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Comment by superkuh

2 months ago

Youtube is a youtube downloader. Everything is a downloader. It's literally impossible to interact with a thing without downloading it and having the data. The difference is that the data is usually deleted later (a silly practice done to trick the lawyers into believing the world is like they think it is, hiding actual reality that would confuse and enrage them).

24 comments

superkuh

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tshaddox  2 months ago

The word "download" is used in two senses. The first is the broader sense you're referring to, where it means "to receive data." The second sense means to collect all the data from a particular file or dataset and store it locally, as opposed to "streaming." That second sense is the one clearly being used when referring to "YouTube downloaders."

  • superkuh  2 months ago

    If you view the entire file they are the same thing. And they're always being collected and stored locally even if it's hidden from you.

    And a static mp4 file encoded with ffmpeg -movflags +faststart -start_at_zero can be seeked within in any browser from any static webserver and viewed at any seeking time without downloading the rest. Is this streaming too?

    Given the first example of fully watching and the second implementation of streaming with a simple static file you can see the streaming/file download distinction you make is much thinner than it first appears. At least from a technical perspective.

    In lawyer-ese you are making a valid semantic point which I do acknowledge. "Streaming" in lawyer-ese means a corporation is doing it so there's: 1. legal liability 2. lots of abstraction layers involved so they don't get upset and 3. the local files are hidden from view of the user. Unlike the simple streaming example with a properly encoded .mp4 file.

miloignis  2 months ago

Agreed, more or less, but I would argue you could make a distinction for a "streaming" situation where say no more than 10% of the data is on your computer at any one point in time, vs "downloading" where the data exists in its entirety at once.

You could encode these terms in a contract or something about allowed usage of a service, I believe.

  • superkuh  2 months ago

    You could. But youtube's website itself would fail this "only 10% at once" test.

    • littlestymaar  2 months ago

      Why? IIRC you can flush the SourceBuffer in Media Source Extention and only keep a small part of the video in the browser's RAM at all time.

      (It won't work for Youtube shorts though, because 10% of a 30s video just isn't enough for reliable smooth playback)

      1 reply →

SoKamil  2 months ago

Unless it’s protected by DRM.

  • presbyterian  2 months ago

    Even with DRM, if you can see it, it's decoded somewhere along the line. There will always be a way to get the raw video out of it if you're committed enough.

    • perching_aix  2 months ago

      That's actually an important distinction. You can recapture the DRM protected (and then decoded) video pretty much always indeed, but then you degrade the quality by having to encode it again.

      Well, not important to some, but for enthusiasts and people looking to actually archive things, it is very important.

      Case in point, hilariously, the last time I used YouTube's video download feature bundled with their Premium offering, I got a way worse quality output than with yt-dlp, which actually ripped the original stream without reencoding it.

      I think I saw an idempotent h264 encoder at some point, where you wouldn't suffer generational loss if you matched the encoder settings exactly from run to run. But then you might need the people mastering the content (in this case YouTube) to adopt that same encoder, which they're not going to be "interested" in.

      7 replies →

    • dylan604  2 months ago

      circumventing the DRM is what will land you in legal hot water. storing the DRM encrypted media isn't the same offense