cross-posted from: https://lemmy.org/post/1872634
So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.
This reeks of DRM.
UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.
UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.
Honestly surprised YouTube hasn’t just required DRM yet
Well… the only available option to them for DRM that will work on all devices is Widevine L3 which is entirely bypassable. Spend a few hours on the net and you can figure out how to do it too.
Could you briefly summarize what’s needed to make it happen? Not asking for a step-by-step just very rough overview
There are a lot of thorough guides on vidhelp along with dumped L3 keys.
You’re basically just saying go get a guide like you could have just not said anything LOL
Not sure what’s up with the self-entitlement but I got shocking news: I don’t own you anything. You asked for a brief explanation and I told you where to go find it. Instead of writing that snarky comment you could’ve instead used the web for its original purpose and conduct your own research and not bug strangers on the internet to do your bidding.
Instead of writing that snarky comment you could’ve instead used the web for its original purpose and conduct your own research and not bug strangers on the internet to do your bidding
You’re not the only one they’re doing it to (I went to their profile to see if this is a pattern, and it sure is).
sleep-pc: a .NET Native AOT tool to make Windows sleep after a timeout
Seems like one of them bad apples. Hopefully the admins of their home instance deal with them soon.
Well, if they want to make everyone either buy Rokus or watch YT either in Edge on Windows (the official way to watch Netflix on PC currently) or on another Android device than a Roku with the official YT app, they could just implement a full Widevine L1 lockdown, and sadly, just buying a Roku to watch YT on or watching it on a pre-existing Roku along with the paid streaming services, is probably what most people would actually do if they locked it down like that.
Basically, Google would win the ad blocker and third-party front-end war by locking YT into pre-approved apps or devices, and as an added bonus (for them), they’d snuff out any competing platforms as Widevine L1 would also kill the ability to mirror one’s YT channel to one of the alternative platforms, and I guarantee most people who just post any random thing on YT don’t store their source video files locally to be able to to re-upload on PeerTube, Odysee, or Rumble, if anything, they’re likely just filming and posting straight from their phones.
Now, the people with nice studio setups probably do have a local copy of their source files stored somewhere that they could re-up on their alternative platform of choice, but average Joes filming from a phone outnumber them.
I don’t think L1/PlayReady SL3K will happen. Imagine Google telling people that in order to view content on their website they need to use a competitor’s browser. Sure, technical people like you and I understand what’s happening behind the scenes, but average joe will just think Google fumbled it and can’t make it work with their own browser, it’s bad press for them. I also think that at least for now there’s too many desktop users to be able to pull it off. They’ll have to tell all the desktop users to go fuck themselves in order to do that, and that will get a good amount of people pissed off.
The only pre-baked option to them…
If they require a full JS implementation, they could crap out different algorithms and rotate you through them. I’m afraid they’ll eventually use a coding LLM to generate daily algorithms.
Imagine YT-DLP needing to adjust to code changes daily.
I am so glad I had the foresight to use yt-dlp to back up most of my favorite videos. Not all of them, but I just thought we’d get more time.
But yeah, I knew this would happen. The age verification thing was really controversial, so Google would have had to expect that people would try to find other ways to access YouTube.
I’m pretty much done with YouTube. It’s just not what it used to be. All my favorite YouTubers are either gone, have changed for the worse, or are on Nebula. It’s mostly just slop, and I won’t miss it.
Nebula is just a better experience most cases too. It just shows you what you’re subscribed to in chronological order, which is how YouTube used to work when it was less annoying.
It also shares more revenue with creators and doesn’t force feed you ads. I really hope it continues to grow and never betrays its roots.
Sadly there’s so much good music from the 2000s on there that I can’t find elsewhere. Small bands that never really broke through.
Inaccesible because of autocratic morons.
The day smart tube next stops working is the day i stop using youtube. I will NEVER watch a shitty youtube ad and I’m sure as shit not paying google any money whatsoever.
It’s so weird hearing about YouTube ads. I can’t recall ever seeing one. I know one day they’re going to finally ruin it and I won’t be able to consume it any more, an event I try to prepare for, but I haven’t really done anything special to avoid ads except all the stuff you have to do just to be secure on the web in the first place. Like just using librewolf out of the box works fine?
What I don’t understand. Like, they know people hate shitty ads.
If they had like, literally any level of vetting on the ads, people might actually watch them. But its all fucking scams or podcasts of lies pretending to be ads etc.
I know it costs money to have people but sales people serve a purpose.
They have a bank of companies that are paying to have their ads shown.
