1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos.
2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole.
The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you can easily see if an account or channel has been censored/banned.
My main use on youtube-dl is downloading videos to watch them in places with slow / unreliable DSL.
Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnections or high latency spikes well.
I don't even keep most of the videos I downloaded due to that, as they are not worth watching more than once anyway, so it could be argued that it's no different than how people usually use YouTube.
AFAIK, (good) browsers still give you the direct links if you know where to look, but the slow boiling of the frog is really evident with things like hiding View Source and such (often under the guise of "usability".) The demise of youtube-dl, along with Google's pushing of their proprietary protocols and other continued user hostilities surely paints a sad picture for the freedom of the Internet...
I've had similar issues on a recent camping trip since the switch from google play music to youtube music... when I lose connectivity, there's no buffer, and seems to be no songs kept to be able to play anything, and it was a really crappy experience.
May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
Google's engineering is not about providing a good user experience, but about using metrics to squeeze out the last 1% of inefficiency. This inevitably makes the system fragile and leaves some people out in the cold, but you're the product, not the customer.
Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters. It automatically upgrades to 4K videos (of course), but its buffering algorithm is pared so close to the bone that it can't handle high bandwidths as well.
Your comments seems contradictory. How is optimizing to provide a good experience for those with bad internet not providing a good user experience? I have fast internet and it works fine for me, maybe the problem is on your end?
My point is that because of the excessive "optimisation" at YouTube, users now have a poor experience if they "don't fit in the middle of the bell curve". The cause of the issues can be high latency, low latency, high bandwidth, low bandwidth... whatever. If you're in the 1%, YouTube has optimised you out in order to save 1% in hosting costs somewhere. It's a type of over-fitting that results in a fragile system.
Engineers at Google get bonuses for shaving 0.1% off of something, because at their scale that could be millions of dollars saved.
Hence protocols like HTTP/3, which exist almost entirely to optimise some Google backend by single-digit percentage points.
YouTube has had every last percent of "inefficiency" squeezed out of it, to the point where lots of users have a degraded experience.
Google famously doesn't care about user experience at all. They care about costs and their own internal KPIs, which are all tied to advertising revenue, not "video playback smoothness".
This is why Firefox was 5x slower on YouTube for years. This is why Google famously has next to zero "customer support", even if you pay them. They don't view you as a customer. You're the product.
Firefox users click on ads less. Firefox users tend to have adblock. They're not good products.
Similarly, Google is fighting a turf war with the likes of NetFlix and Apple for advertising eyeballs, so they do not want to ensure that Apple TV can play back YouTube in the best possible quality. They optimise for Chrome and Chromecast first, everything else a distant second. Got to build that walled garden!
I pay NetFlix the same amount monthly as I pay for YouTube Premium. NetFlix provides support, YouTube doesn't. NetFlix works flawlessly on every device I have, YouTube doesn't.
YouTube doesn't play 4K on my Apple TV 4K! It doesn't play 4K on my flagship Samsung TV! It downgrades my iPhone for 480p even on WiFi!
This kind of anti-consumer (anti-product?) bullshit is why Google needs to be broken up.
The vendor that makes the device, the browser, the search engine, the network protocol, and the advertising platform shouldn't also be television for half the world.
They shouldn't get to degrade the experience to benefit their browser team. They shouldn't get to slow down the experience for a competing browser. They shouldn't get to simply ignore customer complaints. Television broadcasters in most countries have to answer to an ombudsman. YouTube doesn't.
That's too much control that invites anti-competitive, anti-human behaviour. The incentives are all wrong.
A hen will lay eggs, which have a fairly direct monetary value. It doesn't mean the farmer treats their chickens like customers.
In a poor town, a shopkeeper may accept barter instead of cash. Their customers might pay them with eggs, and they would be treated like valued customers even if they're too poor to use trade with real money.
It's a matter of corporate culture on how the consumers are viewed. For largely advertising-driven companies their users are products, even if they pay. For largely product and sales-driven companies their users are customers, even if they're in a free tier or a trial account or whatever.
In the case of YouTube Premium, you're paying in lieu of advertisements, so you're the customer again. ;-) Also, my understanding is for most Premium users the creators get a bigger slice than they tend to get from ad views.
I was living a few blocks away from YouTube HQ building and with 1gigabit up/down fiber optics cable had YouTube stutters. They [YouTube] definitely don’t optimize for that
Watching TV shows about manufacturing process (e.g.: How It's Made) made me realise that manufacturing is not just about "making things perfect", but also "discarding the outliers".
You can make something quite bad on average, and that's okay, you just have to be able to filter out everything you don't want and keep what you want. When CPUs are manufactured, this is what they mean by the "yield". It's the percentage of the product that can be kept, with the rest of the wafer discarded.
Chef's Gallery had a scene that actually shocked me a bit -- this award winning chef was making this deep-fried puff thing that was absolutely perfect. They showed his process, which was to make dozens of them and then plate just the best one for the customer. He never had a knack at all for making them perfect! He was just throwing out 99% of the puffs that he made, using the same technique as anyone else would.
You just have to change your perspective: You're the product. You're the deep fried puff.
If you're an outlier, you will be discarded. You're the bent piece of framing. You're the slice of the silicon wafer that failed the test.
Nobody feels the slightest bit bad about rejecting a faulty product on the production line. No tears are shed. No phone calls are made to the product to see if there's anything the manufacturer can do to fix the situation.
This is Google and by extension YouTube in a nutshell. They're an advertising company manufacturing ad impressions and ad clicks. Viewers are their product.
Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.
> Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.
Viewers on 1Gbps give off two important signals to advertisers.
1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth
2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.
This is most likely somebody that advertisers are very interested in getting their ads in front of!
> 1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth
> 2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.
Unless you’re assuming US residents these are not really signals or helpful. In Japan or Korea you can get GBPs fiber for $30. In Eastern Europe you can get fiber for as low as €10 in Romania I think, in western you can get that for 50 in Switzerland.
Meanwhile there are places where it’s not an option at all unless you get into “contact us” price ranges.
I understand their optimizations, that said, many people listen to music while driving and will have spotty connections, even commuting to/from the burbs. So it's a negative experience that probably outweighs the bandwidth issues. Even a couple songs in buffer at 64kbps encode in the background is better than letting it freeze multiple times a minute for 10+ seconds at a time.
They're too aggressive on their optimizations for mobile networks/devices.
What are you talking about, Youtube Music literally downloads automatically 100s of songs locally for offline playing, and you can download entire albums for offline playing at the press of a button.
There's even a little popup saying something like "It seems we can connect to the server, do you want to play your downloaded songs instead ?" when there are connectivity issues.
Ditto, but with slow/unreliable 3G. It's perfectly possible to watch a 4k video with max quality that way, even if one has a poor connection. Otherwise, I'd be stuck at 240p much of the time.
It is really distressing to see how many of the videos in my, admittedly quite large, favourites list are gone by now. Even ones that I only added in the past few weeks. Either simply "Deleted", "Private" or "Removed/Blocked by the copyright holder". In most cases I have trouble even finding out what the title of the video even was.
One layer of the internet is about packets, another is about ordered sequential streams — and both are widely supported protocols. Above these could potentially sit a dissemination layer, retaining and persisting anything of interest. But in a legal system where information can be speech or property, it is problematic to do that as a standard protocol. Instead we have archive.org, The Archive Team, BitTorrent, and a million progressively less durable options from there, including some of us running youtube-dl on videos of interest, grabbing PDF’s off Arxiv, SSRN, etc. I’m not sure what to do about any of this except a yearly donation to archive.org, and accepting the great distributed fitness function of fate.
Wonder if archive.org and the EFF could get a video site up to compete with youtube, or work to back something like bitchute or otehr alternatives to raise awareness and push back on overreach takedown requests. YouTube/Google just seem to cave, and apparently so does GitHub.
So does everyone who got owned by a multinational megacorp. That's when all the human vision goes out the door. Because there's no mechanisms to keep it there, it will eventually wither.
We could have had so many nice things if it wasn't for those things.
It's almost as if there's somewhere a country which acts as a fertile breeding ground for these uncontrollable unregulated monstrosities, to grow really big, and at some point left roaming wild for other countries to deal with "yeah we don't do that here" (by which I mean stuff like false advertising and reasoning like "if it's legal and I make a profit then I get to do it").
This is an example of the dichotomy between "the internet remembers everything" and the inherent ephemerality of electronic data (effort is required to ensure it remains un-destroyed).
I self-host some things because I like the technical challenge, and what I've found is that the effort required to maintain the online presence of the data is quite demanding. Less so if it's outsourced, but without actively 'tending the garden', it will inevitably disappear at least from the public-facing internet.
The ephemerality is also exacerbated by Google / Facebook account terminations.
