TIL about stacher!Thank you.
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Unfortunately, it's not as up-to-date as yt-dlp so it can be fragile against blocks. I'm hoping that yt-dlp adds some functionality for downloading portions of a livestream (i.e. not downloading from the start, 120 hours ago).
You could encode these terms in a contract or something about allowed usage of a service, I believe.
yt-dlp --download-sections "*05:00-05:10" <YouTube URL>
Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important.
Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium offering, I got a way worse quality output than with yt-dlp, which actually ripped the original stream without reencoding it.
I think I saw an idempotent h264 encoder at some point, where you wouldn't suffer generational loss if you matched the encoder settings exactly from run to run. But then you might need the people mastering the content (in this case YouTube) to adopt that same encoder, which they're not going to be "interested" in.
(It won't work for Youtube shorts though, because 10% of a 30s video just isn't enough for reliable smooth playback)
Maybe that was a difference in the stream itself though, since I've experienced both past-seekable and live-only live streams on YouTube.
The problem with this DVR feature is that if your connection is stuttering it will buffer you backwards a bit. Streamers like to disable this because they want to keep the time to deliver as low as possible so chat is more interactive and engaging, especially on youtube where your viewership might not qualify for the CCV metrics if the stream is not in a foreground tab. Best to leave it off if that is important for you.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/485020-ytbetter-enable-rew...
In other (less biased) words: These old rules were rescinded haven't been enforced since 2012 (last example cited). This article was written in 2025 and still complaining about something that isn't happening anymore.
I don't think I believe this, as much as I'd like to. How many organizations would really consider this a critical need? My guess is, not enough for Google to care.
If you dive into the yt-dlp source code, you see the insane complexity of calculations needed to download a video. There is code to handle nsig checks, internal YouTube API quirks, and constant obfuscation that makes it a nightmare(and the maintainers heroes) to keep up. Google frequently rejects download attempts, blocks certain devices or access methods, and breaks techniques that yt-dlp relies on.
Half the battle is working around attempts by Google to make ads unblockable, and the other half is working around their attempts to shut down downloaders. The idea of a "gray market ecosystem" they tacitly approve ignores how aggressively they tweak their systems to make downloading as unreliable as possible. If Google wanted downloaders to thrive, they wouldn't make developers jump through these hoops. Just look at the yt-dlp issue tracker overflowing with reports of broken functionality. There are no secret nods, handshakes, or other winks, as Google begins to care less and less about compatibility, the doors will close. For example, there is already a secret header used for authenticating that you are using the Google version of Chrome browser [1] [2] that will probably be expanded.
[0] Ask HN: Does anyone else notice YouTube causing 100% CPU usage and stattering? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45301499
[1] Chrome's hidden X-Browser-Validation header reverse engineered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44527739
[2] https://github.com/dsekz/chrome-x-browser-validation-header
Last time I searched 'stacher open source' on Google, I found a Reddit thread discussing when it might become open source.
EDIT: The reason I ask is that the article says Stacher is open source, and that is news to me.
Once those devices get phased out, it is very likely they will move to Encrypted Media Extensions or something similar, I believe I saw an issue ticket on yt-dlp's repo indicating they are already experimenting with such, as certain formats are DRM protected. Lookup all the stuff going on with SABR which if I remember right is either related to DRM or what they may use to support DRM.
YouTube just doesn't make this available via API, but you've always been able to manually from YouTube Studio download your uploaded videos.
The efforts at DRM done by companies like Netflix is done because the companies that licensed the content demand it. That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.
> They perform a valuable role: If it were impossible to download YouTube videos, many organizations would abandon hosting their videos on YouTube for a platform that offered more user flexibility. Or they’d need to host a separate download link and put it in their YouTube descriptions. But organizations don’t need to jump through hoops -- they just let people use YouTube downloaders.
No, organizations simply use YouTube because it's free, extremely convenient, has been very stable enough over the past couple decades to depend on, and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative.
Also, I'm guessing such organizations represent a vanishly small segment of YouTube's uploaders.
I don't think people appreciate how much YouTube has created a market. "Youtuber" is a valid (if often derided) job these days, where creators can earn a living wage and maintain whole media companies. Preserving that monetization portal is key to YouTube and its content creators.
On my favorites YouTube downloaders with UI, I have:
- Varia https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/
- Media Downloader https://github.com/mhogomchungu/media-downloader/
Wrong question leads to the wrong answer.
