re using Deno).
If you’re using some sort of weird OS or architecture that Deno/Node doesn’t support, you might consider QuickJS, which is written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.) Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain. (You don’t have to trust Google in general to trust that they won’t serve you actual malware.)
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)
I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically, especially things that does network requests sometimes (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of packaging it before I run it, so it's not the end of the world.
No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.
> IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization (https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.sol...), not from Google or any websites, FWIW.
> The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization
I meant the challenge that is the reason they need the Javascript in the first place.
You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.
The original point was this:
> > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
> You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.
That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm adding a manifest which controls what this application can actually access, which is basically a VM config, where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part that shouldn't have github.com/* access.
Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of workarounds, so not the end of the world.
> Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from Youtube, right? That’s why we actually needed a JS runtime in the first place.
Correct, the data needed to solve the challenge comes from YouTube.
Restricting or sandboxing software is something I've been looking into recently. Would you mind sharing what you use and possibly an example as well? Perhaps an example for yt-dlp?
This is the way. Leaving so many packages with unfettered access to your system is only so secure.
This works for me:
Thank you!
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code
They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly possible).
It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another.
I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downloading one JS file.
For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval, can't be too positive.
You could serve the files yourself from a server populated by updating them from github after review. You'd need to either sign the domain with your own CA that the host running yt-dlp trusts, or patch yt-dlp to use a different server name, but neither of those steps should be too onerous.
It's not paranoid, it's more attack surfaces that don't need to be.
Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've found helpful to do this.
I've just hit the IPv6 problem. I routinely use yt-dlp -6 to cycle through my (basically infinite) set of IPv6 addresses. However when you do this, it tries the github EJS download over IPv6, which fails as github doesn't support IPv6 (because it's still the year 2000 over there).
Actually I think this is kind of a yt-dlp bug, since it doesn't need to use IPv6 for the github download.
You can set up a 'socat' process to listen on a certain IPv6 address and relay traffic to GitHub, and add it to your hosts file, and you don't even need to break TLS since it's forwarding traffic unchanged
> Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.
Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).
I've been recently benchmarking a lot of different engines: https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/
> Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).
A solver running at 50ms instead of 1ms I would say is practically imperceptible to most users, but I don't know what time span you are measuring with those numbers.
My page is about generic JS benchmarks. Just did a quick run with a sample javascript challenge I got via yt-dlp (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ivankra/javascript-zoo/ref...):
So about 10x slower for the current flavor of YouTube challenges: 0.2s -> 2.2s.A few more results on same input:
Tidied up benchmark and results: https://gist.github.com/ivankra/a950b2c37db48c66fe5dceb0acd8...
Looks like quickjs is the next best option after the big three engines (V8/JSC/SM).
Thanks for the benchmark!
I tried it on my slower laptop. I get:
A 5x slowdown for an interpreted C JS engine is pretty good I think, compared to all the time, code and effort put into v8 over the years!I've found having yt-dlp available on my iPhone useful, and used Pythonista to achieve that, but haven't figured out how to get the new requirements to work yet. Would love any ideas people have!
Can QuickJS be compiled to WASM and executed in WASM sandbox?
> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command
Download a random video and then copy ejs from yt-dlp’s cache directory (I think it’s in /home/username/.cache)
> being able to package it up together with the solver
`make yt-dlp-extra`
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs looks like what you need?
No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it without the flag:
Providing one of the flags automatically lets it automatically get what it needs. No need for AUR packages :)Edit: Maybe I misunderstood, now when I re-read your post. You meant it'll prevent the automatic download at runtime perhaps? That sounds about right if so.
Yes exactly, if you install the package you don't need the download the solver on the fly. AT least that's my understanding of what the package is supposed to do. Personally I have no need for it.
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
I manually installed Deno via Chocolately, but I also installed yt-dlp from choco so it's on v2025.10.22
It was just updated again today, and at least for me, when you install it using the package name "yt-dlp[default]", it already downloads both deno and the solver automatically.
> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command
...Can they not just bundle a solver? For that matter, deno is available as a PyPI package.
> as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment
...An environment that doesn't allow you to install Deno, but does allow you to install yt-dlp?
yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)
> Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.
A third party is packaging it for PyPI (although yt-dlp doesn't support this, nobody has properly verified it etc.) and the wheel looks to be just a monolithic executable and a "tell me the executable path" wrapper (much like the official PyPI package for uv), so I would assume it can.
Tangentially related. Youtube web is now, as of the last month, strictly enforcing "referrer header" for embedded videos. Even if you spoof it, it doesn't always work. You can't navigate directly to "youtube.com/embed/<videoid>" to watch something without giving google some direct information.
Since when are public-facing error codes just lies?
"Oh Error 15 something went wrong, tee hee." "Oh Error 153 better try again, (got em, guys!)"
They operated for a while, before finally updating their FAQ stating this is intentional.[1]
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy... " Provide a HTTP Referer header to enable video playback
Our Terms of Service require embedders to provide a HTTP Referer. If this information is missing, viewers attempting to watch embedded YouTube videos will encounter blocked playback and an error screen (“error 153”). These viewers will still be able to click “Watch on YouTube” to view the video on YouTube. Note that directly accessing the embedded player without an enclosing webpage or context (such as accessing it from your web browser's address bar) will typically not have a HTTP Referer and users will encounter the error screen; the embedded player is only intended to be used within an embedded context."
Pretty much all embeds have done this, increasing over the years. Forget discord embeds. They want the tracking. Sometimes they even make me login "to know I'm not a bot"
Does a Referer of "http://127.0.0.1" work?
Damn that's crazy, nothing a simple static redirector in a single js line can't fix. Overall cost to implement this shit : likely thousands hundred k Bypass cost : literally 0 It really is just a way for them to say "we can fuck with you as much as we want and you won't do shit cause what you gonna do ? go somewhere else ?"
In killing the cable company, YouTube has become the cable company themselves.
Exactly like cable companies did when they killed whatever was before. Every corporation always acts to maximize revenue.
I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site.
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.
The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.
I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.
I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)
Which frame do you use? I’ve been looking for this for a long time, but I wasn’t aware color e-ink was good enough for this yet.
it's actually black and white, and needed some programming to work like this.
I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.
As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.
Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.
I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at
Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you used, if you want to look at the negative you have development costs, and even more costs to get a print. Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
BLS says $0.30 is $1.25 today. Each roll was like 30 pictures too (24, but I like round numbers), so like her $30 a roll?
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...
I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36 picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the professional level as well, but your local drug store had all of the above)
I take pictures of the sky, not to post it somewhere immediately but it’s like documentary captures for later years looking back
We can’t ever document all of life on earth but we can try
I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.
Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?
Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.
> You are a digital hoarder.
Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.
Have you heard of https://github.com/immich-app/immich ?
> Is this meant to be negative?
It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.
Yeah, I still have a VHS collection of cartoons I used to watch as a kid.
It did not sound particularly negative to me either, but if it was, I wonder why.
> do we ever?
We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.
I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.
Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.
Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.
There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.
Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.
Generations of talent & creativity just gone.
What's a "YTP"?
I recommend starting with Mom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7opxguZWns
YouTube poop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop
Anything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee you want to see it again.
The problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content, especially when it'll likely be outside the context you originally found it.
Wasn't expecting to see a fellow sumo hoarder on HN...there's dozens of us, dozens!
I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years ago. I wish I'd archived them.
Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...
Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I start to journal, track, or just document something, after some time I notice again and again that most of the value has already been created the moment I finish working on a specific entry. Even with something seemingly very important like medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are recordings of memories involving people close to you
I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.
I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.
I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube. Many of them are fan-made, many already unavailable I sometimes play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.
How many of the 20,000+ videos you've saved locally do you actually care about if they get "removed" from YouTube?
I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.
You never know until you need to find something and can’t find it.
I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all
I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.
Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g. university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from professional "content creators" that you can't imagine keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your time today either.
With more content than we need being produced regularly, do you really need to store everything you've ever watched?
I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time.
Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.
Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.
I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.
So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.
And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
I have a script that calls out to a small llm
etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present in the titleHey ^^, that's a great idea.
I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me until now, thanks!
I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.
> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?
No.
How so? What’s missing?
* Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as "music" by uploaders, to start.
* Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc.
* Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device.
* If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device.
(Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)
* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.
* There is a liked videos playlist
Yes, I read your comment above.
Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
Great. I'll keep using mine, though.
Can you upload some most interesting deleted YT videos to Web Archive or even Dailymotion, so that they are preserved for the next generation?
What is your storage setup, do you have lots of hard drives, or does this go online somewhere?
how do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently, now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good idea.
do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh
Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
You people always make everything more complicated than necessary.
That does none of the things tubearchivist does, among them:
- Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos
Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around, instead of visiting a page in my browser.
> Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes hard to search and find a specific video. That's where Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
I'm also not a fun of such overengineered programs, but using raw yt-dlp alone is not enough for replicating full workflow.
Your command is nice for downloading a single video (I also provide a url from clipboard via xclip), but archiving videos daily from a list of favorite channels would require a bit more scripting. Didn't manage to find anything both minimal and popular to link instead.
It doesn't download just a single video – it downloads all your liked videos with some reasonable sorting.
Put your favorite channels' and playlists' URLs into a text file and use the "-a file.txt" flag to batch download. Use "--dateafter {date of 3 days ago}" to download only the latest videos. Adapt as needed.
Yep. But.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I sent the video to my friend, but his phone says "/home/trvz/media/youtube/george hotz archive/20251109 - comma ai ｜ COMMA CON 2025 ｜ George Hotz ｜ Outwit, Outplay, Outlast ｜ President [werrvv0MVXQ].webm" was not found. Plz help!
Someone should put together and publish a docker container that does that.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Ooooh thanks! ElasticSearch? Who cares, gotta use somehow that spare memory in my k8s home cluster!
Gives me Magnum Archives vibes.
Damn, one can really build an offline internet for themselves these days huh?
No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
What percentage, in numbers?
From https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404
> What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
>
> The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this project.
More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore.
This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.
Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.
The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.
> Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up..
I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All these big companies keep driving up our cost of living, while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also a cost to not participating, so that's not an option either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their influence on our lives.
> The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.
I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't know how we'll overcome that.
>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.
Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm happy to be corrected, though.
Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory if not accomplice to fraud.
Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
That's a fair point. Thanks for the detailed response.
I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous. Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps, shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that are so outrageous.
I also use a malware blocker at all times (to not have one on all computers would be like running an open telnet server: insane), so can't say I have personal experience with it, but there is plenty of anecdotal discussion about blatant financial scams, e.g. [0][1]. That first one OP claims Youtube acknowledged receiving their report, investigated it, and determined that the ad was acceptable. If true, they are admitting they are specifically aware of these ads and that users are raising complaints about them (they don't exist now, but a court could subpoena information about whether OP's story is true).
Additionally, Google has a well known policy of allowing people to take out ads (which look exactly like a search result) for someone else's trademark (defeating the entire purpose of a trademark), and the FBI has a frequently referenced notice[2] to US citizens to be aware of fraud where scammers take out impersonating ads on "Internet search results" to e.g. lead people to the wrong site for financial institutions. It absolutely blows my mind that no one is prosecuted for participating in this.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18gjiqy/youtube_do...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1h6rdtj/massive_incr...
[2] https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221
Tons of blatant phishing, rug-pull crypto coins, illegal medications, or just fraudulent websites. Very content-dependent though
What do you think about YouTube showing pornographic advertisement to kids? Do you think they could, or do you think they must ensure that it's not displayed ?
Because I don't see how scam are less illegal than showing pornography to children, yet you wouldn't dare to tell me it's fine.
They have the money and the world would be better.
YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on servers and staff in three months.
Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so high that adblocking isn't compatible.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
The biggest difference is still the difference between physical stuff that only exist once and information, that just needs to be copied without loosing any value.
This isn't a piracy argument, it's a "leeching infrastructure that has real costs without contributing" problem.
Tapping into your neighbor's cable TV for free channels may not physically deprive anyone of something but it's still wrong.
I don't see how ad-blocking is unethical.
There are companies that make money by placing ("out of home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian thought.
It would be like attending a time-share dinner and putting in earplugs during their speech. I definitely think it's permissible to do it, but it's also permissible for them to kick you out for doing it.
It's more like tearing out the ad pages of a magazine before reading it. Even if the magazine has fine print saying "the reader may not tear out the ad pages..." It's still a ridiculous rule and it isn't wrong for people to ignore it.
The right analogy would be a newspaper delivering you the paper in ~milliseconds when you ask for it, whereever in the world, for free, and then you proceed to rip off the ads and read it.
The reason newspaper do the delivery was the promise that you'll see the ads, and they get to make money from that ads.
If they notice that you do all of the work of providing you the newspaper almost instantly and you dont see the ads, they are either gonna have to a) politely refuse to serve you b) point you to an alternate way of accessing the newspaper ("Newspaper Premium" for $$)
Firstly, ad watch time is not currency.
Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.
If they don't want to give me the paper for free, they should stop, but they haven't yet. Their expectation to make a certain amount of revenue from ads doesn't obligate the consumer. If their business model isn't making them the profit they need, it's on them to change their strategy.
> Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.
Absolutely! I run an adblocker as well!
At the same time, you'd agree they have the right to refuse to serve you (access denied) or make you jump through hoops (solve a challenge etc)
Sure. YouTube can put everything behind a paywall one day and I won't complain. But I reject the increasingly common belief that it's somehow wrong to block ads.
Again, not wrong to block ads. But they can make it very difficult to have you and I access to videos if we're running adblocker.
We're right, and they're right as well.
The implicit contract is that you see the content while letting the ads that support it play. If you disagree with ads, the ethical choice is to not watch the video, not to leech.
It's also ethical to change browser tabs or leave the room while the ad plays, but blocking it and costing the provider money while not contributing back is not.
> (presumably, I haven't looked into it)
YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.
Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my personal best value streaming service.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords, no more shitty recommendations.
I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.
PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then later, even when profitable can gradually reduce the quality of the service to the point where users have to pay to get back to an experience they used to have is textbook enshittification.
I’m recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first wasn’t shippable and the second always was. That has gradually shifted to neither being skippable.
adblocking "users" are not Youtube's users. What do you mean blocking ads has no bearing on their service? It sounds like you are saying user experience is "I should get this for free".
YouTube itself is offered for free. The creators of content are not Google employees. Adblocking is a safety measure on my own physical machine.
Not YouTube's users? Maybe. But I am, so by that metric there's some doubt.
I paid for over 2 years for the premium, the cost increases and it's cheaper to pihole everything and support the usual suspects on patreon.
It's become a scenario of "I've given you so many adverts, you should pay me to get less."