The internet remembers everything applies much stronger to text than to rich media. I can still find a mention of myself from a 1983 newspaper article that has been duped across a bunch of content harvesters (and also on the way back machine’s view of the newspaper’s site).
I've been distraught at the same thing. I had a few playlists that I grew over time, and it's annoying to go back and see gaps of "[Deleted video]" where your favorites used to be. I'm curious to know if you've found a solution for this.
Personally I've started locally saving anything I think I would want to watch or reference again. When favoriting something or saving it to a playlist, I download it too. I started off with using youtube-dl on the command line and have experimented with the "Import from YouTube" function on Peertube but ended up with a tiny cobbled-together video platform, importer (youtube-dl wrapper), and Firefox extension. I think the next step will be easily saving non-video things - probably recording WARCs?
I beefed up my browser cache to remember everything and have a server in the background downloading any youtube channel I visit. Now I know that anything I've ever looked at via the browser is now accessible offline.
1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos.
I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?
edit: I only meant this in so much that it's entirely possible for Google, that controls both Chrome (the biggest browser) and YouTube (biggest online video site) to encable DHCP restrictions on video capture from within the browser for sites (such as YouTube) that might implement it. Given their proclivity towards giving the RIAA/MPAA whatever they ask for, it wouldn't surprise me.
I'm pretty sure that encrypted media sites already use HDCP because my projector glitches for a few seconds sometimes when I first navigate to Prime Video, and whenever I have a secondary analog VGA monitor connected Prime Video will only play in standard definition.
There's fair use though. It makes sense that you are able to quote a video. Its just that those people on Twitch don't quote; they play the whole thing. Captions with bookmarks would fix that (Pornhub has that natively, quite useful).
Browser extensions are very similar, just as an extension instead of direct. Unfortunately, it's difficult to use non-store extensions in Chrome, and Google pretty much blocks anything that allows youtube downloads from the store. youtube-dl is likely the most popular option for this, and even then, the same (deeply flawed) logic could be used against any of them.
#1 is an activity protected by fair use, and something fairly important. Imagine a world where you can't reference images or clips in your journalism or reviews, forever having to rely on only licensed material and descriptions.
It wasn't a DMCA takedown notice. It was a DMCA section 1201 notice. Section 1201, which criminalizes circumvention of access controls, has nothing to do with copyright.
John Deere uses it to go after sellers of unauthorized replacement parts for their tractors.
Non-compliance is a felony carrying a 5 year / $500k punishment. Unlike takedown notices, there's no counter-notice opportunity for the receiving party. So if the receiving party believed the notice isn't valid, they'll need to argue that as a criminal defendant in criminal court.
B. Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.
Many TOS are full of legal BS that has not been tested in court.
"You shall not download"
Or what? Can Youtube actually sue me for damages, they haven't suffered any. Some videos are lisenced as Creative Commons. I seriously doubt this has any legal force.
IANAL, but for me the terms used here are kind of problematic on a technical level.
- "unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content." -- If there is a download link somewhere in the comments you're allowed to download using youtube-dl?
- "provided functionality" -- either functionality is available or it's not. Whether there is a button for it on the UI or not is entirely different. (However, this sort of seems to imply that the HTML specs are legally binding?)
- Your internet connection is only capable of sending and receiving packets, and it isn't wrong at all to describe "sending" as "uploading" and "receiving" as "downloading".
- It says that you aren't allowed to (among other things) "display" any Content for any other purposes -- other purposes than what? "For your information and personal use"?
- It used to be that you could just copy video files from your browser's cache directory, or you could use hard links -- then you wouldn't even have copied them technically. (Not sure if that's still possible on youtube -- but again what if you had a browser that generated PNG files instead or or before "displaying" stuff on the screen?)
Wow, by that logic news reporters aren't even allowed watch videos on the site for news reporting purposes because it would violate the ban on commercial use.
My primary use case has been to download talks and watch them later. I frequently used to work out of cafes (not since Feb of course) where the connection may not be reliable. Youtube-dl was very helpful in those cases.
Indeed, it should be good practice for any journalist to download copies of online material they are reporting about (not just video, but anything), for the case that they are being deleted or altered. In the old world, you had a piece of paper or a document that you could store somewhere. An URL is not a way of storing the content, it can always disappear.
Another valid use-case is to use the hardware acceleration with your native video player. AFAIK, mpv uses youtube-dl under the hood to play youtube videos. For a long time the video acceleration in browsers wasn't very good for Linux users, so we used players like mpv instead to watch high resolution content.
Actually Chrome on Linux doesn't use hardware acceleration for video playback and never did, while the most recent Firefox almost does, if one turns a couple of experimental knobs.
Off topic but I just tried to move from MacOS to Pop!_OS and this is the main reason that I can't migrate now. No GPU Accel on Chrome means scrolling is horrid on QHD/higher resolution (besides YouTube being pretty much useless). Firefox is fine but there's no user profile modes to separate between my various profiles. With so much work being done on browsers, it feels weird that Linux is so behind on this. And Chrome seem to not want to implement the GPU acceleration at all. I guess I'll pay the Apple tax for the foreseeable future.
Well, I am not sure I understand what you mean. There are two distinct GPU Acceleration technologies at work here:
- for videos
- for website rendering
AFAIK the video acceleration part is the big problem as the issue was ignored for many years by the browser vendors. For rendering websites most browser should do just fine, some hardware-browser combinations might be exceptions though.
I also wonder what you mean by Firefox has no user profiles, because Firefox has a profile concept too. Be default it doesn't ask you, but when you start it with `firefox --ProfileManager` you will see what I mean. I don't like messing with the Profile Manager every time, so I just have different Icons for starting different Profiles (e.g. Music --> Spotify, Movies --> Amazon & Netflix, etc.).
Currently there are just two websites for which I have to use Chromium:
1. Geforce Now, officially Linux is not supported, but with Chromium it does work when you change your user-agent
2. Binance, for whatever reason their login capture doesn't work with Firefox
OK so I'm not sure what's happening with the scrolling. But it's definitely smoother on Firefox than on Chrome. I'm sure it's not my hardware/OS combination (1060 + PopOS w/ Nvidia blobs).
On the profiles part: I am aware of the --ProfileManager option. But the icon is new to me. Should be worth trying. Thanks. Work uses G Suite so I don't know how Meet + some other tools react with Firefox.
I prefer using Firefox anyway, but if you want to dig deeper regarding your Chrome GPU acceleration you might find the following pages valuable:
chrome://gpu/ -- here you can see the current status of your GPU Acceleration
chrome://flags/ -- search for 'GPU' or 'accel'. This is the place where you can override some related settings, but be aware, that this might break your browser, so better backup your browser configuration directory before changing anything ;-)
Firefox added hardware acceleration support very recently, June for Wayland and end of August for X11, and needs to be manually enabled plus YouTube needs to be told to use a supported codec. It's also possible your distro isn't supporting it yet.
h264 is still the only widely supported in-hardware decodeable codec out there (cheapest for the client) but google serves webm by default (cheapest for them and built in-house)
Youtube-dl had some good notes in their README about legitimate uses and an explanation about how they tried to avoid adding sites that specialized in infringing content, but they really did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests. That will not help their argument at all. Youtube-dl absolutely has important and completely legal uses, reporting being among them, but the law doesn't care whether it CAN be used for legal purposes. The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose."
On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?
Downloading copyrighted videos, just like home taping, is legal. There was a supreme court case deciding that the latter is legal. I have yet to hear any reasoning why "home taping, but on the internet" would not fall under that same precedent.
Distributing a tool whose primary purpose is circumventing DRM is forbidden by the DMCA. The DMCA was signed long after the home-taping precedent, so that precedent doesn't really speak to what is and isn't allowed under the DMCA. Fair Use rights exist but if a law says "this isn't fair use", then it's not.
They allege that it circumvents a "rolling cipher", which (they say) is sufficiently DRMy that it comes under the law. The DMCA doesn't have much of a definition of what counts as an access control measure, but the "rolling cipher" that scrambles the download URL looks like one if you squint. Exactly what counts as DRM is less of a technical question than a legal one, so (not being a copyright lawyer) it's not obvious to me what the right answer is.
Because this is about distribution, not a home copy. You could copy and paste the test code into a terminal window and download the video. That’s not the same as a home recording.
> Because this is about distribution, not a home copy. You could copy and paste the test code into a terminal window and download the video. That’s not the same as a home recording.
The difference is that my home copy is my own work and action. The distribution, in this case, via source code, allows anyone to download that copy.
If the code snippet that downloaded infringing materials didn't exist and the user had to find the parameters themselves, that's fine. But it does exist and was included alongside a tool that makes that recording possible.