The right one is "how much of the ad revenue would be lost if". For now it's cheaper to spend bazillions on a whack-a-mole.
Or do you mean they read the source from hacking into a memory buffer after the player does decryption but before decoding, instead of doing the decryption themselves?
Didn't even mention https://3dyd.com
You should also look at PipePipe, also available on F-Droid and with similar enhancements (e.g., Sponsorblock) over NewPipe.
Seems like a bit of a presumptuous proposition. If it were impossible, the web just might be a bit more shit, and the video monopoly would roll on regardless. Most might just come to take for granted videos of personal significance (I downloaded one of my grandpa in WW2 footage, for example, and there was no other version available except the YouTube one) are dependent on YouTube continuing to host them.
Some would, of course, use alternative platforms that offer proper download links, but it's hard to think that would be most, easy to think that would be well under 5% of those uploading videos that should in ways be a kind of permanent archive, or that this loss would really amount to anything to Google, commercially. Maybe not something to poke the bear on?
Unlike with Youtube videos, you can't just freely pull something off GitHub and crack Widevine level 1 DRM. The tools and extracted secret keys that release groups use to pirate 4K content are protected and not generally available.
This doesn't matter if you want to find something popular enough for a release group to drop in a torrent, but if you have personal access to some bespoke or very obscure content the DRM largely prevents you from downloading it. (especially at level 1, used for 4K, which requires that only a separate hardware video decoder can access the keys)
tl;dr; DRM works in the sense it changes it from 1/100 people can download something (YouTube) to ~1/100000.
Can confirm at least one tech news website argued this point and tore down their own video hosting servers in favor of using Youtube links/embeds. Old videos on tweakers.net are simply not accessible anymore, that content is gone now
This was well after HTML5 was widely supported. As a website owner myself, I don't understand what's so hard now that we can write 1 HTML tag and have an embedded video on the page. They made it sound like they need to employ an expensive developer to continuously work on improving this and fixing bugs whereas from my POV you're pretty much there with running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this) and having a quality selector below the video. Can't imagine what about this would have changed in the past decade in a way that requires extra development work. At most you re-evaluate every 5 years which quality levels ffmpeg should generate and change an integer in a config file...
Alas, little as I understand it, this tiny amount of extra effort, even when the development and setup work is already in the past(!), is apparently indeed a driving force in centralizing to Youtube for for-profits
Granted, you would have to deal with whatever your display does to the raw video signal - preferable to pointing a camcorder at the display but a little worse than the original file.
You need to breach the terms of service (use a downloader) to exercise the rights of the content license that youtube supports
16K = 15360x8640 8K = 7680x4320 4K = 3840x2160 2K = 1920x1080 1K = 960x540
(Every value is a doubling of the tier below it, or in the case of "1K" a halving.)
You acknowledge that it's not that simple:
> running ffmpeg at a few quality settings upon uploading (there are maybe 3 articles with a video per day, so any old server can handle this)
Can any old server really handle that? And can it handle the resulting storage of not only the highest-quality copy but also all the other copies added on top? My $5 Linode ("any old server") does not have the storage space for that. You can switch your argument to "storage is cheap these days," but now you're telling people to upgrade their servers and not actually claiming it's a one-click process anymore.
I use Vimeo as a CDN and pay $240 per year for it ($20/month, 4x more than I spend on the Linode that hosts a dozen different websites). If Vimeo were to shut down tomorrow, I'd be pretty out of luck finding anyone offering pricing even close to that-- for example, ScaleEngine charges a minimum of $25 per month and doesn't even include storage and bandwidth in their account fee. Dailymotion Pro offers a similar service to Vimeo these days, but their $9/month plan wouldn't have enough storage for my catalog, and their next cheapest price is $84/month. If you actually go to build out your own solution with professional hosting, it's not gonna be a whole lot cheaper.
Obviously, large corporations can probably afford to do their own hosting-- and if push came to shove, many of them probably would, or would find one of those more expensive partner options. But again, you're no longer arguing "it's just an HTML tag." You're now arguing they should spend hundreds or thousands per year on something that may be incidental to their business.
I have put serious thought into creating a tool that would automatically yt-dlp every video I open to a giant hard drive and append a simple index with the title, channel, thumbnail and date.
In general, I think people are way too casual about media of all kinds silently disappearing when you're not looking.