Nothing about your response changes the fact you appear to just be upset that you can't get anything you want for free and that content creators deserve to be paid.
Enshitiffication is the user experience. The passive, impassive, drooling hordes don't even notice.
Scraping sucks. Imagine a broken API with new breakages every few weeks. Now imagine the provider hates you. Shout out to the team for what they do.
> Now imagine the provider hates you.
That’s the best part.
Exactly. I could never maintain yt-dlp. Must be exhausting.
I think being in a pitched battle with YT is kind of fun, if you enjoy that sort of challenge, and winning to boot.
I mean YT has perfect knowledge of its adversary's moves and a huge staff and they're still losing. It must at least be satisfying. Also its an important job.
> a huge staff and they're still losing.
that's because these staff are just there for a pay cheque.
The yt-dlp maintainers are passionate. You will find that the passion wins.
> You will find that the passion wins
Lets hope so, otherwise we're all fucked.
From
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
it looks like deno is recommended for these reasons:
> Notes
> * Code is run with restricted permissions (e.g, no file system or network access)
> * Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm (--remote-components ejs:npm).
It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but please do not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to execute untrusted code. Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.
> It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp
yt-dlp supports a huge list of websites other than youtube
But YouTube is the only one that yt-dlp uses Deno for. No other website on yt-dlp's list has put up enough of a fight to merit an external JS runtime; only YouTube.
From the September announcement:
> The JavaScript runtime requirement will only apply to downloading from YouTube. yt-dlp can still be used without it on the other ~thousand sites it supports
I assumed they only use this setup for youtube, that might be wrong
Is there a full list? I struggled to find one
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/2025.09.23/supportedsi...
Thanks!
There's a supportedsites.md file in the base directory of the git repo.
Thanks!
I would not put it past them. And I'm not sure I trust the yt-dlp team to implement sandboxing securely. The codebase is already full of shortcuts that lead to vulnerabilities like file extension injection.
I mean, this gives me pause:
> Both QuickJS and QuickJS-NG do not fully allow executing files from stdin, so yt-dlp will create temporary files for each EJS script execution. This can theoretically lead to time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
TOCTOU from temporary files is a solved problem.
i wonder if it would be legal if they did, as an anti-circumvention counter-measure.
> Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.
... Isn't the web browser's sandboxing runtime-level?
It used to be 100% runtime-level and it was the golden age of browser exploits. Each of your tabs are now a separate process that the OS sandboxes. They can only access a specific API over IPC for anything that goes beyond js/rendering (cookie management, etc...). An exploit in V8 today only gives access to this API. A second exploit is needed in this API to escape the sandbox and do anything meaningful on the target system.
Yes, but browser sandboxing is an absolute marvel of software design that also cost millions and millions of dollars in developers salaries and CVE bounties to develop. Neither Deno nor yt-dlp have anywhere close to millions of dollars to spend on implementing secure JS sandboxing.
Yes, and it's only reasonably secure because of years of exploits being found and fixed by some of the best (and very well-funded) software security engineers out there.
That's not true. It's secure because they are stacking OS-sandboxing on top, forcing attackers to find a chain of exploits instead of a single issue in V8
Great news! Deno uses the same runtime as chrome, so you benefit from all those found exploits.
While you benefit from the V8 fixes it lacks OS-level sandboxing (see above). Chrome is safe because it stacks security layers. Runtime sandboxing is just one of them and arguably the weakest one.
For a long time, yt-dlp worked completely with Python. They implemented a lightweight JavaScript interpreter that could run basic scripts. But as the runtime requirements became more sophisticated it struggled to scale
As they put it, it was less of an interpreter, and more like 3 regexes in a trench coat.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
I'm still using the Media Player Classic Home Cinema to this day. https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC interface does nothing. In every other app it is play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
This.
That's awesome. I used VLC only because of the nightmare of codecs back in the day, and worked well for me for ages. I now just use mpv with some UI plugins.
VLC has fallen slightly victim to the “developer team tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and still isn’t done with the rebuild but has stopped maintaining the original for like three years” issue that some software seems to have
Ah, the Overwatch 2 development approach.
> Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
Not just you, I never liked VLC as well. MPC-HC forever!
I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit hole diving!
> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites.
How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]:
> Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer
Ah, I was not a windows user at the time.
Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.
That's if you weren't using a Mac
If you weren't using a Mac and wanted to play Quicktime videos? Then you have to install Apple's Quicktime player for Windows which was a piece of garbage.
Ah man, Macs of yore could play .rm/.rv files natively?
You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian
Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon.
Flash, also almost came built into every browser.
By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine.
Today, most browsers have most codecs.
Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark patterns.
Wouldn't be surprising, likely happened more when competition showed up.
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.
I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.
What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci Resolve, not to mention mobile apps behind the TikTok culture. There are also excellent and built-in video players in every browser and every OS.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste are basic OS-level features. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.
I think that happens when the rift between producers and consumers require some learning to jump from one to the other, at least professionally.
Some of the people who produce videos for a living require vastly different tools than someone who needs to trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't be able to effectively do their job.
For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way. You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are professional tools for people who write stories for a living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters, environments and so on, and many professionals do use them.
So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are still professionals who need tools specifically for "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in other areas :)
I used Avid VideoShop back in the day for that, which was Avid's consumer level offering. But I still appreciated being able to copy and paste from Movie Player when I just needed to paste a clip into a different application, which was much quicker when that was all I needed.
> But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents.
I think Word and other text documents are the exception not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always been viewed in different programs than the ones used for editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway view in something different than the editor. Nobody listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.
In fact I can't even think about any other format except for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs was printing)
> What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported standards whenever possible, but you must know that QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the blueprint (sometimes literally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format) for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"
You may be "technically correct" (the best kind of correct), but holy je-BUS was QT NOT user-friendly nor cross-platform-friendly at the height of its popularity.
There's a reason that once alternatives became available, users left QT as quickly as they could.
QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia, and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player (from the Win98 era)?
Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free.
But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
> But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
ffmpeg?
Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker.
This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.
That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.
> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…
Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.
Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
> It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.
I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire
And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.
1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.
Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.
"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.
> use it in line at the post office
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
> ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
There are more options on PCs to fight back with.
If you think having a developer mode switch on your smartphone that would enable shell access and a build env is what's stopping "the majority of the public" from "zombifying", either you need to talk with more "majority of the public", or I've been talking to the wrong "majority of the public".
The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functions are what rich people call a dinner party or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.
If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean, you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the majority of the public, but that want to do things that able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It would be great if it were easier because the phones were more open, but at some point you gotta go with the serenity prayer.
There's definitely a mismatch between expectations between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean. We agree that the majority of people are not going to suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more open for development. It's a complex societal issue that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down, content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.
> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all
It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.
It's not a question of being technical enough. It's actually a question of being too technical. You're here, which for me garners youa base level of respect if only because I've had the creators of certain subjects of discussion have responded directly to me grousing here.
Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less, you get into building web apps. For what people want to do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.
Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better than nothing.
But are DRM and poor user experiences hard requirements for something to fit in your pocket?
Otherwise, I don’t think I get your point - maybe you could clarify?
throwaway94275 wrote:
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
My GPD pocket 4 fits into really large cargo pants if that counts lol, and there is the micropc2 too that’s even smaller :p
Oh fuck you, I didn't have the $1,500 I just spent on Amazon for one of those! I've been waiting forever for them to make one with a finger print sensor, and I thought you were responding to a different comment so I looked it up and thank you :)
Well… https://www.zotac.com/page/zotac-vr-go-4
There are also various handheld PCs.
