If you're downloading so you can watch it and not for rebroadcast there's literally no difference functionally or legally between clicking a link and opening it in a browser and using youtube-dl . The upside is when someone's account gets terminated for whatever reason you can still watch the content.
Whenever you watch a video you are downloading it. youtube-dl merely gives you control over where that stream goes, whether it's to a hard disk or to a media player like the regular Youtube.
Can someone with more knowledge on the matter help explain why downloading copyrighted material using youtube-dl as opposed to a browser is treated differently under the DMCA? In either case you're accessing copyrighted material by downloading from youtube's servers.
Youtube-dl downloads a lot more than from youtube.
I use it a more often on vimeo content embedded in webpages which usually won't play in my browser (presumably due to some privacy settings) than I use it on youtube.
It's not even clear that youtube-dl vs watching in the browser is any different from watching on tv vs using your vcr to record which has long been legal.
I was thinking the same thing. Instead of using a browser to access a website, parse the files given to it, and download the data so that the user can view it, you are using youtube-dl to access a website, parse the files given to it, and download the data so the user can view it.
It doesn’t matter. Chrome and youtube-dl are both downloading a video and letting the user play it. Youtube-dl is nothing more than a specialized browser.
If Chrome does something, any other piece of software is allowed to do it.
The point is that youtube-dl does exactly the same thing as every other method of watching the video. You can't watch the video -- by any means -- without downloading it first. The uses you list may not be "watching" in a particular sense of the word, but they are "watching" in the same sense of the word that is relevant to using a web browser -- the only sense that would apply to YouTube.
That would be true IF youtube-dl was all about downloading YouTube videos only, but it's not. It's used by people to download videos from like a thousand other websites too.
As another comment pointed out, youtube-fl is not _circumventing_ the mechanism, it is merely using it as intended by its creators. It does exactly what a web browser must do to play the said videos. Just like a browser is allowed to do the same thing to get the right video, put it right there in plain data on your computer and play it - no proprietary DRM ever steps in the process! - , youtube-dl follows the same steps. So youtube-dl is no different from a browser that also has a "download to your computer" button - every other behavior is the same.
Not OP, but I personally use youtube-dl to retrieve videos on a remote server accessed via ssh, which then get downloaded slowly over a low bandwidth link for offline viewing at a later time. They may or may not get reencoded using the ffmpeg integration before retrieving as well.
YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a slow link, not to mention it's incredibly obnoxious with all its recommendations and other unmanagable propaganda delivery.
Youtube-dl's ability to retrieve titles and descriptions without showing me anything else and before retrieving any video content alone make youtube's opaque hashed URLs usable for me.
I watch a bit of YouTube, but I only use YouTube-dl to doownload videos I really like - like abridgements or YTPs - stuff that can easily be copyright notice'd down
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