Why do people use yt-dlp? Is it to skip ads or watch offline? YouTube premium also lets you watch offline and skip ads but for a price. So surely it's no surprise that Google don't want you to have it for free. I think YouTube premium is too expensive given Google pay so little for the content but I don't think it would be sustainable if everyone got it for free.
Little bit of everything. Archiving creators that sometimes just vanish or get enough false DMCA claims to have their channels go offline. Downloading audio/video for sampling, cutting, & remixing (ie. Vaporwave Music/Video production). Sometimes you just need to snag a bit of video/audio to make a meme for your friends. For example we saw a funny old PSA from the 1980's someone uploaded and downloaded it to recut the video into a meme.
Offline use is a big part of it. When on road trips I like to catch up and listen along to DnD streams from Twitch/Youtube and the easiest way is to just rip the VODs from one or the other so when I'm on a road in the middle of no where I don't have to depend on rural cell networks.
Sometimes just for fun, I had yt-dlp running on a G4 Mac Mini so that I could rip content & convert it to something playable on old ass computers when I tried living on a G4 mini for a few months last year as an experiment. I've got friends in more unfortunate circumstances surviving off of computers from the 2000's that greatly appreciate anything people come up with to keep their machines useable in a modern world.
I was recently scrolling through my "Favorites" playlist on YouTube - which dates back to when I first created my account nearly two decades ago. A surprising number of those videos are no longer watchable on YouTube. These aren't even controversial things - just random things that may have been copyright-striked out of existence, pulled by the original uploader for whatever reason, vanished when the uploader deleted their account, pulled by a new owner of channel after some merger/acquisition, etc. So one simple reason is to preserve access to valuable video content.
Making sure you can play the video tomorrow in case Youtube arbitrarily decides it no longer likes it or the account related to it get blocked by some automated algorithm without any recourse for the author, etc.
I've heard there are also rare but serious issues where YouTube will just let old videos bitrot so they nominally still exist, but don't play correctly.
YouTube bitrot is real in the sense that over the years, they've re-encoded everything multiple times, resulting in older content looking absolutely terrible. This includes dropping higher resolution options. They don't even seem to keep the original source files for subsequent re-encodes.
If you watch anything from a decade or so ago, you'd be forgiven for thinking that video content just didn't look very good back then, but no, it's largely down to YouTube compressing them to death since the original upload.
If you have a reasonable backlog of video files on your computer you realise how great the file system and a good file manager is.
You can sort your video by name, by date, by other criteria, all on the fly, build into your file manager. You can rename them, surprisingly useful sometimes. You can put them into folders, you can tag them, all according to your own weird criteria. You can do operation on multiple videos, at the same time. Power users can automate those things.
Youtube's subscription website has exact two options for videos from your subscriptions: You can display them in a list and you can display them in a grid.
Anecdote time. Years ago, I used to use yt-dlp to archive videos I'd like to keep forever. I had a few terabytes of videos, some of which didn't even exist on YouTube anymore. Then, one day, my hard drive suddenly died. I lost everything. Now I don't archive stuff anymore, and my life goes on just the same. Sometimes, I do miss something I used to hoard, but I just nurture the nostalgia and rely on my memory alone.
Seen enough stuff vanish forever that I use it to grab anything I might still want to watch in 5 years, when I remember to. This can include entire channels.
Right click + save doesn't work on Youtube. I have premium but I can't download the MP4 files to play them offline, so I use yt-dlp instead. youtube-dl also works of course.
I also use yt-dlp to download meme videos to share from other social media. That way, people don't have to create accounts everywhere to look at a silly 20 second clip.
I use yt-dlp with mpv for watching videos. I can't watch videos through my web browser at all thanks to Google's anti-adblock measures.
There's no way to pay for Youtube Premium anonymously - and I'm sure as hell not comfortable with providing Google (an American company, mind you) with any more information than they already have on me.
I download videos I use for teaching. In future classes, I can still provide students with the video even if it disappears from YouTube. This happens from time to time.
So I can use a video player that isn't ass. How the general public just accepts having to use a browser-based shitplayer like Youtube or your average streaming site is bonkers.
I use it indirectly via Tube Archivist to get vastly better search. I've mirrored most technical stuff I've seen, and I can do fine-grained text search over video descriptions, audio transcripts, and even comments. This happens live, in milliseconds, and vastly outperforms Google's own search (which is optimized on vibes). Very helpful when I want to quickly and directly jump to a part that mentions a keyword.
I also use it to archive videos of personal significance.
Finally, I sometimes use resource-constrained computers (say, in my shop). The native video players are much more responsive than the official website.
Limited internet connections (speed and/or data-caps). Something like Hughesnet (satellite ISP) couldn't stream more than 240p from youtube during peek times. The data-cap coerced users to do downloads between 2am to 6am.
I use it to download short clips or meme videos and send them to friends when they're blocked from embedding for whatever reason. I do it often enough that I wrote a Fish function (appropriately named `vine`) to make it as easy as `vine -n filename (pbpaste)`.
With an offline copy, I can watch a video on an airplane or other environment where I don't have Internet access.
I consider it "time-shifting."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_shifting
The use case Google care about is almost certainly LLM companies scraping YouTube for model training. Such clients use a lot of bandwidth, don't generate ad revenue, and mean Google gets no benefit in AI from its ownership of that asset.
I doubt that that's very high up on their list of priorities.
> Such clients use a lot of bandwidth
How many AI companies are there really? Realistically, we're talking about a handful of additional downloads per video here at most.
> don't generate ad revenue
That's the real problem: Youtube is in the business of selling ads or Youtube Premium to humans. Anything that lets humans bypass both is going to be at odds with their goals.
But impressions by LLMs aren't (yet?) useful to advertisers, so it wouldn't make any difference either.
A lot of videos on YT are never watched and scrapers can run at high speed. At one point companies scraping web search for SEO reasons consumed a whole datacenter's worth of capacity, so scraping can be a surprisingly serious business (I used to work there).
The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed? The obvious answer would be AI.
Hm, good point. I wasn’t considering the long tail of never-watched videos – if the median number of views is very low it could still matter.
> The tech they're using to steadily lock down Youtube isn't new, so what's changed?
Time has passed and DRM is more ubiquitous on the web these days, and I suspect that the number of people using ad blockers might also be rising, the more ads Youtube is getting.
I don’t doubt that AI might have some effect on it, but I’d be surprised if that was the primary motivation.
Yeah. Remember also that cache misses are much more expensive to serve than cache hits for YT because it falls back to their core datacenters instead of being served from their edge CDN. Scrapers are nothing but cache misses.
I mean, in some sense your two cases are indistinguishable since there's no way I'm going to inject ads into my local .mp4
However, I'd guess quite a few folks use yt-dlp for archiving (or watching on an airplane) because YT Premium is not a "we promise this video will still be available next month"
Yep, downloading copies of videos so I can watch them on long flights is one of my main use cases for yt-dlp.
I suppose someone more sycophantic to the wishes of trillion-dollar corporations could argue that I'm not entitled to do this for free, and that YouTube offers an offline download option as part of its $13.99/mo Premium offering. To them, I'd say "you're right, also go pound sand lol."
