The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

The claim that Google secretly wants YouTube downloaders to work doesn't hold up. Their focus is on delivering videos across a vast range of devices without breaking playback(and even that is blurring[0]), not enabling downloads.

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

The argument the article is making is that if they really wanted YouTube downloaders to stop working, they'd switch to Encrypted Media Extensions. Do you think that's not plausible?

Many smart devices that have youtube functionality(tvs, refrigerators, consoles, cable boxes, etc), have limited or no ability to support that functionality in hardware, or even if they do, it might not be exposed.

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.

I also don't buy this argument about YouTube depending on downloaders:

> 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.

for example I think feature length films that YouTube sells (or rents) already use this encryption.

> if they really wanted YouTube downloaders to stop working

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.

Here has to be at least some benefit Google thinks it gets from youtube downloaders, because for instance there have been various lawsuits going after companies that provide a website to do youtube downloading by the RIAA and co, but Google has studiously avoided endorsing their legal arguments.

That’s why authors should pony up and pay for the encryption feature and rest should be free to download. YouTube could embed ads this way too.

While I do agree (mostly, I've never had a download NOT work, on the rare occasion I grab one), they haven't made it impossible to download videos, so that is a win IMO.

> and the organization does not have the resources to setup an alternative.

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

Using DRM would make it illegal for YouTubers to use Creative-Commons-licensed content in their videos, such as Kevin MacLeod's music or many images from Wikipedia.

That's a wildly imaginative fever dream you're having. There is no timeline in which content creators would pay YouTube to encrypt their video content.

To be fair, the article doesn't say Google "secretly wants" downloaders to work. It says they need downloaders to work, despite wanting to make them as annoying as possible to use. The argument isn't so much about Google's feelings as it is about whether the entire internet would continue making YouTube the video hosting site to use if downloaders were actually (effectively) blocked.

Yeah organizations don't use YouTube for file access, that's just not a good way to operate a video department in a business. Also the quality is terrible and adding another set of reencodes will make it even worse.

> 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.

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.

Your view from a distance, where you rarely download Youtube videos, is common for now, and we still live in a very fortunate time. The problems are short lived, so over long periods, they tend to average out, and you are unlikely to notice them. Even active users will rarely notice a problem, so it is understandable for your use case, it would seem perfect.

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.

Have you tried cloudflare r2?

> 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.

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

Google is not a side here if you don't want people to download your video do not put it on the internet.

I don’t think companies are asking “can people download this video” but rather “can people watch this video” - downloaders seems like an afterthought or non issue.

> mostly, I've never had a download NOT work

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?

When you upload a video to YouTube, you agree that you own the copyright or are otherwise able to grant YouTube a license to do whatever they want with it [0]:

> 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.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/t/terms#27dc3bf5d9

Here's me hosting a bunch of different bitrates of a high quality video, which I encoded on a 2016 laptop. http://lelandbatey.com/projects/REDLINE-intro/

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).

Written by somebody who hasn't taken 1 look at yt-dlp source code or issues. Google regularly pushes updates that "coincidentally" break downloaders. The obfuscation and things they do to e.g. break a download by introducing some breaking code or dynamic calculation required only part way through the video is not normal. They are not serving a bunch of video files or chunks, you need a "client" that handles all these things to download a video. At this point, if you assert that Google doesn't want to secretly stop it, you are either extremely naive, ignorant, or a Google employee.

I miss the system where, when I was watching a flash video in Firefox, that video was already present on my hard drive as an .flv file in /tmp, and I could just copy it somewhere.

People paying for managed services have no concept of bandwidth costs, so they probably think what you just described is impossible.

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.

As the web devolves further, the only viable long-term solution will be allow lists instead of block lists. There is too much hostility online—from websites that want to track you and monetize your data and attention, SEO scams and generated content, and an ever-increasing army of bots—that it's becoming infeasible to maintain rules to filter all of it out. It's much easier to write rules for traffic you approve of, although they will have to be more personal than block lists.

Especially given that YT frequently blocks yt-dlp and bans users who workaround by using the --cookie flag

~~Likely much less than .25/m if that’s mbps. The issue is you’d have no shortage of money at that scale - I run one of the two main Arch Linux package mirrors in my country and while it’s admittedly a quite niche and small distro in comparison, I’m nowhere close enough to saturate 1gbit on normal days, let alone my 10gbit link~~

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

I'm on mobile, but what player did you use on your website?

Does it handle buffer?

