this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2025
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We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client.

This is not limited to yt-dlp. Tests have been run with the same account on various official YouTube TV clients (PS3, web browser, apple tv) and they are also only getting DRM formats for videos.

We live in hell-world.

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[–] MalMen@masto.pt 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

@SnotFlickerman sure it gets harder with DRM, but they will just make DRM break accessible to anyone..

This is my contribution https://github.com/MalMen/HellYes/

[–] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 71 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Theyre adding DRM to videos they don't own. Sounds like a lawsuit

[–] Naich@lemmings.world 65 points 1 week ago

Terms and conditions. What's yours is theirs.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

They do own them, though. That's what happens when you upload content to Youtube. Or virtually any other website, for that matter.

[–] Vendetta9076@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Nope. The person who uploads the video owns the copyright/IP. Seems like they should have say in if theres DRM on their IP.

[–] CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 week ago

Yeah but the YT terms explicitly say that you give them a worldwide royalty free license to do whatever the fuck they want.

Content creators have no say.

[–] freeman@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago

They most certainly have this covered in ToS. IP law is not about actual creators' rights.

[–] cecilkorik@lemmy.ca 60 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Screw them! We'll build our own peertube, with blackjack, and hookers

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

Peertube is f****** amazing, But your average windows user isn't going to be able to manage the hosting. And your average ISP blocks standard hosting ports. Then it also requires the users to manage their own monetization.

It's not undoable but it is kind of a steep slope.

[–] RiQuY@lemm.ee 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

You can use an already hosted instance, there is no need to selfhost every service.

[–] princessnorah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think they were maybe speaking to the peer-to-peer "hosting" part of peertube. If not enough people are contributing to bandwidth, then more falls back to the server, increasing the cost to run it.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 week ago

Mainly storage. The only reason these free hosted sites can stand up is because they have low traffic. If 0.01% of YouTubers started dumping all their video over there, they'd quickly run the free services out of town.

Realistically, If it were easy enough for everyone to host locally (torrent style) and people paired up with hosting partners for backups, peertube could be an amazing Youtube alternative.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

Paying for bandwidth and cloud storage rates for video hosting is pretty much worst case. I'd argue that if you were going to self host anything video would be the most important

[–] kat@orbi.camp 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I joined it but the main feed was just a lot of NSFW content.... So made it kind of awkward for discovery.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Discovery is a major hurdle. There are plenty of instances that don't have NSFW you should poke around to find something suitable.

[–] kat@orbi.camp 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Feel free to recommend some!

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 week ago

With good content? That's a hard find :)

Plenty without NSFW though

I frequent https://v.basspistol.org/ but they're mostly music

do keep in mind you can also use their filters

like these on https://vid.freedif.org/

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Everyone doesn't have to host their own instance.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Everyone doesn’t have to host their own instance.

They don't, but how long do you think a free instance is going to last when it starts seeing serious volume. Video storage in the cloud is expensive AF.

[–] uxellodunum@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Odysee did/does something interesting where if one uses the desktop client, the video gets streamed and cached, and then seeded back over a configurable amount of time. I could see creator's communities being self-sustainable this way.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 days ago

Odyssey was a technical failure. They pushed pretty hard to get the community into it but once it reached even a slightly elevated usage, They had to start standing up servers to back the swarm.

I believe it can work but they didn't crack the nut on that unfortunately, At least not before the SEC brok in and riped them a new one for selling securities basically destroyed the backing company.

[–] 0range@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, video storage is what prevents corporations from creating YouTube competitors, and it also prevents decentralized users from competing

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 week ago

and it also prevents decentralized users from competing

It doesn't have to. PT is just using webtorrent. Make a desktop client that links into existing PT instances for discovery and indexing, but have the DHT pull the files right off the person's home box. Every content creator makes a buddy, they pin each other's content. Every content creator stores their own stuff + 1 person.

[–] Majestic@lemmy.ml 54 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Of course. The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos gave Google a huge neon sign that said this is the one thing that will shut them down, the line they won’t cross. Google has targeted the big front end instances with rate limits and blocks and this is the next step.

Our only hope really is that the current YT-DLP team hands the reins over to people in countries that don’t give a shit about copyright and they put back in the ability to download and decrypt DRM protected video.

[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 38 points 1 week ago

From yt-dlp's software license:

Anyone is free to copy, modify, publish, use, compile, sell, or distribute this software, either in source code form or as a compiled binary, for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and by any means.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

they have a plugin system. afaik drm breaking features could ve kept in a plugin they dont have to touch

[–] mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

if that's true that was a smart move, they seen this coming and made precautions

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I can't find the plugin I first discovered this with, but this basically demonstrates it: https://github.com/notjosh/yt-dlp-GlobalCyclingNetworkPlusDRMWorkaround

wiki article on plugins: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Plugins

[–] mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

i didn't ask for proof but thanks

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 15 points 1 week ago

I mean, that's basically how yt-dlp came to be. They took over when yt-download couldn't keep up anymore. I hate this time, it will take a while until the best successor is found.

[–] RiQuY@lemm.ee 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My only hope is that Google goes bankrupt and people migrate to other places, but sadly that's not feasible atm.

[–] 0range@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Google going bankrupt would almost certainly mean YouTube disappears. Which can happen, but it's not a good thing

[–] Fitzsimmons@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 1 week ago

In the good timeline, multiple governments and international organizations launch peertube servers.

Probably not this timeline though.

[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 week ago

The YT-DLP team by refusing to support DRM videos

If they did this they could be sued for the exact same reason Yuzu got sued: circumvention of DRM. That's a crime in the USA. Apparently.

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 48 points 1 week ago

i've been half-expecting them to roll-out drm for everything including cat videos and shit for awhile now.

We live in hell-world.

Yes. Yes, we do.

[–] biscuit@lemdro.id 29 points 1 week ago

Praying for Smarttube

[–] Lyra_Lycan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Motherfucker I'd better get started archiving

[–] DudeDudenson@lemmings.world 15 points 1 week ago

Wouldn't surprise me if they did this to hamper other companies easily scrubbing videos for AI training

[–] BillionsMustSeed@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I wanted to archive a few channels, but was stopped by the lack of storage. Guess I'm out of luck as my storage upgrade is a long while away :(

[–] veniasilente@lemm.ee 8 points 1 week ago

With yt-dlp you can DL the videos at lower resolution / quality, so that at least you can have one offline working copy in the meantime.

[–] cymor@midwest.social 2 points 1 week ago

Archive.org has a lot of storage.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

Shatter Google.