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Comment by alpaca128 | Hacker News Reader

It's the only way to be sure I'll ever find certain videos again. And Google randomly bans users either way, they're not gonna stop if yt-dl disappears.

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How would Google associate a YT download with a specific YouTube user?

Why would they do that when they can just make sure yt-dlp/youtube-dl doesn't work all together. :) No need to ban users who download content, just ban the service itself (ban as in build roadblocks to deny the downloader service access to your content).

They have been trying to break YouTube-dl for many years (and similar framework for iOS) and the code maintainers just need to update their code slightly to find another workaround and get it working again.

For now. I can see actual DRM coming some time in the not too far future.

No DRM needed. many sites just use hls.js type of chunk download tactic, it is already enough to prevent ytdl from downloading.

Is there any way to solve for that? I’ve noticed that and maybe that’s it or other chunked download stuff. That I haven’t been able to download. Never looked into this stuff enough to see what solutions are (besides brute force screen recording Ofc)

No one size fits all solution. You have to reverse engineer the way the script fetches and processes chunks and write a downloader or a plugin that instruments the running code and spits out the video data.

When wasm released I speculated that it will make this much more widespread and harder to reverse engineer due having more performace to waste on de-obfuscating at runtime. Feels nice to be wrong in this case.

Oh, I thought ytdl could deal with that! Do you know the specific issue and whether support is planned? Lack of HLS support would explain why there's no support for Zoom recordings.

I puzzled over this for a minute as well. Maybe the GP is referring to the user who uploaded the video.

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