"Fitting into my carry-bag so I can use it in line at the post office" is already possible for a PC and many people do it all the time.
That's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.
That looks like something a dweeb would use, I want one
Handhelds like the Steam Deck are PCs and can fit in some pockets :P
I’m also waiting for the gallon sized water bottle I can fit in my <1l pocket.
Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as they do today.
There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.
Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some point by Apple at least.
I think it'd be biased more in the direction of the Ipad. If anything there's one feature apple's trying to avoid and that's Macos' waning ability to run third party binaries
> The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.
When it's not impeded by DRM, that is
long press -> save image/video is perfectly supported on a phone, it's just content diffusion platform that arbitrarily restrict it.
You can't even make a screenshot if the app doesn't allow it. Phones are broken. (well, the OS on them is).
There's a double edged sword here. Not even talking about DRM.
I would love to be able, myself, decide if it's fine to capture a screen for an application but I'd also would love to protect me or my non-tech-savvy relatives from accidentally share sensitive info (e.g. banking) when screen casting.
In my opinion there should be a waiver buried deep in the settings that allows me to disable such protections with a grace period of a week or so. Grace period is crucial because scammers are able to make people do virtually anything under stress and hurrying.
No, it's also iOS that's arbitrarily restricting it. I opened a bare .webm directly in Safari and got nothing on long press and nothing in any of the control widgets to save it.
Long pressing on https://www.learningcontainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07...
gets me
https://imgur.com/a/bseFwX3 on iOS 18, and https://imgur.com/a/Ksbz3zW on iOS 26
Maybe you're holding it wrong?
I think you're holding it wrong, because that's a .webp image, not a .webm video.
oh yeah totally. thanks!
Likely not really what you want but you can make a shortcut that saves the file to Photos.
- Get URLs from (shortcut input) - Get contents from (URLs from previous step) - Save (contents of URL) to Photos
Set to accept URLs and appear in share sheet.
It's not a “phone” problem, it's yet another Apple craziness that their customers somehow tolerate.
Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans
A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser: the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth.
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.
> They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetization up to them
A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.
There are lots of platforms where people pay for their distribution, but they're not as successful.
The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT provides.
As someone who's spent many years building streaming platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and this kind of massive over simplification is really sad.
There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which has paid out billions to creators.
Back then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now, however, companies prioritise their own interests over the user.
I think companies always prioritized their own interests.
A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal information to third parties.
Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they thought they'd get richer that way.
I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that you can get away with #2 so they do that.
We even have a name for this now…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1
Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)
/s
We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X: stable operating systems built on workstation-quality kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland that respected the user by providing distraction-free experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT, Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it wasn’t until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating systems became readily available to home users, with both Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
We do of course still have this in modern computing with Linux/KDE. Stable, snappy, and does exactly what you ask. The computer doesn't get in your way, nor does it try to get you to do something else. It just does what you tell it to do, immediately.
Yup, desktop Linux and other FOSS systems like ReactOS and Haiku are the last bastions of personal computing that haven’t been made into platforms that nag and upsell us.
There are myriad ways to optimise for the user, user friendliness is only one of them.
As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's particular about who its friends are".
> first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was
My first accounts were on Linux 1.x. It was glorious. Simple, sensible, and with manuals one command away. And it allowed you to just get things done. And there were tools. So many tools. 80's home computers and DOS crap and Macs that couldn't even open a file if it hadn't been tagged as the property of some application... Hells I would never have to be a part of any more. Except for work and school. But for personal computing, a brighter future was coming. In 30+ years since I've never had to step away.
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out. Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
DRM being forced into freeview TV seems like a contradiction in terms, and yet here we are.
Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
A media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not really obvious how to create a business that deals in media without some kind of protection over the copying and distribution of that media.
I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information.
I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.
Experience with video is excellent for most people. All the complexity is hidden from the end user, unless you are trying to hack something. In the 1990s, streaming effectively didn't exist because people didn't have enough bandwidth (it was mostly dial-up), and there was very little legal offering, and the little that existed was terrible. Home video was limited too, as few people knew how to make video files suitable for online diffusion.
Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001.
I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now, back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
It took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.
YouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...
Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).
1000/40 is rather asymmetric and the fastest service available in my area.
Now largely more feasible. We should try again.
Would you like to work with me to create OurTube?
I mean, PeerTube is already halfway there. The problem is that it's a pain in the ass to host, last time I tried. Which sums up the whole problem as to why we have YouTube in the first place.
Yes!
Guess why it was asymmetrical in the first place ... Telcos wanted to sell the upload bandwidth to streaming companies. Another double dipping Telco monopoly squeeze and customer boxing / enshitification from very early on.
I thought it was just trading more download for less upload when last mile bandwidth was limited by re-using old POTS copper.
Wasn't dialup largely asymmetric too? I don't think p2p streaming was even on the radar back then.
Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box. On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
It’s not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have struggled on YouTube the past weeks.
Sometimes I can’t even click on the front page, sometimes when I open a video it refuses to play.
I don’t know what’s up, but it works in chrome.
I also had it stop working completely. I thought they finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally install that update I had been sitting on for a while and it just started working again
Probably just the typical nefarious activities of YouTube. Either "accidentally" driving users to switch browsers, or experimenting with circumventing ad blockers, or negligence in testing, or who knows what.
If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people.
One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
That may also just be Firefox's way of telling you it has updated and needs to be restarted.
Well, the corporate policy in GOOG now is to only test everything on Chrome. Engineers are not even allowed to install Firefox. This is the result.
I've got a fresh install of endeavouros/arch and yt is horribly slow now. The upside is I've reduced my usage of the site.
Oh and it's not working at all on my desktop with the same setup, it's telling me to disable ad block. I'd rather give up yt.
> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
I've always found it insane how much software development web sites are willing to undertake, just to avoid using the standard video, audio, and img HTML elements. It's almost hilarious how over engineered everything is, just so they can 'protect' things they are ultimately publishing on the open web.
Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.
I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).
I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller niche video sites aren’t even implemented properly. On some sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL and cookies in the request, and download it to view locally.
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
Chrome has finally just landed enabled by default native HLS playback support within the past month. See http://crrev.com/c/7047405
I'm not sure what the rollout status actually is at the moment.
> See go/hls-direct-playback for design and launch stats analysis.
Is that an internal Google wiki or something? I can't find whatever they're referring to.
The standard video element is really nice:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works really well.
You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)
> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?
RealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was around the times things really got bad.
That does mean we go, essentially:
Step 1: We barely have video at all.
Step 2: Everything is terrible.
Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.
Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.
It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.
Chrome desktop has just landed enabled by default native HLS support for the video element within the last month. (There may be a few issues still to be worked out, and I don't know what the rollout status is, but certainly by year end it will just work). Presumably most downstream chromium derivatives will pick this support up soon.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
So this should eventually help things.
Any serious video distribution system would not use metered bandwidth. You're not using a VPS provider. You are colocating some servers in a datacenter and buying an unmetered 10 gigabit or 100 gigabit IP transit service.
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.
I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc
[0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png
I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
The BBC here used to put a ton of news content on it, it was pretty forward thinking really!
Around 2012?, I had some extension that forced YouTube videos to play with Quicktime in-browser, which was leaner. Original file, no conversion.
I wonder why YouTube doesn't implement full DRM, such as Widevine, at this point.
Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices? Is it too expensive?
