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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

(windowsread.me)
439 points Leftium | 5 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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nitwit005 ◴[19 Sep 25 21:40 UTC] No.45306994[source]▶
This seems to be starting with the assumption that it's possible to prevent people from downloading the videos. That is a false assumption. You can, after all, just play the video and record it. Even if the entire machine playing the content is flawlessly locked down, you can just record the output.

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.

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1. grugagag ◴[19 Sep 25 22:21 UTC] No.45307433[source]▶
Yeah, you can capture HDMI stream with a cheap card so basically everything is ultimately copyable, however that brings in some friction. Some people prefer the easiest option, even if that showers them in advertisments and distupts their attention.
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2. beeflet ◴[19 Sep 25 23:40 UTC] No.45308118[source]▶
It only takes one guy to copy it and upload it to bittorrent or something. All these trusted computing schemes are dependent on the weakest link never breaking, where the weakest link is a piece of hardware that the attacker always has access to.
3. eek2121 ◴[20 Sep 25 00:12 UTC] No.45308363[source]▶
Not if you want the highest quality, and they could absolutely stop even that if desired. The only reason why those methods work is due to legacy support. If they only supported the latest versions of HDMI and DRM, it would be very hard to get decent quality video/audio. As it is, even with things currently as they are, we still don't have the high quality feeds that are sent to TVs and dedicated hardware.
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4. Liftyee ◴[20 Sep 25 00:42 UTC] No.45308599[source]▶
I wonder if it would be possible to use e.g. an FPGA to intercept the "last-leg" MIPI signals going between a TV/monitor's control board and the physical display panel itself. Surely there can't be any DRM at that level, because there is not much more "compute" down the line?

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.

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5. veegee ◴[20 Sep 25 02:03 UTC] No.45309442{3}[source]▶
Yes actually you can. But you don't even need to go that far, there are HDCP converters that do it for you and convert to HDCP 1 (whose master keys have been made available) or just plain HDMI. See HDFury etc.