Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tauwauwau 1390 days ago
What sorcery is this? Youtube videos are opening without any delay (within half a second) and there's no frame lag even with 1080 quality setting. How does this work?
4 comments

I'm surprised Widevine DRM allows this but I guess you can't really detect "I'm in a VM and being streamed visually by the host".

You can't even take a screenshot of YouTube TV if you don't run it in a VM. Goes to the clipboard as all black.

How does HyperBeam not get abused (and consequentially shut down) for people wanting to share a stream of a pay-per-view / YouTube TV style subscription with their friends?

Widevine isn't used on regular videos.
After you visit the link, copy-paste it into a new window. The content will be synchronized ;)
If I leave the video playing and close the tab, it keeps on playing the audio.
Yep. We're running Chromium in the cloud and streaming it back as a video. When you visit https://threejs-example.hyperbeam.com, it will create a "room" and append the room ID to the URL (e.g. https://threejs-example.hyperbeam.com/abc).

All viewers in the same room see and hear the same video stream, and can control the same browser instance.

Hey. I'm not the person you're responding to, but your response sparked my interest given the context.

It sounds like you're saying, "Yes. Our technology enables someone to listen to YouTube without forcing them to continually view the video."

If so, I would like to caution you to tread lightly in this area. I'd built a 300K MAU YouTube-streaming Chrome extension which was ultimately terminated due to advertisers complaining to YouTube that viewers might consume content without visually seeing an advertisement. I went through a year of attempting to mitigate their concerns, but, ultimately, their expectation was that all a/v content become paused the moment video is not visible.

The only exception to this rule, that I am aware of, is Twitch.TV streamers listening to YouTube while streaming and viewers of the stream consuming that YouTube content without seeing the visuals. This is a backroom agreement between Amazon and the RIAA and is not an agreement I would encourage others to hope to achieve.

Obviously, you're not bound by YouTube's TOS, but run afoul and you'll find hyperbeam added to the big 4's url blacklist. This will prevent all YouTube content from playing through your domain.

How would they block this exactly?
Technically? YouTube users are free to describe a deny list of domains. If the referer request header mentions the domain then content does not play.

If you employ technical mitigations, such as issuing requests from a server and misleading with the referer, YouTube will reach out with a C&D. If you don't honor it, then prepare to defend your usage in court similar to ytdl. They will make the case that 1984 Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. doesn't apply to here as there's clear commercial intent supporting the desire to re-stream media content

It does open without delay, but for me, the sound and video are quite laggy.

I shared my link with my wife but she saw something entirely different... wasn't she supposed to be the same thing as me with the same "room" link?

You just have a really good internet connection. Lags a lot on my mobile internet.