A better analogy would be like, if you had a video store that had a machine in the store that allowed people to make copies of a video tape using a duplicating machine. If someone wants to buy a duplicator for home use and use it in their home, that's one thing (though there was litigation around that too), but if you go to a store and can plug in a video tape -- and the example in the store is a copy of a Disney movie -- that's sort of what this is.
(Photocopy shops and libraries often have fairly strict rules about what kind of content can be photocopied, for what it's worth. The guy at Kinkos at 3am might not care that you're copying an entire textbook on the machine, but if you go to Office Depot in the daytime, they definitely will. Kinkos was sued and lost over a photocopy case in regards to excerpts/packets/anthologies for textbooks.)
> A better analogy would be like, if you had a video store that had a machine in the store that allowed people to make copies of a video tape using a duplicating machine. If someone wants to buy a duplicator for home use and use it in their home, that's one thing
If you have the recording device, then you can use it to record video that gets transmitted to you. But there isn't a place you can go to have the video duplicated for you. You do it yourself.
> did themselves a legal disservice by explicitly using copyrighted music video content as tests.
They had no alternative other than not having tests for that particular functionality. The tests were testing youtube-partner specific functionality: the procedure needed to download content from some youtube partners is different.
Moreover, the tests just throw away the downloaded material... it would be entirely reasonable for a court to conclude that there is no copyright interest involved in that activity at all and would be extraordinarily unlikely that any court would find it to be anything but fair use if they did conclude a copyright was involved at all.
If it hadn't been the test cases the RIAA probably would have dug up some old forum post advocating infringement by some occasional contributor. They were always going to argue something.
The fact that they had to have tests set to get around certain partners — partners who, it could be argued, had different provisions to try to limit the download of their content - works against them.
In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo.
ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.
> The law only cares if the tool was "primarily designed" or "marketed" or "has only limited non-infringing purpose."
The first two elements have a mens rea implication behind them: you have to demonstrate the intent of the developers. That RIAA's strongest evidence of intent is buried in a unit test, and this seeming intent flies against the evidence in the far more prominent README that is discussing its unsuitability for infringing content. Furthermore, they can also demonstrate from their own practice in history that they refuse pull requests and close issues were people are clearly trying to use it only for infringing use cases.
Imo... people should be able to download stuff for free if they’re able to see it for free. The “you can see it but you must watch an ad” model is weird and leads to unenforceable/wacky situations like this
(I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)
It's strange to me because I've been using adblokcers for as long as I've been watching things online, as do a large percentage of people, I'm sure. So does it really matter that much to YouTube when I download some video, considering me watching it brings it literally no benefit? What's the gain here?
Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware.
If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
Not like they didn’t try to make it illegal originally.
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.“ - Jack Valenti, former MPAA president, in 1982, explaining to Congress why the VCR should be illegal
I even have a VHS VCR that does this automatically. It’s fascinating - once the recording is done it rewinds and watches the show at high speed, when it sees something in the signal that indicates that an ad was spliced in it marks the start and end. Then when playing back it fast-forwards over the commercials.
It worked brilliantly, back in the days of analog cable TV.
I mean, they tried desperately to make it illegal in the 80s. The Betamax case went to the Supreme Court! [1] Given the current makeup of justices, I would imagine Betamax would be decided differently today, in favor of Universal rather than Sony. Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. Dish was sued over its Hopper DVR that auto-skipped ads and ultimately had to settle. TiVo won some of their lawsuits but because it didn’t do automatic commercial skipping of the recordings, was spared her wrath of the networks like Replay was. (TiVo was ultimately ruined by the cable companies who sought to introduce their own inferior DVRs that they could charge a monthly fee over.)
I wouldn't take Aereo as a guide to how justices would reconsider the Betamax case were it heard de novo. Aereo's business model was to redistribute over-the-air broadcast TV, and it was arguing that its technical implementation was technically not violating any laws. This cast it into the creative reinterpretation of law scenario that tends to lose out in court.
> Aereo lost 6-3, even though the dissenting justices cited Betamax from 30 years previous.
I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:
> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.
> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.
No it didn’t. You could skip ads with the remote at set intervals (notably, TiVo did not let you auto skip the ad even though they could have, but put 15 or 90 second intervals you could customize on the remote to get past the ads very quickly, but it recorded them). ReplayTV, which did more directly skip ads (via its remote, not via recording IIRC), was sued out of existence.
Dish’s Hopper actually DID do ad-free recordings and it was sued too (but there was eventually a settlement), not just for skipping the ads but for distributing the same copy of a recording to multiple users over a server. Cablevision, likewise, was sued (but settled) over the fact that it had a cloud DVR network that allowed the same copy of a recording to be available to multiple people, rather than storing X-Copies of the recording on their servers.
DMCA section 1201 is not about copyright infringement. It’s there to make things that are not copyright infringement illegal.
This is how John Deere got away with prohibiting farmers from repairing their tractors, etc. This is why time-shifting and format-shifting were just fine for OTA/cable television/CDs/etc but are practically nonexistent today.
I never thought of the VCR comparison before and it's interesting. Is recording a video delivered over IP different than recording a video delivered OTA or via cable (which is probably IP these days)?
Worth reminding people that Big Content Holding industry came all too close to getting VHS tapes outlawed.
> In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony could continue to sell its Betamax videocassette recorder, overruling the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judgement that held Sony liable for consumers’ copyright infringement.
FWIW I was contacted by a "prestigious" publisher (the ken) and it was a story against google. The journalist was not even ready to listen to the "pros", she was just interested in whats the harm.
I used ffmpeg and audacity with youtube-dl to download and do file and spectrograph analysis on a faked political video. That analysis showing how the audio was spliced together may have killed the story before it got legs.
In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.
Thanks, it's way less cool when I write spectrogram instead of spectrograph. My mistake on that part.
If you use those tools, it's really straight forward process of using the tools. I didn't know about Audacity until I had spent most of my time figuring out ffmpeg/ffplay. It was an amateur effort, but I've done a lot of security analysis.
> In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.
I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates.
Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged.
I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection.
A long time ago, I wrote and maintained a fairly used Userscript plugin to scrape and download YouTube videos. Let me tell you -- without constant updates (which I've gotten complacent of by using `pip install --upgrade` with youtube-dl), I have forgotten just how much of a hassle it is to constantly fix the HTML parser used to identify and generate download URLs. The reality is, any front-end source code change on YouTube would potentially break the script, sometimes necessitating complete re-write of the parsing scheme. That is all to say, I hope you've set aside ample time and coffee for this hobby...
RIAA alleges that it bypasses a form of DRM. Youtube tries to obfuscate the full URL of videos, so youtube-dl does a little dance to work out where to download it from. If this is a form of DRM, then the DMCA plausibly applies.
So, the argument is whether or not obfuscation is DRM? If that's true anyone can claim that some weird URL scheme is DRM. That's a dangerous slope to tread.
I think it is, too, but "is this sufficiently obfuscatory to fall under the DMCA or not" is really only something a court can decide- it's not a technical question. So "this is obviously not DRM" is an argument, but until a court says otherwise the RIAA seems to have a leg to stand on.
Sometimes I think the scope of what a court is allowed to decide is crazy. It allows new concepts to be manufactured for the convenience of muddying the legal waters. Why the hell legislate around "DRM" and then decide later what that means.
It's a bit tragic: Most tools have a potentially negative/illegal use case. These developers advertising those uses, even if it was just in the source code, wasn't a good idea. Now there is an uphill battle to legitimize its use again.
I did not look at the repo — but has anyone checked if this is trustworthy? Probably many are looking for a new source - providing a nice and convenient entry point to seed dubious / dangerous additions (aka. malware).
From Readme "youtube-dlc is a fork of youtube-dl with the intention of getting features tested by the community merged in the tool faster, since youtube-dl's development seems to be slowing down. (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462)"
Obviously, lots of people use it for legitimate reasons.
I for example, use it to download large amounts of material for when I am offline while sailing. Programming tutorials to learn some useful stuff while offline, entire university courses on interesting topics, etc. There aren't many practical ways for me to do it.
I imagine YouTube would argue this isn't a legitimate reason since they provide YouTube Premium as a paid subscription which includes as one of its perks the ability to download material for viewing offline.
Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.
I download for offline viewing quite often. It is available only on mobile devices and the videos are available offline for 30 days post download. Solutions exist to view video from phones on laptops.
But all that doesn't go to my argument which is that YouTube, not myself, may not see your use case as legitimate since they provide a subscription service which enables offline viewing. I doubt that because the way they have implemented it, for whatever technical, contractual or just on whim reasons, may not meet all your specific needs they see you bypassing controls to implement in your own manner as legitimate.
Exactly. I don't see people running around issuing complaints about knives and how they should no longer be allowed, yet can be, and have been, used to literally kill people.
I know it's a bit of a childish argument for me to make, but I think ultimately it comes down to money in this case.
