As others have pointed out, this is very misleadingly editorialized due to ytdl’s vastly expanded scope. The submission title should be changed to the actual title, “Download Youtube Video in Golang”. (Edit: the title was something like "youtube-dl in golang, actively maintained" when the comment was posted.)
Btw, I should point out there's no shortage of web video downloader projects that support YouTube as well as different, often reduced (compared to ytdl) collections of sites, with different focuses and ergonomics. For instance, two projects I've used/contributed to, both active, YouTube-supporting, and with a focus on Chinese sites:
(Not trying to diminish the project posted; what I'm saying is you can find quite a few actively maintained projects with reduced scope if you look around.)
'Actively-maintained' is another way of saying 'We play Whack-a-Mole with YouTube every time they change how the ultimate .mp4 video file url is obtained via the private API'.
ie: If you didn't update youtube-dl that often, you'd often find that it stopped working.
I always wondered why they didn't just fetch the necessary parsing-logic plugins from a remote repository at runtime, the first time a given site is requested. There are some security implications, but it seems easier to handle than requiring a full update every time a website rejiggles its pages.
I appreciated it becausecause youtube-twitter didn't rejiggle their entire websites. They deployed obfuscation on a video-by-video basis depending on the content of the video. A new CNN video on wildfires wouldn't get it, but a slightly older video on [insert political topic] would get the newest version of obfuscation (and require an update). This allowed users to identify the particular topics that the tech giants where most interested in suppressing.
Well youtube-dl doesn't do that but there is invidious (currently also unmaintained afaik, it's hard being a scraper in 2020). I guess it would be really easy to add an extractor for invidious in youtube-dl.
Though youtube-dl is taken down in Github it doesn't necessarly mean youtube-dl is going to be unmaintained, or at least the youtube-dl developers are not suddenly disappeared.
What is the authors of youtube-dl's response regarding the takedown?
Their continued silence so far doesn't bode well. Likely they don't want to take RIAA head on and will just let youtube-dl drop and move on with their lives. And that's probably what the RIAA counts on.
Yeah, I think the takedown effectively kills youtube-dl as it was. It was already a lot of work to keep it up to date, and you'd often get videos you couldn't download and had to wait for an update. The whack-a-mole updating is several full time jobs that no one wants to do: you don't get paid, and might get sued.
I suspect the opposite will actually happen. The resulting Streisand effect will be a shot in the arm for youtube-dl or its immediate forks.
A fairly mundane scraping tool is now a fashionable "punk" project that will "stick it to the Man". Mirroring it is already an act of civil disobedience; developing it you can now explore some interesting problems in the space between the email-only world of Linux kernel development and the centralized Github/Gitlab model (i.e. do for issue-tracking what git did for merging). And it's likely simple enough (it's a python scraper, at the end of the day) that it can mobilize large swaths of developers.
Youtube-dl core developers should double-down on it, right now.
I'd assume it's only YouTube, the usage message has this text [1]:
Download a video from youtube
The beauty of youtube-dl is that it is so universal, supporting a great number of sites, even the simplest case of giving it a direct link to a video file and it will essentially wget it, and process according to your config.
Are the maintainers still maintaining it? The next time Youtube changes something in their "DRM"/obfuscation code, the last version of youtube-dl you got from Github will stop working...
The beauty also is that it's integrated with many other projects. You can open URL in smplayer and it will use youtube-dl to get media URL and play the video in that page. The same for mpv, and probably others.
As explained in "Lawful Masses with Leonard French" [1] it is enough to have marketing material which advertised copyright infringement to be taken down.
Don't know if it is enough to claim you can download Youtube videos to fulfill this point. From my point of view it is thin ice these days to claim anything...
The referenced video has a CC-BY license. Downloading and sharing is therefore legal according to copyright law. Anyway, in most countries downloading per se is not illegal when the content wasn't obviously illegaly uploaded. No copyright protection mechanism was circumvented.
At the start of his latest video he indicates the fact that it's not in the readme/end user marketing and just appears in an internal test case, and also that test case appears to be only obtaining metadata and not the video content seems to have changed his mind somewwhat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCrJM-MrKyI
It's only a cosmetic change from a tech point of view of course, but from non-tech point of view, maybe it would be safer to say it's a youtube offline player than a youtube video downloader.
It would require to pipe downloaded video to vlc or something by default for this to be true, of course.
Agree with other comments here, as well : youtube-dl reference should probably be removed. It will be added back by those who link to the project.
If I can see a video on my monitor and hear the sound, then I can record my screen and the audio and get a video with 99% of the quality of the original.
Maybe you should ban monitors and speakers next? Or eyes and ears? That would be the only way to stop this.
No, they just need to make a lot of stuff illegal and/or very cumbersome, that's all. And that's definitely possible if enough govts are bribed and lobbied to cooperate with them. They have other corporates already in bed with them. At that point, it becomes a question of going after the few rebels and teaching them a lesson and the rest of the Internet crowd will be left in shock and awe.
Trusted computing 1.0 failed to take off, but you can be sure that it will be reintroduced in future and likely will sneak in under the radar, and trusted computing can very well make all forms of screen recording difficult or impossible except through the analogue hole, and that too can be dealt with in time by IOT devices that will refuse to function unless it can contact ML severs over the Net to "SmartScreen" verify what it is recording... for user security of course.
If youtube-dl is permanently removed from Github, this project will surely follow the same trajectory if it gets any bit popular. So I am not sure what's the point of this.
Github isn't at fault here, nor is Microsoft. There's little they can do in the face of a DMCA takedown without opening themselves up to a _lot_ of liability. The entire point of that system is to take the hosting provider out of it.
Btw, I should point out there's no shortage of web video downloader projects that support YouTube as well as different, often reduced (compared to ytdl) collections of sites, with different focuses and ergonomics. For instance, two projects I've used/contributed to, both active, YouTube-supporting, and with a focus on Chinese sites:
- https://github.com/soimort/you-get (Python, 8 years old, 35.8k stars)
- https://github.com/iawia002/annie (Golang, 2-3 years old, 12.7k stars)
(Not trying to diminish the project posted; what I'm saying is you can find quite a few actively maintained projects with reduced scope if you look around.)