(not that I'd like that; I always download videos from YouTube for my personal archive, and I only use 3rd party or modified clients)
They are already experimenting with DRM on all videos in certain clients (like the HTML5 TV one) https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
Sooner or later, in the next couple of years, it will happen.
> Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices?
This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when then this sort of limitation will be removed.
I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is certainly part of the equation.
I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on doing so.
Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.
Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.
Yeah, it's pretty much to support backwards compatibility with old smart TVs and the like. They already enforce stricter rules on new hi-res content, and once those old devices cycle out of service you can expect the support to go away.
It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you really, really have to.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
I wish @pg would just add "Replace YouTube" to his Frighteningly Ambitious Startup ideas.
https://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS server.
It's been working great by itself for the most part since the beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the way.
We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.
(I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)
Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429 until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to have resolved things for the most part.
Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as big of an issue as it is today.
What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal users that YT is optimized for.
I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve the bulk of the blame imo.
This will happen in the real world when the robot mass production gets going. We'll climb the exponential till we run into the resource limits of the planet at meteoric speed.
Yes, the regulators will try and manage it, but eventually every decision about who can use the robot/AI genie for what will go through them because of the robot/AI genie's enormous strain on natural resources, and you'll be back to a planned economy where the central planners are the environmental regulators.
There are hard decisions to make as well. Who gets to open a rare earth processing plant and have a tailing pond that completely ecologically destroys that area? Someone has to do it to enable the modern economy. It's kind of like we won't have a good AI video generator and will always be behind China if some Youtube creators refuse to license their content for AI training. Same goes for the rare earth processing tailing pond. Nobody can agree on where it's going to go, so China wins.
>I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube.
certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.
enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.
>I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general.
even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks - there's nowt so queer as webshits.
>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare
Lol, that's so true.
>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,
Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.
For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.
Who knows.
Hopefully most of what the bots are ruthlessly scraping is all the AI slop that is filling YT. Hopefully garbage in - garbage out will kill off all the AI nonsense.
yes, "AI" can be useful, but nonsense and slop are not.
"Support for YouTube without a JavaScript runtime is now considered "deprecated." It does still work somewhat; however, format availability will be limited, and severely so in some cases (e.g. for logged-in users). "
The devil is in the details
There are some formats, perhaps the one(s) the user wants, that do not require a JS runtime
Interesting that "signing up" for a website publishing public infomation and "logging in" may not always work in the user's favor. For example, here they claim it limits format availability
"Format availability without a JS runtime is expected to worsen as time goes on, and this will not be considered a "bug" but rather an inevitability for which there is no solution. It's also expected that, eventually, support for YouTube will not be possible at all without a JS runtime."
It is speculated that this format availability might change in the future
How long until it comes with a DRM AI and then my anti-DRM AI will have to fight it in a virtual arena (with neon lights and killer soundtrack, of course)?
s/infomation//information/
Discussed here a few weeks ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads - 1244 points, 620 comments
Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once.
Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled into a native executable that can run without having to install Deno separately.
Alternatively, I'm not sure if this might be an impetus to move the bulk of the codebase itself to TS/JS and just use Deno/Node/Bun or otherwise to move to Rust with rusty_v8 or deno_core directly.
It will also save Google time trying to fingerprint it!
How so?
You mean, like the yt-dlp-ejs package?
Hmm! Close enough, I guess. I didn't notice that. But I hope that it has a flexible interface and that all projects adopt it.
From what I can tell, it basically includes the JavaScript to run, and then the main program tells it which engine to feed it to. From some issue tracker discussion, it does the latter in the common way of "look up an executable on $PATH or use a user-provided path, and shell out to it". I didn't check where the logic is located for building the command line needed for each supported engine.
It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.
From the preservation point of view yes. But realistically, it's been the norm throughout human history that irrelevant culture simply gets removed.
So is much of relevant culture, it's not like there is a magic preservation wand that sorts by relevance before removal
There is. If something is relevant, it'll organically be kept somewhere.
What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those creators can upload wherever they want.
And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or something?
> Do you think YT ought to be government-funded
Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic, arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of it are actually not that great and a potential government system might actually be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
I will say that is something I would not have considered reasonable prior to watching his video.
yt-dlp feels like a whole army fighting Google. Users reporting and the army performs.
If by army you mean underfunded open source volunteers then yes.
That's the point, they don't have the fund but still give the sense of fight and power of an army.
If it's free, can you even talk about underfunding?
You can donate to a free project, including yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Maintainers.md#...)
The developers can arbitrarily decide their own goals and always claim underfunding, that's why it's meaningless in this context
I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against, but the fact that big corporations are built on top of the work of volunteers (curl, ffmpeg) who mostly have to beg for funding is a known fact.
Example from yesterday: https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-send...
Nobody "has to" beg for funding, because nobody is forcing them to work! You are underfunded if you are forced to accomplish a task and are given too little money. In community driven projects this is not the case. The only thing keeping the developers from taking a nice vacation is their abstract own sense of duty, which is their prerogative, but completely optional
Frankly I think this is inevitable- it's practically one of the laws of computing: any sufficiently complex system will ultimately require a turing-complete language regardless of its actual necessity.
See also: """Zawinski's Law states: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."""" and """Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:[1][2]
Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."""
(from the above I conclude that if you want to take over the computer world, implementing a mail reader with an embedded Lisp).
previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
Someday it will have to launch a VM with a copy of Chrome installed and use an AI model to operate the VM to make it look like a human, then use frame capture inside the VM to record the video and transcode it.
Before you blame Google, think that the main users of yt-dlp could be:
1) multi-billion AI companies which download large amount of videos without permission and without paying
2) Youtube competitors/replacements in countries where Youtube is blocked, which copy the videos without permission and payment
I wish though that Youtube would adjust their policy to block this type of users and let ordinary people download videos.
> this type of user
They are undifferentiable from ordinary users.
And what about users who do adblocking? They are also "not paying" in the same sense - how come they're not included in your list?
They are distinguished by volume. No ordinary user downloads millions of videos.
> No ordinary user downloads millions of videos.
why not? If that ordinary user wants to train their own model? Now you're not allowing such things to be done?
Sorry I forgot that the economy got so good that every "ordinary user" can afford a GPU farm now.
> if using QuickJS, version 2025-4-26 or later is strongly recommended for performance reasons
Oh, I wonder if they got performance to a reasonable level then? When the external JS requirements were first announced, they said it took upwards of half an hour, and a QuickJS developer wrote in the ticket that they didn’t see a path towards improving it significantly enough.
It wasn't a QuickJS developer but developer from a fork: https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/issues/445
Oh, so with QuickJS it only takes a few seconds at worst. That's great news for portability!
I wonder how the whole thing works when I open a youtube video from a preview inside a chat application on my mobile phone.
It looks like the video loads and starts playing in some kind of in-app browser, but there is just full-screen video and nothing else. I also never faced any ads in this "mode" of playing a video, yet recently some strange things started happening where the playback would start together with an audio-track from the advertisement. The video itself would start playing but the sound would be replaced with the sound from ad which seemed very odd and much like a bug, only when advertisement audio track ends it will be replaced with audio track from the video itself.
I'm genuinely curious how is the whole playback process different when I watch a video from the Telegram preview, can I somehow achieve the same "just fullscreen video" kind of playback on the desktop as well? Does anyone have any insight?
Not sure what you’re asking.