Looking closely, at least for yt-dlp, you would see it tries multiple methods to grab available formats, tabulates the working ones, and picks from them. Those methods are constantly being peeled away, though some are occasionally added or fixed. The net trend is clear. The ability to download is eroding. There have been moments when you might seriously consider that downloading, at least without a complicated setup(PO-Tokens, widevine keys, or something else), is just going to stop working.
As time goes on, even for those rare times you want to grab a video, direct downloading may no longer work. You might have to resort to other methods, like screen recording through software or an actual camera, for as long as your devices will let you do even that.
Yes, it could. It'd only just waste more bandwidth having to redownload and cause more pauses. But people who buy things (the important ones to advertise to) have fast connections and everyone's locked in so google can focus more on advertiser issues over the lower end network user experience.
In the end, I decided it is not worth it. In the scenario you described, I would take the video link/ID and paste it into Bing and Yandex. There is large chance they still have that page cached in their index.
FWIW if you are going to create your own tool, my advice will be to make it a browser extension, and try to pull the video straight from YouTube's <video> element.
This just made me incredibly grateful for the people who do this kind of work. I have no idea who writes all the uBlock Origin filters either, but blessed be the angels, long may their stay in heaven be.
I'm pretty confident I could figure it out eventually but let's be honest, the chance that I'd ever actually invest that much time and energy is approximates zero close enough that we can just say it's flat nil.
Maybe Santa Claus needs to make some donations tonight. ho ho ho
Someone at google please give us the ability to see titles!
Well, how about thanks the people who's maintaining the downloader to make it possible?
> they haven't made it impossible to download videos, so that is a win IMO.
At some point you can just fire up OBS Studio and do a screen rip, then cut the ads out manually and put it on Torrent/ED2k.
Will you still think it's a win then?
> If you choose to upload Content, you must not submit to the Service any Content that does not comply with this Agreement (including the YouTube Community Guidelines) or the law. For example, the Content you submit must not include third-party intellectual property (such as copyrighted material) unless you have permission from that party or are otherwise legally entitled to do so. [...]
> By providing Content to the Service, you grant to YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable license to use that Content (including to reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works, display and perform it) in connection with the Service and YouTube's (and its successors' and Affiliates') business, including for the purpose of promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service.
If you include others' work with anything stronger than CC0, that's not a license you can grant. So you'll always be in trouble in principle, regardless of whether or how YouTube decides to exercise that license. In practice, I wouldn't be surprised if the copyright owner could get away with a takedown if they wanted to.
The server is $30/month hosted by OVH, which comes with 2TB of storage. The throughout on the dedicated server is 1gbps. Unlimited transfer is included (and I've gone through many dozens of TB of traffic in a month).
Bandwidth these days can be less than .25/m at a 100g commit in US/EU, and OVH is pushing dozens of tb/s.
Big ups on keeping independent.
It’s a trade off I suppose - you can very well host your own streaming solution, and for the same price you can get a great single node, but if you want good TTFB and nodes with close proximity to many regions you may as well pay for a managed solution as the price for multiple VPS/VM stacks up quickly when you have a low budget
Edit: I think I missed your point about bandwidth pricing lol, but the second still stands
The part that is so infuriating is that they try to turn around and capture that value would should rightly be owned by the public by offering downloads for premium members, especially when that we KNOW the only reason YouTube isn't totally financially ruined is that the ISPs are legally required to price worthless youtube's (literally AI generated) spam traffic the same as useful services. (Net Neutrality)
And the are using these ill gotten gains to create their own backbone for yet more profit. Entirely pointless exercise when you realize the government is eventually going to break these companies up and will of course nationalize the one that owns all the infrastructure. Corporations are simply not the correct tool for managing infrastructure that the public relies on. I'm sure anybody whose tried to run a business on top of a google service can attest that's it's a bad strategy and is guaranteed to fail in the long term.
YouTube plays a game with downloaders to be and stay popular, supported even by niche devices.
On the other hand they will use vague license statements to strike opponents.
Even RSS YouTube is accessible to bots, but block d by robots. They can always claim you are doing something wrong of they wanted.
Im glad I wasn't blocked or throttled, but it seems like it'd be trivial to block someone like me
Am I missing something? It does sort of feel like they're allowing it
EDIT: Spooky skeletons.. Youtube suddenly as of today forces a "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot" on both the website and yt-dl .. So maybe I've been fingerprinted and blacklisted somehow
It's "just" a yt-dlp frontend with a nice UI, meaning it works with sites other than youtube as well.