The companies dictate who they want to market to.
Google originally pitched scanning your things for relvant ads and delivered on it, but that’s not where the money is at.
Yeah, and we have led to a race to the bottom in a war against ads that everyone hates.
Short term bull shit for long term death.
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game? I know yt-dlp and invidious have been quite crafty at adapting to these changes, but the scales seem to be tipping.
It feels like Google will dominate the game into submission the same way it did with AOSP and Chrome. I know I’m being dramatic but it’s really starting to feel like we’re being cornered into a hopeless situation
Maybe total DRM enforcement, and clients without widevine only get garbage quality. That’d end yt-dlp for youtube
Android is different because there are no alternatives to cellphones except Apple. On the web, there are other ways to share video. So Google can maybe lock YouTube down, but it can’t lock you down.
Many of us use 3rd party browsers a stop-gap measure. We’d like to leave the platform entirely, but we are still interested in some of the content there, so we’re OK with the cat-and-mouse game for now, knowing that if Google goes hardcore blocking mode that we will walk away and be better human beings for it.
Technically you don’t need a smartphone. A tethered mobile device would do. For just cellular calls, there are dumbphones. That Youtube does or doesn’t work doesn’t concern me. They always ask to login on VPN which is always on for me. Thanks, just no.
You got Linux phones but those are rough to be nice about it.
Jolla with sailfish is the best. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-community-phone
They are glorified toys to be blunt. Cellphones just require too much proprietary tech and licensing. Shits never goanna be viable as anything more than a hobbyist toy.
If you already use your phone as nothing more then a toy then it’s a easy switch. But most people don’t.
Not to mention, carriers can dictate who can get connected. Australia already banned any IMEIs not “approved” by them, not even for emergency calls.
In contrast, all that a computer would need is working wifi, and for now at least, we still control wifi hardware and the ISP can’t dictate what devices you connect. (unless they start forcing their “gateways” Modem/Router devices)
i heard there is something called murena
https://murena.com/products/smartphones/
no idea how these are, but i have previous generation fairphone and it has been decent, even if that one has android. I’ll propably get one at some point since i dont want to use android. the price of fairphones is a bit high, but that is how it is when you dont use slavery to produce them.
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
A mandatory account with paid subscription.
The fucking horror!
It would be. Its been nice moving away from using a Google account.
What exactly has been “nice” 🤣. For real, please explain to me how your superior IdP works and what features have made it “nice” 🤣.
Why are you overusing emojis? Anyways, its been nice feeling less tied to Google services since I switched away from Gmail and moving to another email provider, and moving to foss options for services I used to use Google for.
So having less dependency on Google, and not even having to sign into Google anymore to get benefit of subscription feed, playlists, and history has been cool through freetube on desktop and other third party apps like newpipe.
You are on lemmy which is a very niche tech leaning social media that is more likely to degoogle or limit google usage. What is so bizzare about the concept of someone wanting to reduce their account dependency from a large corporate platform?
The end game is to take full control. If Google implements Widevine on YT, and especially Widevine L1, that’ll be their Hiroshima bomb for both third-party front-ends and downloaders, and even non-Android, ChromeOS, Apple, or Windows platforms as far as OS goes and non-Chrome or Edge browsers.
That would be their poison pill. Youtube’s advantage is in it’s ubiquity. Lose that, you lose countless users.
They’d sooner replace those users with home-grown AI slop the way they’re moving right now.
The perfect business case: AI users watching AI ads before AI videos. No pesky users to deal with👍
But also, they’re not real users watching those ads and getting impressions. Unless people are using an agent system that could be convinced to buy the product, it doesn’t seem like it would be that useful.
You may as well serve ads to standard viewbot at that point.
Your new monitor likely has DRM features built in that are already being utilized by Netflix and others. Youtube is next on the line
DRM is expensive. Very expensive in fact because it is basically non-trivial encryption.
A website with as much traffic as YouTube cannot afford to DRM every single video stream. There just isn’t enough processing power and electricity available.
Netflix et al. have a tiny fraction of YouTube’s traffic with more income per user due to subscriptions.
Plus YouTube’s storage demands are many orders of magnitude larger. A maximum upper bound for Netflix is 1 PB I’d imagine. Archiveteam alone has selectively downloaded more than 3 PB. YouTube has, I’d imagine, a double digit exabyte amount of data stored + backups.
And yet, youtube uses resource intensive compression methods for said exabytes
Do we know this?