I never understood why do they not limit downloading data to the speed at which you could be possibly watching it. Yesterday I downloaded a 15hour show in like 20 minutes. There is no way I could have downloaded that much data in a legit way through their website/player

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

Why don’t creators both publish to YouTube but also publish somewhere else for archival or public access reasons, to help keep content available for outside walled gardens? Is it just not important to them? Is it hosting costs? Missing out on ad revenue?

I have YT Premium and if Google bans yt-dlp, I will cancel my subscription. I pay them not to do that.

you show them who’s boss, premium user

You could have been a legit viewer... clicking to skip over segments of the video, presumably trying to find where you left off last time, or for some scene you remember, or the climax of the video... whatever.

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.

Seems quite naive to think they'd be affected in any way by the tiny intersection of users that are both yt-dlp users and premium subscribers boycotting them...

Where else should they be publishing to? And who is going to pay for this service?

Don’t forget - most “content creators” are not technical - self hosting is not an option.

And even if it were - it costs money.

There is an official download option inside the app. If they limit the download speed to the watching time, it won't be useful.

I think they are, yt-dlp just circumvents it

I just mean some kind of public service like one of those archive sites. So they would place it into YouTube for revenue but also these other places so there’s a way to get the videos without Google being a dictatorial overlord.

They still want the YouTube experience to be smooth, to allow users to skip small parts of videos without waiting for it to load every time, to be able to watch multiple videos at the same time, to be able to leave video paused until it loads, etc., which limiting downloading data would hinder. I assume blocking downloads is just not worth destroyinf user experience.

This is more or less what I already do with uBlock/uMatrix. By default, I filter out ALL third party content on every website, and manually allow CDNs and other legitimate third party domains. I still use DNS blacklists however so that mobile devices where this can't be easily done benefit from some protection against the most common offenders (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, etc.)

Also they allow downloads for premium subs maybe it’s more efficient to not check that status every time.

Right!

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.

I think it is not about making a change, it is putting money where your mouth is.

To buy premium to support creators.

Once yt becomes hostile the deal between me and yt is off.

Not the person above but they're using Video.js 7.10.2 <http://videojs.com/>

No lol nobody is reading the numbers. Vimeo is $20 / mo. Vimeo + $5 Linode server = $25 / mo, cheaper than the $30 / mo OVH server. The quoted ScaleEngine is $25 / mo, which ($25 + $5 = $30) the same as the OVH server.

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.

If you click to skip over, even clicking every minute, you're still not grabbing the whole thing, right? Whereas downloading is grabbing every second.

> there is already a secret header used for authenticating that you are using the Google version of Chrome browser

Google needs to be broken up already.

Depending on the player and how they cache it. Yes, if google monitor every byte to which client had downloaded, but that just seems like ultra micro managing, and have no idea how many players will it break. Youtube seems like one of those site, should allow people to download or make them a public utility on IPFS or something like that.

> (mostly, I've never had a download NOT work, on the rare occasion I grab one)

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.

Here's a thought: what if paying a fixed amount to encrypt your video would grant you a much higher commission for the ads shown?

This option is only available to premium users afaik

LTT kinda do, but they're the exception, not the norm

Yes, this absolutely does not shield YouTube from liability from third parties, since the copyright holder of third-party content included in the video is not a party to the agreement. That's why they have a copyright notice and takedown procedure in the first place, and also the reason for numerous lawsuits against YouTube in the past, some of which they have lost.

To date, many Creative Commons licenses do in fact amount to "permission from that party", but if they start using DRM, those licenses would cease to grant YouTube permission.

This is starting to look like some quality llm benchmark!

And ever updating with that!

As some people already said, skipping section. Also you can increase video speeds, I normally watch youtube at 2x speed but I think you can go up to 5x.

Doesn't cloudflare and amazon have this now? Pretty sure CF is developing a closed source player- but theres plenty of FOSS ones (rip the one jellyfin uses out of it- at worst).

And, theres plenty of tutorials on using ffmpeg based tools to make the files. And yes, "oh no, I need to learn something new for my video workflow."

The official download option doesn't download it to your filesystem as a file. It just lets you watch the video offline in the official app/website. Just tested it now.

Meaning the video file exists in your file system somewhere, so downloading at a higher speed than possibly viewing the video is an existing functionality in the app.

Youtube pays them per (ad) view, and also recommends the video to more people based on how many people click on it. So giving people another way to watch it will decrease their revenue and audience.