I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.
replies(14):
Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.
The rate things are going I’ll just have to use those sites instead.
YouTube is a weird position. A lot of content is public domain and should be freely downloaded. Other content isn’t.
A good middle ground would be for YouTube to just give uploaders an option to enable downloads.
I do agree that people need to STOP trying to make yt-dl easy to use to the point it actually competes with YouTube. YouTube Red when you factor in music is a very good deal. I’ve been subscribed for years.
Like it or not but YouTube is almost entirely funded by ads. You don’t have a right to use the service without paying.
I see your point, bit it isn't just the ads. I object to being stalked throughout my life online, they don't have the right to do that IMO.
Separate the ads from the stalking and maybe I'll just block or otherwise avoid the stalking and not the ads, but right now that is not remotely possible. I don't use sponsorblock for instance, the main extra stuff that circumvents can't be stalky, though I do manually skip when I've heard the same scripted-by-the-advertiser-to-try-sound-natural part already (wow, so your favourite part of the service is exactly the same as the other two podcasters I've listened to this day? In exactly the same words? That really sounds like a recommendation from you personally as a genuine user… (actually, this can sometimes be a useful signal of how little trust I should put in their other opinions!)).
But at the same time if you have an understanding that their business model demands you accept their terms of service, so they can fund the product, your basic options are participating or not.
The vast vast majority of the time I watch YouTube it's via an official client, and if you feel so strongly about your privacy I'm sure you're knowledgeable enough to sandbox your browser. You can always spin up a VM just for YouTube and run Chrome inside of that.
I rarely download public domain videos for music projects. But this gets harder every week. Eventually I'll just have to grab my phone with an analog audio jack and manually record back into my computer.
Or just download the public domain videos from another site. Yt-dl makes this phenomenally easier, but I definitely understand YouTube's motivations in blocking it.