I suspect they usually compress videos at most a couple times (for each resolution) and then keep the results cached somewhere. At least for popular videos that combined take up 99% of bandwidth. For 0 views videos I’d imagine they only store the highest resolution and compress it further down on demand.
I’d argue DRMing all those popular videos would take up so much computing power it cannot be offset by ads.
Whatever the latest version of HDCP is, sure. HDCP is a core feature of the HDMI spec.
I was actually thinking of DisplayPort since I haven’t used HDMI for quite some time now, but pretty much the same thing, except for name - DPCP, but supposedly DP also supports HDCP.
Yeah, I think Netflix has like a few thousand movies and a couple thousand TV shows, and some of us here have similarly sized Jellyfin libraries. On the other hand, YouTube has billions of videos. It seems DRM would be a significantly more difficult and costly problem for YouTube.
Well the problem for google is that Youtube MUST be accessible to almost any internet user in the world - that’s a key reason why it’s so ubiquitous.
The reason this cat and mouse game has lasted as long as it has in the first place is because any method that is currently being quashed has a solution lying in another user agent that youtube can’t kill.
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
As long as YT caters to the lowest common denominator (Their business model essentially binds them to do so), there will always be a software/hardware environment that these tools can spoof. The moment that stops being the case, people look for other options.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely. They abandoned the entry level users, so entry level users are abandoning them.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely.
Staying in windows 10 sure, but I’ve yet to see much evidence people have been switching much to Linux.
Good point, but the result is still the same - people defect away from the “modern” product instead of complying and buying a new machine.
Anecdotally, I’ve recently helped friends and family (a sample size of about 4 people now) to set up either windows LTSC or Linux mint on their machines as they are uninterested in replacing their computers, so maybe linux is a minority solution (although still occurring)
Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
Not-so-fun fact, this is exactly what ATSC 3 is trying to do for OTA broadcast TV.
ATSC 3 ? Never heard of that, but I’m curious.
New broadcast standard which if implemented as intended, will use Widevine DRM to encrypt/decrypt streams, and require a web connection to view previously free OTA broadcasts, also that DRM will limit what you can do with it, as Rossmann puts it early on in his ‘this is why I show these things in my vids’ vid. https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/videos/watch/61332f1b-9a15-46b6-8a97-c4e378fbce72
Damn. Hopefully some capture mechanism will exist so piracy sites can still reupload a backup.
HDMI capture will always work.
I would be alarmed, if there was still anything worth watching on TV.
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
This all incorrectly assumes that there exists any viable competition to switch to. YouTube ran at a net loss for over a decade to get the reach they currently have, only because Google was one of the very few companies who could feasibly afford to do so. Nobody else with the resources to compete with YouTube is willing to compete with YouTube, because of the massive cost required to get even a fraction of that user base, let alone a critical mass.
And most of the content people access YouTube for is only found on YouTube, so those hypothetical users aren’t going to switch to a new platform, they’re going to either just flat-out stop watching or will replace their devices.
Users replacing their devices isn’t feasible in many parts of the world, especially outside of the west.
You are correct that a service similar in scale and scope would not appear out of the aether due to the cost, but to say nothing would make a grab for those underserved users would be foolish.
Again - the entry level cost conscious users do constitute a large part of Youtube’s userbase, so even if they are burdensome to support (due to ad blocking rates, required legacy features to upkeep, and so on), they are a core part of the audience that youtube serves. In an economic environment where people cannot afford to abandon their hardware, there is no chance they will opt out of receiving information and entertainment entirely because of their devices being unsupported by google’s sites. They will move to the next service in the chain, either existing or new. To google’s investors, that shrinkage in userbase may be untenable.
PeerTube or LBRY (The protocol, not Odysee) might help in that. As in decentralized instances focussing on specific content. All connected via hubs/open-protocols.
Basically Decentralized or dustributed networks are key. The next hurdle is populating those platforms with content.
Unfortunately video platforms are also much harder on small hosts. More storage, more bandwidth, harder to moderate.
I feel like the solution might be a media management company, like buffer, offering to host videos directly and over a open protocols for a small upgrade in addition to posting to YT et all.
Not just populating with content, but also create revenue in some way. Otherwise creators won’t post their content there, they have to make a living from whatever platforms they’re on after all
Tiktok and intagam are standing by to at least take over short form video.
Tiktok has also experimented with longer videos.
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
The internet gets turned into packetized cable tv with bonus panopticon features.
what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game?
Same as usual: the mouse loses unless it assembles and unionizes with other mouses and they bring in a guillotine.
Probably like every other victim of enshittification:
You pay or you don’t consume.
