←back to thread

The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

(windowsread.me)
579 points Leftium | 3 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
molticrystal ◴[19 Sep 25 20:49 UTC] No.45306399[source]▶
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

replies(18): >>45306431 #>>45307288 #>>45308312 #>>45308891 #>>45309570 #>>45309738 #>>45310615 #>>45310619 #>>45310847 #>>45311126 #>>45311155 #>>45311160 #>>45311645 #>>45313122 #>>45315060 #>>45315374 #>>45316124 #>>45325129 #
AceJohnny2 ◴[19 Sep 25 22:06 UTC] No.45307288[source]▶
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.

replies(2): >>45308491 #>>45308898 #
lucb1e ◴[20 Sep 25 00:29 UTC] No.45308491[source]▶
> 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

replies(2): >>45308921 #>>45314902 #
snowwrestler ◴[20 Sep 25 16:41 UTC] No.45314902[source]▶
It’s easy to set up a backend video hosting system. But unless you are running (and checking!) a strong client-side observability system, you’ll never see all the problems that people are having with it. And they won’t tell you either, they’ll just leave.

Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

replies(2): >>45315526 #>>45317709 #
1. lucb1e ◴[20 Sep 25 21:27 UTC] No.45317709[source]▶
Is there someone in the world for whom this demo https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/... does not play? Because that's what I use and am not aware of issues with it

> Reddit struggles to provide a video player that is up to YouTube’s par. Do you have more resources than Reddit? Better programmers?

It's hard to say whether MDN and I have/am better programmer(s) and resource(s) than reddit without having any examples or notions of what issues reddit has run into.

If you mean achieving feature-parity, like automatic subtitles and dubbing and control menus to select languages and format those subtitles etc., that's a whole different ball game of course. The site I was speaking of doesn't support that today either (they don't dub/sub), at best you get automatically generated Dutch subtitles from yt now, i.e. shit subtitles (worse than English autogen and we all know how well those deal with jargon and noise)

replies(1): >>45318247 #
2. snowwrestler ◴[20 Sep 25 22:41 UTC] No.45318247[source]▶
You're linking to a page with a 5 second 1MB video on it. Yes, it's easy to use the <video> element to serve a video file no larger than a picture. No, that does not mean you have a system that will allow thousands of users to watch an 11 min HD video during their subway ride that starts instantly and never pauses, stutters, or locks up.

I can't speak to Dutch websites but in the U.S., a news website will usually feel obligated to provide subtitles on their videos to avoid lawsuits under the ADA.

replies(1): >>45328063 #
3. lucb1e ◴[22 Sep 25 00:51 UTC] No.45328063[source]▶
Oh that's interesting! The US is portrayed here as this free for all country (limited unemployment money, health services, PTO...) but then subtitles are mandatory? That's cool! I presume we don't have such a law since the news sites I frequent don't seem to offer that for most videos (not counting youtube's autogenerated attempt for the few sites that outsource video hosting to google)

As for that video being small and not receiving thousands of simultaneous views: sure, but buying sufficient bandwidth is not a "hire better programmers" problem. You don't need to beat Reddit's skills and resources to provide smoother video playback. Probably the opposite actually: smaller scale should be easier to handle than reddit scale, and they already had that all set up