I don't follow the argument that the procedural invalidity makes Github more culpable.
In a normal, procedurally valid, DMCA the only harm to the host for not following the procedure is that they lose the safe harbor.
In this case because it isn't a question of infringement there isn't a safe harbor at all.
In either case a company can choose to take something down because it wants to reduce its exposure to litigation.
I'm disappointed that even after acquisition github has continued with the beyond-industry-standard level of aggressiveness with takedowns. But I don't see how you conclude that the anti-circumvention complaint makes github more in the wrong for complying.
Based on your response, and the parent comment, it seems like content hosts have a responsibility: to determine if a DMCA takedown request is valid. If a host doesn't see this as a responsibility, and simply complies with every DMCA (whether valid, invalid, or even fraudulent), I'd agree with op... the host is culpable whenever they comply with an invalid or fraudulent DMCA request. Maybe not culpable in a legal sense, but certainly they are to blame (otherwise who?) for complying with invalid DMCA.
They don't have a responsibility except in a goodwill sense.
The DMCA gives hosts an option to have legal immunity for each specific case of infringement, to gain the immunity they need only take the content down at the cost of outraging a potential customer. They don't have to take the option, however.
It is common in industry for hosts to simply discard obviously invalid complaints particularly if the target is high profile. The legal immunity isn't very valuable if the complaint is baseless-- (sure, there might be frivolous litigation, but that is always possible).
It also seems pretty common for hosts to allow the target of the complaint to counter-notice in advance of taking the material down and then just skip the takedown, or they take it down but restore it immediately on counter-notice (youtube itself does this, or at least did when I was hit with a spurious dmca complaint there years ago). Both of these procedures don't follow the letter of the law and arguably cost the provider their safe-harbour. OTOH, almost no DMCA complaints are actually valid per the specific requirements of the statute, so maybe they don't actually lose their safe-harbour.
I once worked for a business that got a DMCA request for taking down a legitimate site, from a law firm acting on the site owner's behalf. They refused to listen to reason and didn't stop until we got the site owner to call their own lawyers and tell them back off. Luckily, we were outside the jurisdiction of the DMCA so we had the option of simply saying no.
I can't imagine it was the only time such a thing happened, and that alone is an argument for simply ignoring those take-down requests if possible.
> that Microsoft/Github pulled youtube-dl offline by choosing to respond to a DMCA takedown order that is not procedurally valid.... The fact that Microsoft didn't tell the RIAA to go Disney themselves means that 100% of the blame lies at Microsoft's feet. No exceptions.
What you said is clearly correct, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect any company to insert themselves in the middle of these disputes. At scale it's impossible.
Imagine you run a forum with millions of members and tens of thousands of posts per day. You get a stack of DMCA takedown requests every day. Do you think it's feasible for you to scrutinize each and every one, and take a moral stand on those you deem 'not procedurally valid' ? How much do you think that might cost? What happens when you call one wrong and the law comes to YOU?
For anything to really change, it's clear someone will have to go after the RIAA.. (EFF maybe?)
Given the number of fraudulent DMCA takedowns that are created by bots and malicious actors, they absolutely have to be individually examined by competent legal counsel.
At one point Microsoft was issuing DMCA takedowns against (then) openOffice.org mirrors, allegedly on the grounds that any large file with a name that contained the word 'office' must be a 'pirated' version of MS Office. Taking these takedowns at face value would have ended the openOffice.org project and absolutely could not have been respected in good faith.
These kind of abuses are ongoing from multiple parties, including bots, copyright trolls, and crazed ideologues who file completely fraudulent DMCA takedowns to force anonymous personalities to disclose their identities. There is no alternative but to consider DMCA takedowns on legal merits because so many of them have no merits whatsoever.
Having the funding to do this 'at scale' is just as much a cost of doing business as paying for power and connectivity. If hosting platforms don't want to do this, then they should purchase an amendment to the DMCA to impose criminal sanctions on entities that serve fraudulent DMCA takedowns.
Under section 1201 anti-circumvention rules, unless Youtube-DL enters the US legal system & counter-notifies, Github/Microsoft face CRIMINAL liability charges with steep JAIL TIME and a half-million dollar fine.
I want to chew Microsoft out for this one, but the US-based copyright mafia have built themselves an unbelievably vicious draconian set of laws that prevent any sort of challenge, including those coming from scientific inquiry or examination. Anti-circumvention is the most world-hating corporate-owned-world flaming garbage that could be devised, and violating it comes with unbelievably mercilessly cruel criminal penalties.
The menace of this threat has silenced science & speech, has prevented mankind from examining the world about them, learning of it, & discussing it. We have outlawed knowledge, outlawed idea, literally criminalized knowing something about the world with steep jail time. This is a farce, of the highest order, one of the greatest shames the law has done unto itself.
I feel like this line from your link to Bunnie Huang's blog is apropos to many of the conflicts of our time:
> Like the parable of the frog in the well, their creativity has been confined to a small patch, not realizing how big and blue the sky could be if they could step outside that well.
That was posted in 2016; does anyone know what happened with that lawsuit?
> It's not Github/Microsoft's responsibility to make legal determinations about whether a particular DMCA takedown notice is valid.
Except, by choosing to honor it, they decided that it is legally valid.
The appropriate response to a copyright claim against material that the claimant clearly does not own is 'unless you can prove that you own this material, come back with a court order.'
Is it? OR is it the prudent thing to do to temporarily make it unavailable. Then take a second to look at things, then bring it back again if that the action deemed appropriate? If doing nothing leaves the vulnerable while doing something that gets reversed gives them ammo to go after the accuser, then it seems the lesser of 2 evils to me
I mean, to be fair, they probably have one of the most colossal legal teams of any tech company, no?
Regardless, I think they takedown without giving the "DMCA" complaint much scrutiny because the risk of penalty for NOT taking action is greater than just taking down the repo(s) risk-free.
Github's ToS: which says "we have the right (though not the obligation) to refuse or remove any User-Generated Content that, in our sole discretion, violates any GitHub terms or policies." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
I have to say it IS strange they took down content based on a letter that doesn't prove or even really suggest copyright infringement has taken place (only that it COULD, as a result of using the software), and their own ToS says "There may be legal consequences for sending a false or frivolous takedown notice." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
The headline on the article should reflect the fact that Microsoft/Github pulled youtube-dl offline by choosing to respond to a DMCA takedown order that is not procedurally valid. The privatization of law enforcement through DMCA takedown orders does not extend to alleged circumvention tools; it includes only copyrighted material that is allegedly 'pirated.'
The RIAA is engaging in an abuse of process that Microsoft has no obligation to cooperate with. The fact that Microsoft didn't tell the RIAA to go Disney themselves means that 100% of the blame lies at Microsoft's feet. No exceptions.
. .
That said, the youtube-dl maintainers should file a bar association complaint against the RIAA lawyer(s) who wrote the DMCA takedown. Filing invalid motions is an ethical violation that should result in sanctions.
A large number of alternative news outlets have been catching YouTube bans under the cover of the QAnon crackdown. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the main archiving tool one could use to migrate off of YouTube is being squelched at the same time.
Microsoft has to reverse this takedown.
Even though it is called "youtube-dl", it also is for downloading videoes on hundres of other video platforms!
Many, as stated in this article, use it for research purposes and investigative journalism.
Why do companies like MS, Google, Amazon etc acquire smaller companies if they cant protect the values these small companies stand for and made them attractive in first place.
When my full-time job was as a journalist, I used youtube-dl all the time as a way to have archives of content that was either in danger of being taken down (related to a mass-shooting or other global event) or that the creator would take down after it received attention. In fact, I used to have instructions for how to install it in the various wikis/docs for other team members (this was easier once the Python GUI frontend became available, but I still created step-by-step instructions for specific settings).
I produce/host a few weekly news shows focused on developer-centric news and updates and have a keyboard macro setup to run youtube-dl against a text file with URLs not to download the videos, but the thumbnails for videos, so I can use them in the on-screen graphics when talking about a specific story. Before I scripted that solution, the process of having to manually extract the thumbnail for any video I was highlighting was a major PITA.
Also, being frank, youtube-dl is significantly better than the official YouTube API for downloading past content from channels I own/manage. It’s faster and a lot more scriptable. I have automated scripts set to watch specific playlists or channels and auto-download stuff for archival purposes — and again, this is content that I either own or that exists on a channel where I’m one of the admins.
It’s unfortunate that the test suite had links to commercial music — we’ve seen in past RIAA litigation that that is enough to go against the argument that this isn’t encouraging download of copyrighted content.
But as a tool, for not just YouTube but so many other services, it’s invaluable even in non-data hoarding/grey area or straight up infringement scenarios.