They turn it into an app-only platform just like with many PRC-based apps. Literally, some of those platforms doesn’t even have a web or desktop mode.
I tried using Baidu Maps web to look at my old neighborhood (I was born in mainland China) for nostalgia, and the site repeatedly automatically attempts to download the .apk like every tap I make on the site. Wtf lol. The site probably detected the useragent and keeps nagging me about their app.
I tried browsing a random popular online store to see what it’s like for curiosity (天猫), but it asked for a sign in. Like wut? Even Amazon, Ebay, Bestbuy doesn’t do that. PRC is actually just late stage cyberpunk capitalism.
This is gonna be the future for every big-corp stuff. App only, real ID and phone number verification required. Probably even scan your face.
We need a Meshtastic-based “internet” to actually decouple from big corps have control our infrastructure to have real freedom.
Good luck blocking alt OSes on PC if Windows goes the route you’re describing though, unless MS pulls some strings to force Pluton platform-wide on PC and stamp out alt OSes altogether.
Also, good luck blocking decentralized and self-hostable platforms, at least easily.
lol. microsoft manages the preinstalled signing keys for secure boot. all it needs to do is require motherboard makers to not allow disabling secure boot or installing a machine owner key.
Good luck trying that with loose mainboards for custom builds unless they can just preinstall Windows in ROM at that point or push to get the current desktop form factors axed in favor of mini PCs from the big OEMs.
Can they really get away with banning Linux from hardware though? It’s not like there are only 12 of us anymore.
I don’t think we are in meaningful numbers. not yet.
Plus unless they discontinue all the modular desktop form factors in favor of mini PCs where everything is soldered, and turn the PC platform into yet another Mac clone controlled by a single entity, you can still just build your own PC and install whatever OS you want at that point since custom builds don’t generally ship with an OS and expect the builder to provide it themselves.
Holy shit I did not realize how complex of a project yt-dlp has to be to do something as simple as download a video… Kudos to the devs
Video Lite on iOS works fine.
Just ran am update for ytdlp and it’s working again.
Beginning very soon, you’ll need to have the JavaScript runtime Deno installed to keep YouTube downloads working as normal.
if only you could read 😔
Installed where?
Can’t recall installing such a runtime manually.
Is it bundled with yt-dlp?
So many questions…If only one could be preciseWell the title claims that Youtube just broke third party clients, so you sorta expect the clients to be broken. Shit title
Damn reading is hard
*writing
Read past headlines
How much into the past are we talking about?
At least 10,000 years to get the full picture of how human civilization got to this point.
With a focus on how some us think there’s only 4000 years of history.
I do, I just explained why so many are confused, friendo.
New pipe and smart tube both working for me.
My self hosted downloader similarly didn’t skip a beat.
Which one?
YoutubeDL-Material. It works great and I’ve found it downloads videos from other sources too.
Grayjay still seems to work.
Smart tube also looks like it’s working this morning.
I’ve had it fail to load a lot of stuff today. Something’s definitely up.
upcoming.
What about upcoming and not yet implemented do u not understand?
“Oh but my “shit client x” still works”.
Really steeeve? 🤷♂️
Was about to mention that. I’ve had no issues with it today
Lies. Both YT ReVanced and SmartTubeNext have been working perfectly all day today.
Not lies, because Youtube on android uses something called DroidGuard, while on browser and other platforms, uses something called BotGuard. Their implementation differ, but NewPipe uses DroidGuard and programs like FreeTube and Invidious use BotGuard. So that’s probably the reason why NewPipe still works fine.
Don’t quote me on that tho. But that’s what I know
YT Revanced is not a 3rd party client. It (and all vanced patches) work by taking the original app and patching the code directly, often simply to bypass sections of it entirely.
Let’s take background playback for example, the app has that functionality but it checks if the user has a premium subscription or not before allowing it. Revanced simply removes that check by jumping over the code and always returning true.
Yeah it works more like how cracks used to work back in the day.
NewPipe as well, without any update either.
Yep FreeTube is the only one I found not working, which is what I use on the desktop.
They’re going to keep enshitifying it until they kill it completely. Them blackholes, I mean shareholders, will never have enough money.
The market that accesses YouTube from a PC or Mac is shrinking rapidly.
They would prefer you use one of the apps and at some point that will be the majority, if it isn’t already
Yeah last I’ve seen even smartphones and tablets are decreasing quickly relative to smart TVs.
That is by design.
With an actual computer, you have a lot more options in terms of how you can handle the content. They don’t own your PC (yet) but they do own the mobile market and the operating system entirely.
