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by blfr 1370 days ago
Obviously, this tool does circumvent YouTube's mechanisms to download and edit a video. The user kinda accepts the risk (how many of them even read that privacy policy?) but there is no verification that they have any rights to the video. Which is imho as it should be.

It's neither wrong nor illegal to download someone's video and edit it. It's explicitly allowed in many jurisdictions under fair use. However, OP seems to accept complaint's framing.

Speaking of youtube-dl, there's an excellent fork, yt-dlp[1], which circumvents the newer speed limiting features YouTube implemented. (From what I gather, they use APIs for older devices.)

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

2 comments

Yeah, AFAIK in many jurisdictions, this would be thrown out of court, because you (YouTube) cannot go around and complain about people downloading your videos after you put them on direct access on the Internet ! (Your profits being reliant on separately shown ads aren't an excuse because you could splice them directly in the video and the analog hole still exists anyway.)

In practice though, this has resulted in several (replay) video broadcasters hiding their videos behind mandatory account creation - IIRC a legal battle is still ongoing because doing something like this might violate the obligations they took when they rented the public EM spectrum.

Does yt-dlp circumvent the age check for videos classified as not suitable for minors as well? From what I've seen the loopholes for that type of video seem to have gotten closed this year.
I don't really download anything edgy and don't know how to easily find an age-gated video. If you provide a link though, I'll check.
Thanks. Oh not even edgy (well, not too edgy). Something like this Rammstein music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZcUAPRRac

I can't even tell why this one specifically is age-gated, but something as explicit as their Deutschland video isn't. I guess there must be a boob in this one somewhere.

Yes, it's age-gated for me and downloads fine:

    ยป yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=StZcUAPRRac 
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading webpage
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading android player API JSON
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading tv embedded player API JSON
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading web embedded client config
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading player a97e97de
    [youtube] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading web embedded player API JSON
    [info] StZcUAPRRac: Downloading 1 format(s): 248+251
    [download] Destination: Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video)     [StZcUAPRRac].f248.webm
    [download] 100% of 37.25MiB in 00:01 at 28.46MiB/s
    [download] Destination: Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f251.webm
    [download] 100% of 3.68MiB in 00:00 at 18.70MiB/s
    [Merger] Merging formats into "Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].webm"
    Deleting original file Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f251.webm (pass -k to keep)
    Deleting original file Rammstein - Sonne (Official Video) [StZcUAPRRac].f248.webm (pass -k to keep)
Interesting (and useful). Yt-dlp seems to be quite on top it.
Does this work inside EU? AFAIK that's where the workarounds were being killed (due to AVMSD)
I just gave it a go (now that it's evening and I'm at my own computer), and it works from the Netherlands.

Surprisingly, because just about all the other methods and proxy-sites mentioned in various click-baity articles a search yields have stopped working.

No boob, but male buttocks and sniffing coca^W golden dust.

Edit: ah, bath scene at 02:40. There are like 4 pixels what could be interpreted as an areola.

Works in NewPipe
How does the age check work? Do google check ID/passports to verify the users age, or is the age something that the user report themselves?
Well, the thing is that many of us here won't ever notice, because they own a Google account that is older than the minimum age (or something like 'minimum age' minus 'reasonable age at which someone could open a Google account'), and which got grandfathered in as 'age checked' simply by having existed for over a decade. You'll never see the age verification stuff if you have on of those.

Now create a new Google account. What Google will ask you seems to be region dependent, but here in the Netherlands I get just two options: make a dummy payment using a credit card, or send in a copy of your ID.

This year I closed my age old Google account, and moved from Gmail to Fastmail. I did have to create a new Google account recently for use with the Play Store. It's not tied to anything that costs money, so that's fine, but it won't work on Youtube for age gated videos. I get the question outlined above now.

Yes, it does.