To be clear, I’ve often used youtube-dl to infringe (as have the vast majority of its users), but that’s my choice/fault. The tool itself has plenty of non-infringing uses. I just wish they’d either linked the test file to another area or used other examples.
It's also github. The other year China tried blocking github via the GFW and had to allow it because so many developers there needed it.
Either way you can host git yourself (or just use git format-patch) there's not a single thing github really does for you other than integrate a bunch of self-hostable tools behind a flashy (and increasingly less usable) web GUI.
Not to mention that the chroma subsampling gets worse and worse this way. Not just because that's an inherent problem but also because youtube is (like most video players) horrendously bad at resampling the chroma.
YouTube even offers a Creative Commons feature, such as on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUY01kW8p2o: if you scroll to the end of the description it reads: License
Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed).
I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal.
Sure, Google could do but there's more than enough problems vs reward to make it unattractive:
- When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't.
- It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer)
- Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded the file
- There's no way of having users "click" those adverts, let alone report back to Google that they've engaged with it
- Some of those aforementioned points might also have a knock on effect with how advertising is charged, which would mean Google would need another pricing model
...and all of this is before you even address the technical issues of video files having multiple different bitrates and formats. You could probably generate a new file on the fly but that would be extremely computationally expensive. So they'd rack up more costs hosting the service as well as lose money on advertising.
Honestly, I can't blame Google for not supporting a download option.
What do you mean by "technical issues"? Google already has a streaming video player supporting multiple bitrates and formats. They could just do whatever youtube-dl does to pack it into a file or even more optimally, grab it from their video database directly should there be something like that.
Exactly, Google has that player, but to replicate the same effect for offline playing you would need to play a playlist or a DASH video and multiple fragments.
But I grant it's technically possible to do with a single MPEG file, just not trivial. You would need to prepend the advertisement to the video bitstream (re-encoded with same parameters such as width, height, FPS, intra picture interval) and then do the same for audio, while ensuring the video/audio synchronization is kept intact (MPEG edit lists are not well-supported by players, such as by ffmpeg), while preferably not re-encoding the actual video. A bit more complicated to do the insertion in the middle of the file.
It's possible to do, but I don't think it's something that any off-the-shelf tools actually do.
Yeah there are off the shelf tools available to the broadcasting industry. But these things are designed to tens of streams, not millions. As usual, it's a scale problem rather than a code problem.
I'd already explained the problem, albeit without much detail.
The adverts are a different file to the video files. So you need to either merge them ahead of time or dynamically splice them in real time.
Ahead of time: Now you need to not only have a video asset for each bit rate and video format but you need to multiply that with the number of adverts on any given day. This would result in thousands of files, maybe even hundreds of thousands once you take targeted adverts into account. And they'd need to rebuild their entire catalogue whenever an ad campaign ends. Clearly that isn't going to work long term.
Real time: Option 2 is to stream the advert then follow immediately with the video content on the same HLS stream. This is much more achievable than option 1 but you are then running the streams like a live TV service where you're dynamically splicing content into existing streams. It isn't difficult to do per stream but it is extra processing compared with the existing set up. The real problem lies with scale. A TV broadcaster might do this with a dozen to a few hundred channels, each with contracts ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Youtube have millions of streams, each which earn pennies from advertising (and even less if they had to download because of the change in advertising model -- as I also described before). So they'd have to pay more and earn less. The financials simply wouldn't stack up.
Before you comment that YouTube and Twitch offer live streaming services based around the same advertising models, yes they do, but they also operate using the same stack as the pre-recorded videos because those video streams don't need to be spliced by YouTube / Twitch (any editing happens by the content creators before it hits YouTube and YouTube can show the adverts before or even between the videos by injecting them in the browser (ie so the splicing is managed at the front end rather than on Googles servers). None of this is doable with a "download video" button.
Not directly, perhaps, but the Law of Large Numbers says that views-per-download are very probably statistically derterminable, and can be estimated with high accuracy.
Otherwise, this is the same problem print newspapers have; how many readers per copy, seeing what adverts, how many times? This can be modelled or assessed (e.g., by reader response codes / instrumented URLs) fairly readily.
Last time I was messing around with youtube-dl I was surprised by the huge size and variety of formats for just one video. I can’t think of an easy way to constantly embed new ads into all those video files. And can they charge for an impression without knowing if the video was ever watched? Maybe its just too much trouble.
Make it part of the Premium subscription then (which is ad-free). If people or companies have a legitimate use for downloading videos, paying $10/mo (or however much it is) isn't going to break the bank.
The copy-protection MAFIAA (a joke acronym, Movie and Film Industry Association of America, a hypothetical super-beast merger of the vicious & loathed RIAA and the MPAA) spent a while going after BitTorrent itself too, in a similar manner, as a potential tool for piracy.
Thankfully plenty of people were also using BitTorrent for things like distributing Linux distributions & creative commons material.
Google has zero interest in free downloads. They are in bed with the music industry which makes them some ad dollars and their client thinking is sub-zero. Thats because the public is not the client, the advertisers are. If I worked at Google I would be scratching myself behind the ears and take a long big look at what the company has become.
I suspect there's at least a small dose of ultra privilege of googlers involved too.
The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to pay the bills (including stuff like cleaning jobs where they work at 4 or 5 different old people's homes) - and then wonder why outbreaks spread so fast.
Googlers have probably forgotten the olden times, when they didn't have Gigabit connections to their pockets and lounge rooms, and don't even remember last time they wanted to "save a copy into a hard drive locally, like a hilarious boomer!"...
But I lived in Mountain View. Decent internet is more or less not available there. Your choices are comcast or DSL.
Maybe they just don't remember the last time they had a waking hour out of the office ... :)
It's clear to me that whomever is making these product decisions has a very different relationship with computing and their data than I do-- but whatever the reason is, I don't think it's because they have a much better internet connection.
Youtube makes money on advertising. You can’t put modern ads into a downloaded video. I don’t think the ultra-privilege of Googlers factors into this particular decision.
(Also if you live in Mountain View, you’re stuck with a Comcast cable modem and a 38mbps max upload speed even when paying for their “gigabit” plan. But you'll only get 10-15mbps during the peak hours of the work day.)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadI hope they put it up onn a Github-like site outside the US.
1) Downloading videos to use later in editing for analysis pieces / editorial videos.
2) Download videos that may disappear in a "No longer available" blackhole.
The 2nd is incredibly useful and telling when you go back, look up videos by their ID, and see what has been deleted. I'd also recommend changing the OUTPUT format to include the channel name or Twitter account, so you can easily see if an account or channel has been censored/banned.
Watching a youtube video on a slow (1k) DSL has become entirely impossible because a few years back youtube (seemingly) stopped buffering the entire video, so you can't start the video, pause, go do something else and watch it once it's loaded. Not only that, but it really does not handle either temporary disconnections or high latency spikes well.
AFAIK, (good) browsers still give you the direct links if you know where to look, but the slow boiling of the frog is really evident with things like hiding View Source and such (often under the guise of "usability".) The demise of youtube-dl, along with Google's pushing of their proprietary protocols and other continued user hostilities surely paints a sad picture for the freedom of the Internet...
May have to go back to spotify or offline mp3 files, I don't miss having to manage my own playlists tbh.
Some people would argue that optimising YouTube for the bottom 1% of Internet connections makes no financial sense, but I have gigabit fibre and YouTube stutters. It automatically upgrades to 4K videos (of course), but its buffering algorithm is pared so close to the bone that it can't handle high bandwidths as well.
Engineers at Google get bonuses for shaving 0.1% off of something, because at their scale that could be millions of dollars saved.
Hence protocols like HTTP/3, which exist almost entirely to optimise some Google backend by single-digit percentage points.
YouTube has had every last percent of "inefficiency" squeezed out of it, to the point where lots of users have a degraded experience.
Google famously doesn't care about user experience at all. They care about costs and their own internal KPIs, which are all tied to advertising revenue, not "video playback smoothness".
This is why Firefox was 5x slower on YouTube for years. This is why Google famously has next to zero "customer support", even if you pay them. They don't view you as a customer. You're the product.
Firefox users click on ads less. Firefox users tend to have adblock. They're not good products.
Similarly, Google is fighting a turf war with the likes of NetFlix and Apple for advertising eyeballs, so they do not want to ensure that Apple TV can play back YouTube in the best possible quality. They optimise for Chrome and Chromecast first, everything else a distant second. Got to build that walled garden!
I pay NetFlix the same amount monthly as I pay for YouTube Premium. NetFlix provides support, YouTube doesn't. NetFlix works flawlessly on every device I have, YouTube doesn't.
YouTube doesn't play 4K on my Apple TV 4K! It doesn't play 4K on my flagship Samsung TV! It downgrades my iPhone for 480p even on WiFi!
