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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

(windowsread.me)
494 points Leftium | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.211s | 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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dylan604 ◴[19 Sep 25 23:03 UTC] No.45307818[source]▶
> That doesn't mean the DRM works. You can find torrents of all those shows.

Causation does not mean correlation. The vast majority of content available via torrents did not come from breaking a streamer's DRM.

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1. pta2002 ◴[20 Sep 25 09:45 UTC] No.45311854[source]▶
This is completely bullshit. If you find a proper download, you’ll usually see something like “NFLX.WEB-DL” on the file name. That means it got ripped and downloaded from Netflix.

The DRM decryption isn’t the hard bit - it’s actually mostly a standard thing, and there are plenty of tools on GitHub that will decrypt it from you if you have a key, e.g. Devine.

The issue is mostly around getting a key, but those are easy enough to get if you know where to look (e.g. TV firmware dumps).

Once you have this though, and any piracy group will have this, it’s so much easier to do this than to screen record, and will give you the original quality as well.