Youtube testing DRM-only for TV clients
(news.ycombinator.com)
Comments (12)
sorted by:
Reminder to download any video at all important to you or anyone else.
Right now they're testing requiring DRM on TV clients (affects yt-dlp), but they can turn on DRM for all videos at any moment and few will even notice.
This is inevitable and coming soon. They need to stop other AI companies from scraping content, prevent AI viewer bots from watching ads, and stop AI from exploding youtube's storage costs. It won't even stop at DRM, but device identification (with Web Environment Integrity they're pushing).
But even more than that, it seems to be their strategy for reeesisting; make it so only pirate hackers can save a backup copy and then they can just remove any 'problematic' videos and edit history.
Thanks for the warning. I don't care much about "TV clients", but I do care a lot about yt-dlp.
Yeah, if this goes live this kills downloads and audio-only modes, and all third-party interfaces, probably.
I'll just stop using YT, and find the content elsewhere. I listen to podcasts while I work, and don't have the bandwidth (or reason) to play videos. Also, not sure if it's changed, but the YT app won't even let you turn off your screen. That's easily bypassed with Brave, though.
Literally one of the major features of their premium program is this, and they are open in saying that.
Which shows how smart their business mode is. They'd rather prevent free customers from using their product at all through annoyance, driving them to competitors arms who can offer better for cheaper, rather than let them maybe not get maximum shekels extracted.
That's absolutely going to be the end result - the only question is how long before they fully do it. And I think it'll be fairly quick because AI has forced their hand. Ideally they'd do it slower and boil-the-frog linux users into using trusted, signed-kernel distros (make Ubuntu lock down like ChromeOS, SteamOS).
Another very recent change I noticed is youtube will only play the first minute of video without all their javascript (and so bot detection) loaded. It used to play with just youtube.com scripts enabled. Their bot detection for fully reset, clean browsers also now defaults to 'you're a bot'.
I think they've offloaded storage to tape, or maybe it's just stored in one datacenter, because of massive AI generated content. Crack down on bots so nobody can ever play 90% of uploaded videos except the original uploader and friends he direct links it to. Bots can't make money off AI dreck, more youtube profit, investors happy.
In any case they're making big changes so better archive stuff while you can!
I wonder if it would be possible to hook up an old VHS and record YouTube videos to tape then transfer them to PC as a digital file?
Of course it's possible. You'd get better a magnitude better quality just pointing a camera at the screen, but it's possible.
Tried reading the article, left more confused than before. Can someone please explain what this means in laymans terms?
The bug report original source was even more confusing so I posted the hackernews summary.
Basically youtube is testing only serving DRM videos to see who complains. If not enough people are affected by it then they'll turn it on permanently for everybody and you'll need a hack HDMI cable or other pirate hardware device in order to download videos.
Calm the fuck down lmao
What's ultimately going to come out of this is that Widevine/L3/whatever the fuck YouTube will end up using is going to be circumvented and jailbroken in a matter of weeks and the faggot cunt gatekeepers at VideoHelp (who can all suck my cock btw) will lose all the leverage they have against the rest of us because these tools will then work with most VOD platforms that aren't multi-million dollar enterprises.
Nothing spurs innovation quite like warfare. We went from the Gloster Gladiator (1933), a biplane with an open cockpit to the Horten Ho 229 (1944), a blended wing JET fighter in 11 years. Google's greed will prove to be their undoing.