You can get fullscreen video in a desktop browser by pressing F or clicking the fullscreen icon (broken rectangle) below the video.
You can get ad-free playback by paying for Premium or sometimes with an ad blocker.
Outside the browser, you can get both with yt-dlp, which also integrates into video players like mpv.
You can get ad-free, fullscreen video on mobile right away by opening it from a chat message preview. You also just get the full-screen video, no way to minimise it and see Youtube UI, no ads visible. I was just wondering how it works and can you simulate that on the desktop.
[Fullscreen icon in YouTube is double arrow, not broken rectangle.]
The day that YouTube makes itself unusable with properly free tools is the day that I use Nebula and such instead
I'm glad there's a streaming service that pays independent creators for their hard work, but the player is glitchy almost to the point of being unusable.
Actually, it's completely to the point of being unusable. For several videos now, I've watched halfway through and suddenly playback stops and the video is replaced with "Error." And every time this happens I have to just pray the videos on youtube because, without exaggeration, it will never work again. Even after checking a week later.
This is where I would guess the world destroing AGI/ASI will come about. The neverending cat-and-mouse game of ads/blockers driven by profit motive. LLMs will used by both sides in a escalating game, with humans with its attention and wallet stuck in the middle.
Couldn't this be compiled to a single-file executable using Bun or Deno, to avoid the need for a runtime install?
https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables
In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.
They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on L2 attested device.
>They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM.
That's already here. Even random aliexpress tablets support widevine L1 (ie. highest security level)
How often are their keys extracted?
maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only would get them pretty much all the way there.
They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in sandboxes and their content would be safe.
"their" content? This is Youtube.
Of course, the same can be said for FB, Tiktok, instagram, Pintrest, reddit, ... and I'm sure the list keeps going. Frankly, Youtube is pretty damn good about this, really.
No where else to go that pays. They can pay which entices those to stay.
Google owns that monopoly.
Well, there used to be a lot of economic theory about how stupid it is to have marketplaces (like Youtube fundamentally is) be owned by anyone but the government. Entire books.
Yet no-one seems to remember.
I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more professional approach based on external recording.
Wonder if you could train a neural net to take camera recordings and basically reconstitute the original. For a given setup, the distortions should be pretty consistent.
I might be recalling it wrong,but I remember reading that there was some old hardware that refused to record protected TV/Movies probably a VCR or a DVR.
Camera manufacturers can easily refuse to record a stream of they detect it is protected, may be via watermarks or other sidechannel.
HDCP is how modern digital displays (and digital display recorders) do it.
You might be thinking of Macrovision, which was integrated in a lot of DVD players and would embed pulses into the vertical blanking interval of the analogy video output. These pulses could be detected by compliant DVD recorders and used to refuse recording. The pulses would also cause playback defects in some older VCRs and TVs.
I remember connecting my first DVD player to an old TV via a VCR (effectively using the VCR as an RF modulator) and being plagued with the image brightness constantly lowering and rising. At the time, I fixed this by switching to a dedicated RF modulator. I now suspect Macrovision is what caused this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System
> HDCP is how modern digital displays (and digital display recorders) do it.
But that's inside the system. I'm talking about recording the physical output, i.e. the screen itself. With a controlled environment, known screen characteristics, I would hope that an external recorder + post-processing can create high quality images or video.
Old VCRs looked for a hidden signal that rental videos put out so you couldn't record them. But it was easy to block with a cheap device that you put in the middle.
Macrovision worked by outputting signals that were just barely out of spec, such that TVs would be able to correct for the issues just fine but VCRs would constantly lose sync.
Netflix is already there for 4k streams
And it's an entirely useless effort. No idea how it is done but the internet is full 4k rips.
They find devices that are easy to hack (and I mean rip and tear) and extract the decryption keys from each of them, from what I have heard cheap chinese tvs and set top boxes, they extract the keys from the chips (hardware hacking, heard some even use microscopes to read the keys by hand), and then use them to decrypt streams, I heard that they catch them pretty fast to they use like 1 device per season. This is why they use mostly stollen devices.
The really shitty thing is that vulnerable devices get blacklisted en masse, so all legitimate users get stuck with 480p video content on streaming services. The Nexus 5 got this treatment, as I understand it, because it was too easy to extract the keys.
Not a Netflix user here: Are you saying that paying customers get cut off from higher video quality, that they are possibly paying for, and pressured into buying new devices? That shit should be illegal!
Yes, that's exactly what happens!
It provides a good incentive for manufacturers to invest into security for their devices.
No, it provides no incentive at all!
It's the users who suffer when this happens, not the manufacturers. The manufacturers couldn't care less, the money is already in the bank.
If the manufacturers were required to replace all the revoked devices at their cost, that would be a real incentive.
Manufactures suffer reputational damage from it. Also keys could be revoked before they finish selling through all of their stock of produced phones.
More easily in the past (I don't think if it's still true for 4K) you only needed an HDMI splitter to bypass HDCP copy protection.
Now you need both a buggy HDCP 1.4 splitter and an HDCP 2.1 to 1.4 converter.
Interesting - do you have any sources to read further?
Search for widevine decrypt. You’ll find code and forums where at least some L3 (software) keys are publicly shared. For high resolution on some platforms, you need L1 keys, but as far as I understand the decryption process basically stays the same once you have a working key.
Random article: https://www.ismailzai.com/blog/picking-the-widevine-locks
Claimed to be L1 key leaks (probably all blacklisted by now): https://github.com/Mavrick102/WIDEVINE-CDM-L1-Giveaway
You won't find a ton of up-to-date info that would let you do the same - the scene groups hold their methods closely specifically because of this cat-and-mouse game.
The analog hole is real.
I was wondering how easy it is
I.e I know that hdmi stream can be encrypted so I guess for Netflix you can't juste have a "hdmi splitter"? Do you need to go as far as plugging yourself just before the lcd pixels ? And if so , is it the moment where its easier to have a high def camera pointed at your lcd screen with post processing?
Breaking HDCP is a lot easier than breaking the other things. You don't have to attack the torment nexus directly. This is not the most ideal option but it is information theoretically correct assuming your capture rig is set up properly.
Yeah. The HDCP1 master key was leaked over a decade ago, it's a joke compared to widevine. Encoding the raw input is very feasible on modern hardware.
You can only get a WEBRip that way, not a WEBDL, since you'll need to re-encode and introduce some generational loss. The gold standard for streaming piracy is stripping the DRM from the original compressed bitstream, remuxing it to mkv, and uploading that as-is for maximum quality.
It would be harder to break HDCP and you wouldn't even get the original compressed media content. It's a worse idea.
I knew of this chrome bug which could allow netflix to be ripped. I had heard it in comments of some section of youtube and I might need to look further into it but its definitely possible.
It's not as easy as downloading a YouTube video though
Can you explain in simple terms what would prevent one from running the decryption programmatically posing as the end client?
Yes, it's called: Web Environment Integrity + hardware attestation of some kind
> "the technical means through which WEI will accomplish its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a server can ask a third-party "verification" service to make sure that the user's browsing environment has not been "tampered" with. A translation of the policy's terminology will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way from Google's accepted browser configuration" [1]
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/web-environment-integrit...
Let's say the only devices you can get that will run YouTube are running i/pad/visionOS or Android and that those will only run on controlled hardware and that the hardware will only run signed code. Now let's say the only way to get the YouTube client is though the controlled app stores on those platforms. You can build a chain of trust tied to something like a TPM in the device at one end and signing keys held by Apple or Google at the other that makes it very difficult to get access to the client implementation and the key material and run something like the client in an environment that would allow it to provide convincing evidence that it is a trusted client. As long as you have the hardware and software in your hands, it's probably not impossible, but it can be made just a few steps shy.
