[conspire] (forw) [DNG] [OT] YouTube archivism targeted

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Carl Myers (cmyers at cmyers.org):

> I certainly hope someone fights this as the description "a
> command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few
> more sites." is similar to describing a hammer as "a tool to
> assassinate the president in his stupid face, and also do some stuff
> with nails or whatever"

The description is sort of necessary to the tool's aim, in this place --
as is its construction.  I'll elaborate:

YouTube could easily just stream the A/V files from dead-simple Web
pages, because 'a href' has been a thing for 28 years.  But that is 
the _last_ thing they would want to do, because then anyone on the
planet could save-local or just Show Source and get the direct URL
trivially, and then anyone could fetch and retain a local copy.

YouTube, Inc. / Google, Inc.'s value proposition to Our Lords in
Hollywood was that they could control user behaviour and enable the
content barons to dictate when access could cease completely, mandate
intercession of advertising, etc.  If users could secure independent 
custody of local copies and re-use them without handcuffs, then Our
Lords in Hollywood would have shunned the service.

YouTube pulls this feat off using an amazingly hypercomplex obscuring
screen of Javascript that is _solely_ present to obscure the direct URL
while still permitting the page to serve the content.  For youtube-dl to
do its magic, the author studies the Javascript bafflegab and figures
out how to extract from it the real URL.

The author needs to do this separately and individually for each
supported A/V streaming site -- and does so.  Moreover, he or she
efficiently _re-performs_ that same feat of reverse-engineering within 
(typically) an hour every time one of those sites rejiggers the
obfuscatory Javascript specifically so that youtube-dl and similiar 
tools (if any remain; I don't know) will break.

Numerous times a year, I've tried to pull down something using
youtube-dl, it obscurely fails on the site (usually YouTube.com), and
blessedly there's a spanking new youtube-dl release _immediately_ that
works fine.

Our Lords in Hollywood (well, in this case, their little pathetic lapdog
the RIAA) is obviously irritated at this display of independent
competence, and have gotten around to deploying their usual cudgel to
make user autonomy go away again.

-- 
Cheers,
Rick Moen                        "The first rule of Dunning-Kruger club is
rick at linuxmafia.com              you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger club."
McQ! (4x80)                           -- @drankturpentine (Dennis Detwiller)