This kind of anti-consumer (anti-product?) bullshit is why Google needs to be broken up.
The vendor that makes the device, the browser, the search engine, the network protocol, and the advertising platform shouldn't also be television for half the world.
They shouldn't get to degrade the experience to benefit their browser team. They shouldn't get to slow down the experience for a competing browser. They shouldn't get to simply ignore customer complaints. Television broadcasters in most countries have to answer to an ombudsman. YouTube doesn't.
That's too much control that invites anti-competitive, anti-human behaviour. The incentives are all wrong.
> I pay for YouTube Premium
So you're aware that you're the product even if you pay them and you still pay them?
Not that it matters as it's a drop in the ocean.
In a poor town, a shopkeeper may accept barter instead of cash. Their customers might pay them with eggs, and they would be treated like valued customers even if they're too poor to use trade with real money.
It's a matter of corporate culture on how the consumers are viewed. For largely advertising-driven companies their users are products, even if they pay. For largely product and sales-driven companies their users are customers, even if they're in a free tier or a trial account or whatever.
You can make something quite bad on average, and that's okay, you just have to be able to filter out everything you don't want and keep what you want. When CPUs are manufactured, this is what they mean by the "yield". It's the percentage of the product that can be kept, with the rest of the wafer discarded.
Chef's Gallery had a scene that actually shocked me a bit -- this award winning chef was making this deep-fried puff thing that was absolutely perfect. They showed his process, which was to make dozens of them and then plate just the best one for the customer. He never had a knack at all for making them perfect! He was just throwing out 99% of the puffs that he made, using the same technique as anyone else would.
You just have to change your perspective: You're the product. You're the deep fried puff.
If you're an outlier, you will be discarded. You're the bent piece of framing. You're the slice of the silicon wafer that failed the test.
Nobody feels the slightest bit bad about rejecting a faulty product on the production line. No tears are shed. No phone calls are made to the product to see if there's anything the manufacturer can do to fix the situation.
This is Google and by extension YouTube in a nutshell. They're an advertising company manufacturing ad impressions and ad clicks. Viewers are their product.
Viewers on 1 Mbps or 1 Gbps are equally outliers. Both are too weird to cater to, less than optimal, unpredictable, difficult to advertise-to viewers.
Rejected.
Viewers on 1Gbps give off two important signals to advertisers.
1) Probably living near a city to get fiber coverage, which these days is usually a signal of wealth
2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.
This is most likely somebody that advertisers are very interested in getting their ads in front of!
> 2) Can afford a fiber internet monthly subscription, also usually not cheap.
Unless you’re assuming US residents these are not really signals or helpful. In Japan or Korea you can get GBPs fiber for $30. In Eastern Europe you can get fiber for as low as €10 in Romania I think, in western you can get that for 50 in Switzerland.
Meanwhile there are places where it’s not an option at all unless you get into “contact us” price ranges.
This is a peering issue and your ISP's fault, not YouTube's. They can't fix bad peering from their end, your ISP has to do it.
They're too aggressive on their optimizations for mobile networks/devices.
There's even a little popup saying something like "It seems we can connect to the server, do you want to play your downloaded songs instead ?" when there are connectivity issues.
We could have had so many nice things if it wasn't for those things.
It's almost as if there's somewhere a country which acts as a fertile breeding ground for these uncontrollable unregulated monstrosities, to grow really big, and at some point left roaming wild for other countries to deal with "yeah we don't do that here" (by which I mean stuff like false advertising and reasoning like "if it's legal and I make a profit then I get to do it").
I self-host some things because I like the technical challenge, and what I've found is that the effort required to maintain the online presence of the data is quite demanding. Less so if it's outsourced, but without actively 'tending the garden', it will inevitably disappear at least from the public-facing internet.
The ephemerality is also exacerbated by Google / Facebook account terminations.
Personally I've started locally saving anything I think I would want to watch or reference again. When favoriting something or saving it to a playlist, I download it too. I started off with using youtube-dl on the command line and have experimented with the "Import from YouTube" function on Peertube but ended up with a tiny cobbled-together video platform, importer (youtube-dl wrapper), and Firefox extension. I think the next step will be easily saving non-video things - probably recording WARCs?
I did that with only one YouTube playlist, so it wasn't too much work.
I wonder if certain famous YouTubers used youtube-dl for this purpose. How else would you download, edit, and analyze a video's editing or special effects?
edit: I only meant this in so much that it's entirely possible for Google, that controls both Chrome (the biggest browser) and YouTube (biggest online video site) to encable DHCP restrictions on video capture from within the browser for sites (such as YouTube) that might implement it. Given their proclivity towards giving the RIAA/MPAA whatever they ask for, it wouldn't surprise me.
I'm guessing you meant HDCP?
I'm pretty sure that encrypted media sites already use HDCP because my projector glitches for a few seconds sometimes when I first navigate to Prime Video, and whenever I have a secondary analog VGA monitor connected Prime Video will only play in standard definition.
i wager to say that the vast majority of browser extensions and websites that allow downloading of media content use ytdl in the background
John Deere uses it to go after sellers of unauthorized replacement parts for their tractors.
Non-compliance is a felony carrying a 5 year / $500k punishment. Unlike takedown notices, there's no counter-notice opportunity for the receiving party. So if the receiving party believed the notice isn't valid, they'll need to argue that as a criminal defendant in criminal court.
"You shall not download"
Or what? Can Youtube actually sue me for damages, they haven't suffered any. Some videos are lisenced as Creative Commons. I seriously doubt this has any legal force.
- "unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content." -- If there is a download link somewhere in the comments you're allowed to download using youtube-dl?
- "provided functionality" -- either functionality is available or it's not. Whether there is a button for it on the UI or not is entirely different. (However, this sort of seems to imply that the HTML specs are legally binding?)
- Your internet connection is only capable of sending and receiving packets, and it isn't wrong at all to describe "sending" as "uploading" and "receiving" as "downloading".
- It says that you aren't allowed to (among other things) "display" any Content for any other purposes -- other purposes than what? "For your information and personal use"?
- It used to be that you could just copy video files from your browser's cache directory, or you could use hard links -- then you wouldn't even have copied them technically. (Not sure if that's still possible on youtube -- but again what if you had a browser that generated PNG files instead or or before "displaying" stuff on the screen?)
- for videos
- for website rendering
AFAIK the video acceleration part is the big problem as the issue was ignored for many years by the browser vendors. For rendering websites most browser should do just fine, some hardware-browser combinations might be exceptions though.
I also wonder what you mean by Firefox has no user profiles, because Firefox has a profile concept too. Be default it doesn't ask you, but when you start it with `firefox --ProfileManager` you will see what I mean. I don't like messing with the Profile Manager every time, so I just have different Icons for starting different Profiles (e.g. Music --> Spotify, Movies --> Amazon & Netflix, etc.).
Currently there are just two websites for which I have to use Chromium:
1. Geforce Now, officially Linux is not supported, but with Chromium it does work when you change your user-agent
2. Binance, for whatever reason their login capture doesn't work with Firefox
On the profiles part: I am aware of the --ProfileManager option. But the icon is new to me. Should be worth trying. Thanks. Work uses G Suite so I don't know how Meet + some other tools react with Firefox.
chrome://gpu/ -- here you can see the current status of your GPU Acceleration
chrome://flags/ -- search for 'GPU' or 'accel'. This is the place where you can override some related settings, but be aware, that this might break your browser, so better backup your browser configuration directory before changing anything ;-)
Hardware is a HP T610.
h264 is still the only widely supported in-hardware decodeable codec out there (cheapest for the client) but google serves webm by default (cheapest for them and built in-house)
ytdl-format lets you choose
On the other hand, I'm no lawyer, but I think there's a (possibly bad) argument that youtube-dl does not violate 17 USC §§1201(a)(2)(a) because it does not circumvent any technological measures to control access to any content. The video is transferred entirely in the clear to any anonymous users that request it. Youtube-dl makes no false claims or breaks no cryptography or encryption. What measure is in place that is being circumvented?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-2...
There is legitimately some obfuscation happening:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/06/youtube-download-counter-co...
...yes, it is? What difference are you imagining?
If the code snippet that downloaded infringing materials didn't exist and the user had to find the parameters themselves, that's fine. But it does exist and was included alongside a tool that makes that recording possible.
A better analogy would be like, if you had a video store that had a machine in the store that allowed people to make copies of a video tape using a duplicating machine. If someone wants to buy a duplicator for home use and use it in their home, that's one thing (though there was litigation around that too), but if you go to a store and can plug in a video tape -- and the example in the store is a copy of a Disney movie -- that's sort of what this is.
