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Major Record Labels Sue Youtube-dl's Hosting Provider:
"We don't think the suit is justified," says Uberspace chief Jonas Pasche in comments to TorrentFreak.
"YouTube has measures to prevent users from downloading specific content, which they make use of for YouTube Movies and Music: DRM. They don't use that technology here, enabling a download rather trivially. One may view youtube-dl as just a specialized browser, and you wouldn't ban Firefox just because you can use it to access music videos on YouTube."
According to an Uberspace lawyer, the aim of the lawsuit is to achieve some kind of precedent or "fundamental judgment". Success could mean that other companies could be obliged to take action in similarly controversial legal situations.
And the alleged illegality of youtube-dl is indeed controversial. While YouTube's terms of service generally disallow downloading, in Germany there is the right to make a private copy, with local rights group GEMA collecting fees to compensate for just that. Equally, when users upload content to YouTube under a Creative Commons license, for example, they agree to others in the community making use of that content.
[...] "Not only does YouTube pay license fees for music, we all pay fees for the right to private copying in the form of the device fee, which is levied with every purchase of smartphones or storage media," says Reda.
"Despite this double payment, Sony, Universal and Warner Music want to prevent us from exercising our right to private copying by saving YouTube videos locally on the hard drive."
The question of whether YouTube's "rolling cipher" is (or is not) a technical protection measure is currently the hot and recurring topic in a lawsuit filed by YouTube-ripping site Yout.com against the RIAA in the United States. After more than a year, the warring factions are no closer to an agreement.
This comes just as (2021-12-17) the main developer changed his status to, "inactive."[1]
Gee, I wonder why?
In my opinion, "the powers that be" won't be satisfied until they get the youtube-dl program completely chased into the underground. Is the successor yt-dlp) next?
(Score: 5, Informative) by jasassin on Monday January 17 2022, @08:29AM (3 children)
YouTube-dl and yt-dlp are great with mpv (movie player) on Linux. Watching YouTube videos in Firefox uses a LOT more CPU than mpv. If you have youtube-dl in your path you can:
mpv https://youtube.com/video-url [youtube.com]
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @10:55PM (2 children)
With mpv you can watch at different speeds (with still understable audio around 1.5x, use mplayer if you want smurfs), go forwards or backwards one frame (try reading tube stickers in painting tutorials to learn what is exactly being used), get OSD with mini preview for seeking [1], run shaders [2], tweak look (contrast, luminance, brightness, gamma) without touching your monitor settings, watch double or half size with one key, keep on top (took ages for this to appear in FF), change aspect ratio (poorly digitized videos anynone?), adjust subtitle and audio syncs, deinterlace, zoom and pan. And many more. If you do not hava data caps, download to temp and then decide what to do with the file.
[1]: https://github.com/blankname/mpv_thumbnail_script [github.com] is a fork updated for recent mpv (original repo is more stale than youtube-dl... maybe this is the way things go now, fork of fork of...). Even so you have to change a mp.register_event line to 'mp.observe_property("tracks-changed", nil, request_init)' to avoid a deprecation warning.
[2]: for example to emulate CRTs and check how old video games would more or less look. Sadly I have not found the right shader (best so far https://old.reddit.com/r/mpv/comments/hvwvsl/crt_scanline_glsl_shader/ [reddit.com] and you have to change define to #define if copy/pasting), as it seems the syntax is not 100% standard thus unable to shaders from emulators.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @03:56AM
mpv even works in the console, with DRM/KMS or SDL.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @01:52PM
Unfortunately in Ubuntu, the mpv package has a hard dependency on the youtube-dl package. Installing the Ubuntu mpv forces the installation of the official Ubuntu youtube-dl package, which is out-of-date and not patched. If you already have your own youtube-dl installed with all sorts of manually applied patches etc, it is way more up to date than Ubuntu's version.