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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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).
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").
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 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.