Can anyone explain what this actually means? The issue ticket's core points revolve around concepts that are not understandable even for a technologically well-versed general reader, so people will just pivot to the keywords, which won't make for productive discussions.

To be more specific:

- what is an innertube client?

- what is a `tv` innertube client?

- what is TVHTML5?

- what are "DRM formats"?

- what does it mean for them to be "available"?

- and finally, why is it of interest if they're only available to tv innertube clients?

We're where we are basically because people are happy with it. They are happy not owning a movie, a record, a book. People don't get it. They ones that we do are the minority. And is not that I'm against streaming. Streaming is ok, but all providers should offer the option to have at least a legit digital copy for a reasonable price to own. And by own I mean to have a non DRM protected file of any kind. A simple media file that can be truly owned and reproduced wherever I want. I have absolutely no issues at all paying to own something. Until then I will absolutely not pay a damn penny to these fuckers.

I already massively reduced my time in the Youtube App by writing some scripts using yt-dlp to download my subscriptions, convert them to mp3 and host the podcast feeds inside my local network. I guess when this eventually breaks I'll probably have to go outside during my free time. It's still working for now so lets hope it continues until spring.

This is absolutely terrible news. It's been pretty clear this was coming, and I think fairly clear that this is part of a very high-level strategy for Google. They've been investing heavily in all aspects of this for years now, on the client and server side. It reeks of enshittification to me, but more than that I think we're just about to enter the era of locked/closed tech. A Youtube without DRM does almost feel like an anachronism when you consider the rest of the landscape. Most people willingly buy devices that severely limit what they can do, so I'm not expecting any real pushback from consumers either. Those of us who really care about this will probably just find ourselves faced with a choice: digitally divide (and deprive) ourselves for our principles, or be forcefully shoved into the same box as the lowest common denominator users.

Assuming non-evil motivations on the G executives part, I do wonder if AI was the final straw here. In order to build their "moat" on Gemini they need to make it so data collectors can't get to Youtube videos. Only "real" way to ensure that is to DRM things. X/Twitter, Reddit, Stack Overflow, and many others have taken steps as well for similar reasons. I'm sure it's something they wanted to do anyway so maybe AI is more an excuse than a reason, but it's surely not nothing.

A while back itag 18 and 22, MP4 video that includes an audio track, seemed to disappear in favor of split video and audio, e.g., formats with video only like itag 136 and 137. This requires using ffmpeg to merge an audio track with the video. More recently, it appears they have brought back itag 18.

Youtube seems to be fighting with video downloads? I receive "sign in and prove you are not a bot" every day when using Tor (and without Tor YouTube is not accessible). I don't mind watching ads or solving captchas but Youtube chose the worst method.

Incidentally, YT just greeted here with a "Sign in to confirm you are not a bot. We do this to protect our community"...

There are many ways to tighten a noose...

Too bad that some of us will never have an account (just like some of us will not use any DRM system). We will have to find a way to access the wealth indirectly.

Can someone recommend an alternative to Youtube for discovering lofi/synthwave songs?

What is going to happen to Firefox users? The DRM supported by FF is easily broken. Will YouTube drop support for Firefox?

On a related note, TubeArchivist just released v0.5, and is officially not in a feature freeze.

Will this kill extensions like Vinegar for Safari?

Why do people use yt-dlp? Is it to skip ads or watch offline? YouTube premium also lets you watch offline and skip ads but for a price. So surely it's no surprise that Google don't want you to have it for free. I think YouTube premium is too expensive given Google pay so little for the content but I don't think it would be sustainable if everyone got it for free.

There must be many content creators who don't want DRM forced onto their videos, so I don't think it can ever be mandatory.

Will this break things like Newpipe and Freetube?

How can the web players read the videos if they are encrypted? I’m guessing by definition they need the keys to do so thus would it not be possible for ytdlp to also support this when the encrypted video implementation is fully rolled out?

Is this going to break youtube on a lot of Android TVs?

Google is not a company I would want to work for.

Is there an explainer on how this stuff works on platforms without some sort of DRM hardware? Or does it not work.

Is YouTube the biggest rug pull in history? They built their monopoly by being a public, no bullshit video host. Nobody would have uploaded anything to them if it was like this 15 years ago. Not sure how many people can remember, but it would have been laughable back then to make videos and have someone put ads in the middle of them.

But now it's milking time. Eventually they'll push it too far and they might start losing viewers, but not before a few people get very rich. I feel like we're entering a dark period. YouTube showed us what it could be like, but we need to organise ourselves and host videos in a peer to peer fashion if we want to get it back and keep it.

I've been creating a web-based YouTube player for my kids.

Will this restrict iframe embedded video playback?

Does this break Chromium, the non-DRM open source version of Chrome?

What a garbage move.

How long until Youtube prevents people from watching videos without logging in?

Hey youtube. Stop making your apps so shit and then I wouldn't have to rely on third party apps

I guess it doesn't surprise me that our corporate overlords do everything possible to make it more annoying to watch their media, but I don't have to like it. It's frustrating, because at this point it's going to be extremely difficult to avoid DRM (quasi) legally.

I HYPOTHETICALLY have over 400 Blu-ray movies, and about 40 complete series. I HYPOTHETICALLY painstakingly ripped all of them, broke their DRM, and watch it with my Jellyfin server. I don't put these videos on ThePirateBay, and the Blu-rays are all legit copies. I've gotten conflicting information about whether or not what I'm doing is legal, but I certainly don't think what I'm doing there is unethical.

But now, how exactly do I get DRM-free movies while also paying for them? They aren't really producing Blu-rays for every movie anymore, if I want to buy a movie I have to get it from Amazon or something and stream it, with the corporation reserving the right to take it away at any time.

Is the only way of getting and preserving media piracy now? I genuinely don't know of a way to get DRM-free media anymore without stealing it.

Okay, but:

     yt-dlp -f315 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ'

     [download] 100% of    1.27GiB in 00:00:52 at 24.85MiB/s

I don't know if this perhaps affects web browsers playing on non-HDCP displays.