(Photocopy shops and libraries often have fairly strict rules about what kind of content can be photocopied, for what it's worth. The guy at Kinkos at 3am might not care that you're copying an entire textbook on the machine, but if you go to Office Depot in the daytime, they definitely will. Kinkos was sued and lost over a photocopy case in regards to excerpts/packets/anthologies for textbooks.)
That's what's happening here. Github is selling (for free) recording machines.
If you have the recording device, then you can use it to record video that gets transmitted to you. But there isn't a place you can go to have the video duplicated for you. You do it yourself.
Downloading a video is same as recording it to a VHS and serves the same purpose.
They had no alternative other than not having tests for that particular functionality. The tests were testing youtube-partner specific functionality: the procedure needed to download content from some youtube partners is different.
Moreover, the tests just throw away the downloaded material... it would be entirely reasonable for a court to conclude that there is no copyright interest involved in that activity at all and would be extraordinarily unlikely that any court would find it to be anything but fair use if they did conclude a copyright was involved at all.
If it hadn't been the test cases the RIAA probably would have dug up some old forum post advocating infringement by some occasional contributor. They were always going to argue something.
In retrospect, it would have been much better to link to an external repo or site or source for the test file, rather than to have that as part of the GitHub repo.
ETA: you’re right that they were always going to go after something, but the action for GitHub to take down the repo wouldn’t be arguable if the test file wasn’t in the repo. It’s possible they would have gone to issues/comments within the project (another reason, in retrospect, to host that stuff separately), but in this case there was stuff in the source code that the RIAA can reasonably argue would lead to infringement.
Plus, the unit test IIRC only downloaded a 100KB (thus less than one second) chunk.
The first two elements have a mens rea implication behind them: you have to demonstrate the intent of the developers. That RIAA's strongest evidence of intent is buried in a unit test, and this seeming intent flies against the evidence in the far more prominent README that is discussing its unsuitability for infringing content. Furthermore, they can also demonstrate from their own practice in history that they refuse pull requests and close issues were people are clearly trying to use it only for infringing use cases.
(I’m not really a stakeholder tho so who cares what I think)
Intellectual property law is about controlling what you can see, and do, with your own eyes, ears, and hardware.
If you stream a video on YouTube, YouTube can arbitrarily take it away from you whenever they want. If you download a video from YouTube, it's yours to keep. Tools like youtube-dl take away the power YouTube has over you, and that's an unacceptable loss to the ownership class even if they suffer no financial losses.
... funds OTA television. Also funds YT.
With OTA, it is okay to record OTA broadcasts using a VCR, so I'm not sure why youtube-dl would be different.
But really, if the VCR were invented today, it would be made illegal.
“I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.“ - Jack Valenti, former MPAA president, in 1982, explaining to Congress why the VCR should be illegal
It worked brilliantly, back in the days of analog cable TV.
ReplayTV was sued and went out of business before it could be fully adjudicated. Dish was sued over its Hopper DVR that auto-skipped ads and ultimately had to settle. TiVo won some of their lawsuits but because it didn’t do automatic commercial skipping of the recordings, was spared her wrath of the networks like Replay was. (TiVo was ultimately ruined by the cable companies who sought to introduce their own inferior DVRs that they could charge a monthly fee over.)
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Uni....
I remember that dissent (authored by the late Justice Scalia—RIP). Here’s the citation in question:
> We came within one vote of declaring the VCR contraband 30 years ago in Sony [v. Universal]. The dissent in that case was driven in part by the plaintiffs’ prediction that VCR technology would wreak all manner of havoc in the television and movie industries.
> The Networks make similarly dire predictions about Aereo. We are told that nothing less than “the very existence of broadcast television as we know it” is at stake. Aereo and its amici dispute those forecasts and make a few of their own, suggesting that a decision in the Networks’ favor will stifle technological innovation and imperil billions of dollars of investments in cloud-storage services. We are in no position to judge the validity of those self-interested claims or to foresee the path of future technological development.
Recorded TV and cut out the ads.
Dish’s Hopper actually DID do ad-free recordings and it was sued too (but there was eventually a settlement), not just for skipping the ads but for distributing the same copy of a recording to multiple users over a server. Cablevision, likewise, was sued (but settled) over the fact that it had a cloud DVR network that allowed the same copy of a recording to be available to multiple people, rather than storing X-Copies of the recording on their servers.
This is how John Deere got away with prohibiting farmers from repairing their tractors, etc. This is why time-shifting and format-shifting were just fine for OTA/cable television/CDs/etc but are practically nonexistent today.
EFF:
https://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
https://www.eff.org/search/site/1201
> In 1984, the Supreme Court ruled that Sony could continue to sell its Betamax videocassette recorder, overruling the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals judgement that held Sony liable for consumers’ copyright infringement.
https://consumerist.com/2014/01/17/on-this-day-in-1984-the-s...
Same s*, different decade.
In an era of fakes and deepfakes, we need tools like youtube-dl more than ever.
Could you tell us more about this process?
If you use those tools, it's really straight forward process of using the tools. I didn't know about Audacity until I had spent most of my time figuring out ffmpeg/ffplay. It was an amateur effort, but I've done a lot of security analysis.
I've been working on deepfake detection for the past two years. I use pytube3 and youtube-dl to scrape hours and hours of footage, not just youtube, but cspan, news sites, anything I can get my hands on. I have ~100 hours pulled so far, at multiple encoding rates.
Facebook recently changed their API and now the best I can scrape easily is 240p. That's insufficient to detect the artifacts the models need to train on. I can only pull 1/3rd of cspan videos I can watch through the viewer because again, api changes. It's a constant cat and mouse.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that if I don't have those wonderful folks out there keeping these tools and test suites up-to-date, this project is massively disadvantaged.
I don't have any public release assets at the moment, but you can read about Siwei Lyu and Hany Farid, who are leading the charge in deepfake detection.
http://www.cs.albany.edu/~lsw/
https://futurism.com/expert-online-disinfo-covid-black-lives...
Sometimes I think the scope of what a court is allowed to decide is crazy. It allows new concepts to be manufactured for the convenience of muddying the legal waters. Why the hell legislate around "DRM" and then decide later what that means.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921
I for example, use it to download large amounts of material for when I am offline while sailing. Programming tutorials to learn some useful stuff while offline, entire university courses on interesting topics, etc. There aren't many practical ways for me to do it.
Have you ACTUALLY tried to download? I am using latest Chrome on Linux and I don't even have the option. Downloading to the phone is not a workable option for me, I need to be able to see it on laptop screen and I need a lot of it for weeks of being offline. And couple other problems like videos ceasing to be available for whatever unknown reason, suddenly.
But all that doesn't go to my argument which is that YouTube, not myself, may not see your use case as legitimate since they provide a subscription service which enables offline viewing. I doubt that because the way they have implemented it, for whatever technical, contractual or just on whim reasons, may not meet all your specific needs they see you bypassing controls to implement in your own manner as legitimate.
I know it's a bit of a childish argument for me to make, but I think ultimately it comes down to money in this case.
In a normal, procedurally valid, DMCA the only harm to the host for not following the procedure is that they lose the safe harbor.
In this case because it isn't a question of infringement there isn't a safe harbor at all.
In either case a company can choose to take something down because it wants to reduce its exposure to litigation.
I'm disappointed that even after acquisition github has continued with the beyond-industry-standard level of aggressiveness with takedowns. But I don't see how you conclude that the anti-circumvention complaint makes github more in the wrong for complying.
For that particular instance or permanently?
The DMCA gives hosts an option to have legal immunity for each specific case of infringement, to gain the immunity they need only take the content down at the cost of outraging a potential customer. They don't have to take the option, however.
It is common in industry for hosts to simply discard obviously invalid complaints particularly if the target is high profile. The legal immunity isn't very valuable if the complaint is baseless-- (sure, there might be frivolous litigation, but that is always possible).
It also seems pretty common for hosts to allow the target of the complaint to counter-notice in advance of taking the material down and then just skip the takedown, or they take it down but restore it immediately on counter-notice (youtube itself does this, or at least did when I was hit with a spurious dmca complaint there years ago). Both of these procedures don't follow the letter of the law and arguably cost the provider their safe-harbour. OTOH, almost no DMCA complaints are actually valid per the specific requirements of the statute, so maybe they don't actually lose their safe-harbour.
I can't imagine it was the only time such a thing happened, and that alone is an argument for simply ignoring those take-down requests if possible.
What you said is clearly correct, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect any company to insert themselves in the middle of these disputes. At scale it's impossible.
Imagine you run a forum with millions of members and tens of thousands of posts per day. You get a stack of DMCA takedown requests every day. Do you think it's feasible for you to scrutinize each and every one, and take a moral stand on those you deem 'not procedurally valid' ? How much do you think that might cost? What happens when you call one wrong and the law comes to YOU?
For anything to really change, it's clear someone will have to go after the RIAA.. (EFF maybe?)