You don't get access to the decryption code nor the keys - both are hardwired in silicon.
We'll eventually be able to reverse-engineer that and run it programmatically, but it will take a long time.
And when they catch you doing so, they'll ban your (personalized) encryption key so you'll just have to buy another graphics card to get another key.
This is how it already works, not some future thing. But the licensing fees make it so it only gets used for Hollywood-level movies.
Here are a couple ideas:
The decryption code could verify that it's only providing decrypted content to an attested-legitimate monitor, using DRM over HDMI (HDCP).
You might try to modify the decryption code to disable the part where it reencrypts the data for the monitor, but it might be heavily obfuscated.
Maybe the decryption key is only provided to a TPM that can attest its legitimacy. Then you would need a hardware vulnerability to crack it.
Maybe the server could provide a datastream that's fed directly to the monitor and decrypted there, without any decryption happening on the computer. Then of course the reverse engineering would target the monitor instead of the code on the computer. The monitor would be a less easily accessible reverse engineering target, and it itself could employ obfuscation and a TPM.
Attestation requiring a hardware TPM 2.0 (or higher), and not being able to extract the private key from the TPM on your system.
TPM is Mathematically Secure and you can't extract what's put in. See, Fritz-Chip.
Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.
TPM isn't the only misfeature that makes Windows 11 an abomination. People who don't switch to a respectful platform is in for a lot of pain.
DRM protection schemes usually don't rely on TPM, the real magic happens inside your GPU and the monitor.
They can use all available tools at the same time.
TPMs existed for at least a decade though.
They can even be based on free software like in my Librem laptop. This is however not what Microsoft wants.
iOS can already attest to websites that they are running in unmodified Safari. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
I guess that isn't quite enough to prevent screen recording but these devices also support DRM which does this.
The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on a phone.
Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.
Works dandily here.
Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me.
Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.
Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.
Google is having a hard time conforming to their own javascript standards.
> Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much deliberate censorship.
> It's very much deliberate censorship.
Also known as "moderation"
That 'moderation' is in the same spirit as 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' at Guantanamo Bay, 'Administrative Segregation' in US prisons or Russia's 'Special military operations' in Ukraine. Tomayto, tomahto.
Disclaimer: To anybody getting ready to be offended by these references, don't be selectively blind to the word 'spirit' above. If you still can't make it out, I'm obviously referring to euphemisms here and no additional equivalences are implied. Anything else you attribute to my statement reflects your own views and is your own responsibility. It's such a shame that I have to explain such basic facts with a disclaimer that's longer than the comment itself. But the reality is that some people are so sensitive that they insist on imposing their version political correctness to not just implied speech, but also to unimplied speech, language and even thought, while totally disregarding others' cultural perspectives. I leave this here just in case I have to explain my intentions to someone again.
And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.
In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.
What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
dumb middle management driven by dumb metrics
a very old story...
> livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already
maybe it's vibe coded nowadays
I hope they will do that, yes really.
Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators directly.
But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary, it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go) And I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push (eg.: Witcher)
That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :) Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with torrents)
> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.
That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.
I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them.
You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from YouTube.
If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.
They'll never leave money on the table like that. The older demographic are the only ones that can buy things.
One constant about Google, they always bet on the web.
Until the profits tells them not to.
i think a lot of millenials and older gen-z use youtube on browsers. It has more and more alternative competitors too, like bilibili in China.
Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about native application and native performance, great native animations and native experience (and native ads, of course)! We won't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.
The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway.
Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.
But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.
And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
> Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
Could you elaborate a bit, please? Any links are appreciated.
https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-batteries-ex...
Silicon Carbon batteries. And others, but this tech is already in production.
Good article. Thanks!
> No more interoperability
> no more leverage against corpos
> just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!
These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are things like attestation in consumer hardware.
> These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are things like attestation in consumer hardware.
Totally this, and not because powers suddenly realized they can't control Web like they controlled early "smart" dumb phones circa J2ME times.
This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing.
I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.
I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.
I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point).
The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?”
Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.
Just because the balance shifts doesn't mean the desktop/laptop stops being supported.
Laptops aren't going anywhere. Even if phones and tablets replace them for a third of tasks, or a third of people.
The idea that laptops with browsers would become so rare that YouTube would drop support, within any reasonably predictable future timeframe, is pure fantasy.
All the ewaste MS generated w/Win11 min requirements… I’m thinking that kinda maneuver. Eh not really but anyways:
A slow dropping of support for those who aren’t using an app or Chrome with some Play(Video) Integrity Extension installed.
>within any reasonably predictable future timeframe
I think given the pace of technological advancement and given how every generation we see at least one major piece of electronics completely wipe out generations of predictions, this statement doesn’t serve a productive purpose other than to make “I don’t agree” sound like some variation of “it’s an objective fact that what you said is impossible.” You’re just spiking the conversation, even if that is not your intention.
I didn’t say this is definitely going to happen. I’m just saying clearly the way we engage with computers is shifting and that means companies will adjust accordingly. It’s not that far fetched.
As for “within any reasonably predictable future timeframe,” for all we know YouTube will become a relic.
> It’s not that far fetched.
That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario is far-fetched. This isn't between two comparably plausible scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent where a popular site like YouTube would remove support. It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on current actual trends.
I’m not too proud to admit that I am way out on a limb and probably wrong. I’m just kind of musing and thinking out loud about a broader question. I don’t mind you disagreeing, I don’t mind being wrong, but I don’t know man…maybe try and ease off the gas a bit?
They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill all non-Chromium browsers.
No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
What OS are televisions using to run all of their streaming media apps? It's not iOS.
Samsung Smart TVs run Tizen.
Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I’d argue it’d helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for corporate videos. Yeah there’s other solutions but the number of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.
>Watching YT at work is a major thing.
Where are these jobs where I can get paid to watch YouTube?
Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.
Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.
Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?
And nobody's saying you're getting paid to watch YouTube all day. But video links get sent around, and people check out whatever 3 minute video. They watch during lunch. You know how it is.
Working in infrastructure design (specifically railways), cab ride videos are often useful to fill in gaps in as-built plans or the pictures you took on a site visit (you'll always miss out to photograph something that'll be of major interest later), especially in early planning phases. Plus there's the odd software tutorial video here and there, too, of course.
I think it would give me a life crisis and I'd feel like a failure of a boss if I learned my otherwise productive employees felt they couldn't watch sloptube the clock. A sysadmin that isn't constantly jacked into nethack is hardly a sysadmin at all. You should really demand more humane working conditions if you feel like you have to micro-optimize your work day.
In small shops youtube is quite a handy source of information. I have to prototype and 3D print lots of stuff.
[dead]
It's not YouTube though, but downloader :)
"yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in existence, even if youtube.com went away.
I think that too. When the people refresh their TVs with the newer, more DRM friendly/updated version this channel will meet its end :(
My understanding is that the original yt-dl used the browser interface. yt-dlp uses the android app interface.
>This impacts yt-dlp as we currently request video data from YouTube as if we were YouTube on TV.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
> Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
It would still be possible with native apps. Somebody will have to reverse engineer it continuously. So it will be slower, but still possible.