It also adds a quick-download option to the android sharing menu when sharing a link, which I've found incredibly convenient.
Youtube does try to throttle the data speeds, when that first happened, youtube-dl stopped being useful and everyone upgraded their python versions and started using yt-dlp instead.
Don’t forget - most “content creators” are not technical - self hosting is not an option.
And even if it were - it costs money.
I very rarely download YouTube videos but simply having done it a few times over the years, and even watching the text fly by in the terminal with yt-dlp, everything you’ve said is obvious.
Screen recording indeed might fail—Apple lets devs block it, so even screen recording the iPhone Mirroring app can result in an all-black recording.
How long until YouTube only plays on authorized devices with screens optimized for anti-camera recording? Silver lining, could birth a new creative industry of storytelling, like courtroom sketch artists with more Mr. Beast.
https://github.com/DialmasterOrg/Youtarr and https://github.com/Jocomol/newsboat_video_downloader were already mentioned in the comments, I think there's a few different apps that support playback, but I've never tried any of them.
To buy premium to support creators.
Once yt becomes hostile the deal between me and yt is off.
There's even a good Jellyfin integration
So there's probably at least some calculation where they have to decide how much effort they're putting into cracking down on these things, simply because on the one hand they don't want to anger Hollywood and music labels, and on the other hand they don't want to kill off 3/4 of media analysis content on the platform.
There's also the fact a lot of creators will deliberately turn a blind eye to people reusing their video footage so long as they credited in return. For a lot of them, it's less work to just let people figure out how to get the footage from their channels than to set up a third party hosting service where you can officially download them.
Interesting to hear about the terms of service provision though. Wonder how well it would hold up now given that a lot of modern outlets use donations or paid subscriptions for financing rather than ads? I can see an outlet like 404 Media covering YouTube downloaders at some point because of that.
That is not what we're talking about - the working assumption here is that the DRM scheme is sound and effective. In which case your only possible but also guaranteed stage of recapture is at the analog hole, by which point the media encoding is already undone, incurring a generational loss.
[0] I consider presently existing and historical DRM implementations deeply flawed and misguided; they severely overstep their boundaries implied by the name "DRM", in certain cases quite disgustingly - hence the many added adjectives for clarification
[1] puzzlingly, any access control will actually get you in the same legal situation, regardless of whether the access control mechanism is effective or sound, so this is actually a design decision; but it's pretty universally taken afaik.
Y'all just have two different budgets. For one person $30 / mo is reasonable for the other it's expensive.
But the core claim, that $5 / mo hosts a lot of non-video content but not much video content, holds.
We really dropped the ball when it came to running random js from websites. The number of people who truly run only free software these days is close to zero. I used to block all js about 10 years ago but it was a losing battle and ended up being essentially an opt out from society.
Google needs to be broken up already.
A lot of the reason for that is because yt-dlp explicitly makes it easy for you to update it, so I would imagine that many frontends will do so automatically - something which is becoming more necessary as time goes on, as YouTube and yt-dip play cat and mouse with each other.
Unfortunately, lately, yt-dip has had to disable by default the downloading of certain formats that it was formerly able to access by pretending to be the YouTube iOS client, because they were erroring too often. There are alternatives, of course, but those ones were pretty good.
A lot of what you see in yt-dlp is because of the immense amount of work that the developers put in in order to keep it working. Despite that it now allows for downloading from many more sites than it originally was developed for, they're still not going to give up YouTube support (as long as it still allows DRM-free versions) without a fight.
Once YouTube moves to completely DRM'd videos, however, that may have to be when yt-dlp retires support for YouTube, because yt-dlp very deliberately does not bypass DRM. I'd imagine the name would change at that point.
I used to be obsessed with this.
The way I saw it was the universe took billions of years of concerted effort to generate a random number that represents a unique file such as an interesting video or image. It would be such a shame if all that effort was invalidated due to bullshit YouTube reasons or copyright nonsense or link rot or whatever.
So I started hoarding this data. I started buying hardware and designing a home data center with ZFS and hundreds of terabytes to hold it all. I started downloading things I never actually gave a shit about just because they were rare and I wanted to preserve them.
I think getting married cured me of this. Now it's all moments that will be lost to time, like tears in the rain.