At one point Microsoft was issuing DMCA takedowns against (then) openOffice.org mirrors, allegedly on the grounds that any large file with a name that contained the word 'office' must be a 'pirated' version of MS Office. Taking these takedowns at face value would have ended the openOffice.org project and absolutely could not have been respected in good faith.
These kind of abuses are ongoing from multiple parties, including bots, copyright trolls, and crazed ideologues who file completely fraudulent DMCA takedowns to force anonymous personalities to disclose their identities. There is no alternative but to consider DMCA takedowns on legal merits because so many of them have no merits whatsoever.
Having the funding to do this 'at scale' is just as much a cost of doing business as paying for power and connectivity. If hosting platforms don't want to do this, then they should purchase an amendment to the DMCA to impose criminal sanctions on entities that serve fraudulent DMCA takedowns.
I want to chew Microsoft out for this one, but the US-based copyright mafia have built themselves an unbelievably vicious draconian set of laws that prevent any sort of challenge, including those coming from scientific inquiry or examination. Anti-circumvention is the most world-hating corporate-owned-world flaming garbage that could be devised, and violating it comes with unbelievably mercilessly cruel criminal penalties.
The menace of this threat has silenced science & speech, has prevented mankind from examining the world about them, learning of it, & discussing it. We have outlawed knowledge, outlawed idea, literally criminalized knowing something about the world with steep jail time. This is a farce, of the highest order, one of the greatest shames the law has done unto itself.
Great recent thread from Doctorow on this: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/105090187888073250
I also recommend Bunnie Huang's "Why I'm Suing the US Government", https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4782
Anti-circumvention laws must be stopped.
> Like the parable of the frog in the well, their creativity has been confined to a small patch, not realizing how big and blue the sky could be if they could step outside that well.
That was posted in 2016; does anyone know what happened with that lawsuit?
I completely agree, on the other hand, that a takedown notice issued knowingly without proper grounds should be penalised severely.
Except, by choosing to honor it, they decided that it is legally valid.
The appropriate response to a copyright claim against material that the claimant clearly does not own is 'unless you can prove that you own this material, come back with a court order.'
Regardless, I think they takedown without giving the "DMCA" complaint much scrutiny because the risk of penalty for NOT taking action is greater than just taking down the repo(s) risk-free.
Github's ToS: which says "we have the right (though not the obligation) to refuse or remove any User-Generated Content that, in our sole discretion, violates any GitHub terms or policies." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
I have to say it IS strange they took down content based on a letter that doesn't prove or even really suggest copyright infringement has taken place (only that it COULD, as a result of using the software), and their own ToS says "There may be legal consequences for sending a false or frivolous takedown notice." ( https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-... )
Why do companies like MS, Google, Amazon etc acquire smaller companies if they cant protect the values these small companies stand for and made them attractive in first place.
I produce/host a few weekly news shows focused on developer-centric news and updates and have a keyboard macro setup to run youtube-dl against a text file with URLs not to download the videos, but the thumbnails for videos, so I can use them in the on-screen graphics when talking about a specific story. Before I scripted that solution, the process of having to manually extract the thumbnail for any video I was highlighting was a major PITA.
Also, being frank, youtube-dl is significantly better than the official YouTube API for downloading past content from channels I own/manage. It’s faster and a lot more scriptable. I have automated scripts set to watch specific playlists or channels and auto-download stuff for archival purposes — and again, this is content that I either own or that exists on a channel where I’m one of the admins.
It’s unfortunate that the test suite had links to commercial music — we’ve seen in past RIAA litigation that that is enough to go against the argument that this isn’t encouraging download of copyrighted content.
But as a tool, for not just YouTube but so many other services, it’s invaluable even in non-data hoarding/grey area or straight up infringement scenarios.
To be clear, I’ve often used youtube-dl to infringe (as have the vast majority of its users), but that’s my choice/fault. The tool itself has plenty of non-infringing uses. I just wish they’d either linked the test file to another area or used other examples.
Either way you can host git yourself (or just use git format-patch) there's not a single thing github really does for you other than integrate a bunch of self-hostable tools behind a flashy (and increasingly less usable) web GUI.
I've never understood why they don't offer a download option for such videos: the likes of youtube-dl is the only way to get a copy, and it's perfectly legal.
Likewise for public domain videos.
youtube-dl et al are niche enough that it doesn't put a real dent in their ad business, but making it more convenient with a Download button might.
That's certainly something they can do; they just don't do it.
Compare movies on VHS tapes, which all roll ads before actually playing the movie.
- When you fast forward VHS tapes you still see the adverts. When you time seek a digital video file you don't.
- It's harder to do targeted advertising (since you no longer know if the downloader is also the viewer)
- Adverts baked into a video file can't be changed out later for newer adverts after the user has downloaded the file
- There's no way of having users "click" those adverts, let alone report back to Google that they've engaged with it
- Some of those aforementioned points might also have a knock on effect with how advertising is charged, which would mean Google would need another pricing model
...and all of this is before you even address the technical issues of video files having multiple different bitrates and formats. You could probably generate a new file on the fly but that would be extremely computationally expensive. So they'd rack up more costs hosting the service as well as lose money on advertising.
Honestly, I can't blame Google for not supporting a download option.
But I grant it's technically possible to do with a single MPEG file, just not trivial. You would need to prepend the advertisement to the video bitstream (re-encoded with same parameters such as width, height, FPS, intra picture interval) and then do the same for audio, while ensuring the video/audio synchronization is kept intact (MPEG edit lists are not well-supported by players, such as by ffmpeg), while preferably not re-encoding the actual video. A bit more complicated to do the insertion in the middle of the file.
It's possible to do, but I don't think it's something that any off-the-shelf tools actually do.
The adverts are a different file to the video files. So you need to either merge them ahead of time or dynamically splice them in real time.
Ahead of time: Now you need to not only have a video asset for each bit rate and video format but you need to multiply that with the number of adverts on any given day. This would result in thousands of files, maybe even hundreds of thousands once you take targeted adverts into account. And they'd need to rebuild their entire catalogue whenever an ad campaign ends. Clearly that isn't going to work long term.
Real time: Option 2 is to stream the advert then follow immediately with the video content on the same HLS stream. This is much more achievable than option 1 but you are then running the streams like a live TV service where you're dynamically splicing content into existing streams. It isn't difficult to do per stream but it is extra processing compared with the existing set up. The real problem lies with scale. A TV broadcaster might do this with a dozen to a few hundred channels, each with contracts ranging from thousands to hundreds of thousands. Youtube have millions of streams, each which earn pennies from advertising (and even less if they had to download because of the change in advertising model -- as I also described before). So they'd have to pay more and earn less. The financials simply wouldn't stack up.
Before you comment that YouTube and Twitch offer live streaming services based around the same advertising models, yes they do, but they also operate using the same stack as the pre-recorded videos because those video streams don't need to be spliced by YouTube / Twitch (any editing happens by the content creators before it hits YouTube and YouTube can show the adverts before or even between the videos by injecting them in the browser (ie so the splicing is managed at the front end rather than on Googles servers). None of this is doable with a "download video" button.
Otherwise, this is the same problem print newspapers have; how many readers per copy, seeing what adverts, how many times? This can be modelled or assessed (e.g., by reader response codes / instrumented URLs) fairly readily.
Thankfully plenty of people were also using BitTorrent for things like distributing Linux distributions & creative commons material.
That, again, may perhaps save the day.
The same way governments and bureaucrats fuck up things like Covid responses, because they can't even imagine people not having 9-5 office jobs which are totally suited to WFH, and then blithely implement disease protection schemes failing to account for low income and precariously employed people, many of whom are working 3 jobs to pay the bills (including stuff like cleaning jobs where they work at 4 or 5 different old people's homes) - and then wonder why outbreaks spread so fast.
Googlers have probably forgotten the olden times, when they didn't have Gigabit connections to their pockets and lounge rooms, and don't even remember last time they wanted to "save a copy into a hard drive locally, like a hilarious boomer!"...
But I lived in Mountain View. Decent internet is more or less not available there. Your choices are comcast or DSL.
Maybe they just don't remember the last time they had a waking hour out of the office ... :)
It's clear to me that whomever is making these product decisions has a very different relationship with computing and their data than I do-- but whatever the reason is, I don't think it's because they have a much better internet connection.
Sure, that's why projects like Project Loon were launched by Googlers.
I don't think the CC video thing is even ads related. Just that most videos are not CC and no one thought about creating an exception for CC videos.
(Also if you live in Mountain View, you’re stuck with a Comcast cable modem and a 38mbps max upload speed even when paying for their “gigabit” plan. But you'll only get 10-15mbps during the peak hours of the work day.)
youtube-dl has an experimental --include-ads option =)