However, that won't be the case if they start using some secret (like a private key) that you can't access directly from an app, or if they decide that you can't run custom/modified apps. That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
> That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about security as they claim.
Yeah, that is exactly I was thinking.
Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.
They know that. yt-dlp uses browser-like access to download.
YouTube has gotten so bad that even normal people are complaining about it now. A middle-aged woman who volunteers with me was saying how she did not feel comfortable using YouTube due to the number of inappropriate ads. I ended up giving her links to a few Invidious instances and she loves them even if they are slower and not entirely reliable. She also understood the concept of a front-end without much explaining on my part.
Easy solution: use YT in a web browser with an ad blocker (like uBlock Origin or AdGuard on iOS).
This explains why it suddenly failed for me yesterday and the downloads were limited to 360p only. `dnf install deno` and it was back to normal.
For Firefox + uBlock origin users having troubles viewing YouTube, please see my previous comment for filters that may help with playback issues:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976
In case anyone was wondering, use `--js-runtimes node` to use the (as stated as insecure) node option.
What is the reason for this new requirement? I didn't see it explained anywhere.
I don't mind, but it has to work out of the box after a pip install.
Looks like the packaging will be a mess?
> it has to work out of the box after a pip install.
What do you mean by it has to ?
If you specify "yt-dlp[default]" as the package for pip to install, it pulls in the dependency required to use deno for this.
Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.
Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.
Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them elsewhere.
eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAi1pn3kBqE
I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...
Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...
I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).
It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.
Just move the capturing a layer further away, there is always the analog hole.
Yes but why waste $10-$20 on a cheap HDMI recorder, when I can create this beautiful software in two person-days of work?
It depends on a lot of factors. But even if it works in a virtual machine, your CPU is going to be pegged at 100% the whole time to handle the re-encoding. Unless you use a hardware h.264 encoder, but then the quality is pretty terrible since it's explicitly optimized for speed over quality and isn't tunable the way software encoders are.
It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You always just want to access the original compressed bitstream if possible.
I think the real key is to only compress enough initially so that you don't blow out your storage in terms of size and throughput... Once you have the stream captured at a higher quality, you can always recompress more optimally.
A relatively low compression with hardware h.264 will still take up a lot less space and throughput than mpeg-2 or raw.
The ultimate hack would be to intercept the data stream after the decryption, but before the decoding, so you get still-compressed H264 or whatever...
I suppose it's possible that they use a codec where the decryption also means decompression...
In the current times yes, you can basically record your screen with whatever tool you fancy.
But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders" are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from the hdmi cable output for example.
Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
> Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of time I think.
In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but considering that is free compared to something you pay, who cares?
To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie to be copied.
It's a lost battle in the purist sense, but impure things can go far in real life. DRM is like my lock on the door. I'm sure it's a joke for LockpickLawyer and even a good many more people out there, but, it has successfully defended my household so far.
DRM just raises the bar a bit for access. For example in gaming, it gives the publishers a head start over pirates. If the game is unavailable for pirates during the largest hype, a lot more people buy the product than otherwise.
Also, sometimes DRM wins. For example, right now, Denuvo is undefeated. Some hardware dongle authenticated software are also unavailable in pirated form. Of course one could argue that eventually these would be defeated as well, but, DRM still served its purpose, in defending the product from unauthorized copying in times when it was most desirable.
To me, DRM hasn't made sense when I was looking at it from a Free Software standpoint, but it now makes sense from a product management standpoint.
With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording software sees a blank screen.
I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.
I imagine there would be ways around this. I know from personal experience that Kazam screen recorder on Firefox on Ubuntu can record anything and everything, including YouTube as well as DRM content on Disney+ and Prime Video.
I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I don't think that even Google could demand changes like that to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably circumvent that.
And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
On Linux you can feed the GPU encoded bitstream and then GPU will use hardware to decode and display it as overlay.
Why is this relevant? To be clear, I'm asking from a place of ignorance. Are you saying that because the video player can have the video decoding happen entirely on the GPU, screen recording software can't pick it up? Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
> Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
The GPU would simply return all zeros for area where DRM-protected video is being played. Duh.
There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point.
I don't know if Youtube cares, but other website do attempt to block this as well. They will either black your screen or prevent playback if you try to screen record, even encrypting to prevent recording the HDMI/DP output.
If corporations could stop being dicks, that would be great. Between this and the Reddit API change feels like they all get together and plan this. Thank god for FOSS.
I do not understand why Google doesn't just explicitly permit people who pay for premium to use yt-dlp or other tools to watch YouTube however the fuck they want. Put that in your terms, Google -- so people aren't afraid they'll lose their GMail because they wanted to watch a video -- and you'll get more paying customers...
Seriously, there's even that "Download" button but it goes to some weird janky browser-local storage instead of just giving me a damn file.
(I don't think they'd realistically get more paying customers, but I would appreciate it anyway.)
Youtube used to have working download buttons on any video that the uploader licenced as creative commons.
The version of their app that used their V2 API also allowed downloading any video (local to the app, not easily copied) or even setting it to auto-download all of your subscription feed as videos came out.
Is this why Youtube stopped working for me on Safari? I'm sure it is one of my adblockers, but I pay for YT Premium.
Is captcha solving on yt-dlp's roadmap? This seems to be a natural next step. Maybe there is an external library they could integrate?
Youtube obviously is making it harder to download videos because... it's training data
Then someday it with require an entire llm installed locally
I am impressed at their resourcefulness.
Knock on wood not to jinx it, but I wonder why this manages to stay up on github when eg paywall-busting chrome extensions get banned from there (because of DMCA takedowns I guess?)
there was already an attempt to take it down back in 2020/2021 [0]. The DMCA claim's main argument was that ytdl was circumventing Techincal Protection Measures (TPMs) in order to access the content. Thanks to a letter from the EFF [1] which explains how ytdl accesses content in the same way that a browser does (i.e. it does circumvent anything such as DRM), github rejected the takedown.
this is also why ytdl has stood firm in saying they will never attempt to be compatible with anything protected by DRM.
[0] https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/s...
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
Thanks for context with good links!
Is there an UI wrapper for this?
Am I right in saying they need to be able to run JS code from YouTube to be able to get the download URL at this point? Deliberate obfuscation I'm guessing? I guess Deno makes the code fairly safe to execute and I guess the chances of YouTube daring to download spyware onto your machine is minimal :-)
I still remember when it was as simple as a request to /get_video?video_id=XXXXXXXX with possibly a &fmt=YY parameter.
Great fuckings to those at YT, I wonder if they ever feel bad for what they're doing or they are just happy to get $$$.
For me the principal issue with Youtube (for many years was copyright overreach, yeah ok safe harbor, but you can't tell me that they couldn't have done a better job) has been censorship/demonetization which is effectively censorship
Everything from that follows, the entire philosophy of the product
It makes me wonder if all of Google is like this
great tool for archiving ICE abuses posted on multiple platforms
Ah! So, that’s why brew no longer updates yt-dlp on my iMac from 2017 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why deno over bun?
Per their wiki [0], these are their notes on Bun:
- No permission restrictions available. Scripts have full file system and network access.
- Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm (--remote-components ejs:npm).
- No support for SOCKS proxies when downloading EJS script dependencies from npm.
[0]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS#notes-2
I'm suprised that corporate software has not picked up deno for these reasons.
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Claude wrote this comment. I recognize the "you're hitting on a", "your X is the correct architectural fix"
god damn they the youtube is at fault, always says: forbidden when trying to download a book audiobook