You don’t have any form of root/admin access on a mobile device of any type nor any other device (tv box, game console, tablet, etc). For the handful that have jailbroken or rooted their phones, many apps don’t work (by design of course). You can do it, but you’ll break a ton of stuff in the process. That’s enough to keep causals from doing it and leaves the tiny group of hardcore dorks that are willing to live with the complexities that are required.
I’m going to put on my tinfoil hat and say this is what keeps any real attempt at a Linux phone in the gutter. If people had a choice for their mobile operating system and the freedom to do what they want with it, the big tech companies would shit a brick. They’ve already removed the ability to block ads on mobile devices for the vast majority, they’re finally getting what they wanted (save the handful of Firefox users left).
Linux phones won’t be a thing until there is hardware for them. With apple/google phones, the manufacturers will not release the necessary software so that is needed for a 3rd party OS. Google and Apple will make sure that anyone who makes hardware for them are legally tied to keeping that software tightly closed. Even if someone did manage to reverse engineer it, it would be a herculean effort and would break as soon as a new release is out (or if one of the manufacturers “accidentally” released some exploit code for the reverse engineered drivers).
It’s an ugly world these greedy fucks have made for us.
They don’t own your PC (yet)
MS pretty much owns the desktop PC space with Windows though, and even though there’s nothing stopping you from installing an alt OS on PC generally, Win11 not supporting anything older than Zen+ or Coffee Lake and flat-out refusing to run on anything older than Bulldozer or Nehalem even without support because everything before those arches lacks the POPCNT instruction, isn’t a good sign to say the least.
Hopefully MS don’t start acting like Google and start breaking WINE/Proton and DXVK/VKD3D and crippling Linux gaming and even general desktop use on Linux, or even forcing Pluton to be enabled platform-wide blocking the ability to install alt OSes.
It’s an ugly world these greedy fucks have made for us.
We EAGERLY helped them. We walked into the cage and clasped the manacles all by ourselves.
Who’s “we” though?
I see the largest two camps here as (1) casuals that don’t have the know how to protest via alternatives and (2) the tech literate that are willing but ultimately limited by the larger forces at work.
I think it’s fair to blame the people with the power that exploited the first group and left the second without choice.
I will set my fucking phone on fire before i install a google app on it
They won’t kill it, just like it hasn’t died so far. The content, viewer demographics, and algorithm continue to shift. There’s too much money with all the ads and subscription fees. Most people view some content on it by default.
Its gonna be the new cable TV in a way. Kinda sucks, some good stuff on it, but mostly slop filled with ads. And everyone will still use it. Even if they block all 3rd party access, people like me are still going to use it to some limited degree. There will be a video about how to fix a random plumbing fitting that is leaking in my house, or how to fix some random thing on my 15 year old car.
Overheard at the last shareholders conference. Until everyone empties all their ecoin & change jars and the only the left to eat are those Budding’s Mysterious sandwich meats with some shit ass processed excuse for a loaf of bread. I understand that may be high livin’ according to some standards. It ain’t but that is another topic altogether.
The Dude abides.
Yt-dlp worked for me 3 hours ago
I’d love to know the stats of how many people are using the official mobile apps vs third party clients. Surely you’re gonna break third party at some point that people just give up on YT.
Most people are probably just using the official app without a second thought, or even the official web client on Chrome or Edge, or vanilla FF without an ad blocker or any other protections, whatsoever.
This JS thing still isn’t a good sign of things to come should Google crack down even harder.
People using 3rd party clients or even adblockers are a tiny percentage of their total users. Which is why it was fairly surprising they went to such lengths for just that tiny bit of viewership. But for monopolists, having 99% is just not enough, they NEED that last percent somehow.
Yeah have been using https://inv.nadeko.net/ as FreeTube broke for me. Unfortunately there seems to be some kind of bandwidth throttling as I’m getting 720p videos only (my internet is fine for 1080p and I was getting 1080p on FreeTube).
The limit is 1080p, because there is just a lot of traffic. Allowing more than that, will lower the capacity of people that can watch at the same time
Have you made an account? I think doing so makes a new “watch-id” that gets around the throttling.
Can’t you just set inv.nadeko.net as the default instance? I thought Freetube was an invidious client, no?
No, FreeTube is its own thing, but it can fall back to an invidious instance. Idk why it fails for me with inv.nadeko.net as my default instance though.
about +12 hours ago spotdl (which uses yt-dlp) was broken. But I keep go on watching videos on newpipe
