Summary of which youtube-applications does what and how free they are

2 replies [Last post]
GrevenGull
Offline
Joined: 12/18/2017

I have posted several posts the last month asking for tips to how to watch youtube videos without supporting all the bad stuff that come with it. I would just like to summarize what I have learned and maybe others can fill in what is is missing.

GTK-youtube-viewer

-Is a package that can stream and download youtube videos and is completely safe regarding the javascript issue. It seems as though when it meets videos behind DRM it just refuses to do anything with them.

youtube-dl

-Is a package that downloads youtube videos. It has some issues regarding the javascript, but it is not yet fully known how big of an issue it is (referring to the JS interpreter thingy).

mpv

-Is a package that streams youtube videos? It can be totally free if it is running Avideo in the background, or it can be fishy if it is running youtube-dl in the background.

ADFENO
Offline
Joined: 12/31/2012

See the reply from bill-auger on the same issue in gnu-linux-libre
mailing list ([1]). Long story short: even if youtube-dl, ViewTube,
YouTube All HTML5, VLC and such like are proven to be free/libre
software, this doesn't chnage the network effect. The only change that
can happen is people being educated so as not to depend on only a single
service provider for something not federated (this is better described
also by [2]).

I have a friend who once tried to start as an independ artist, and he
told me: "Why on Earth people think that every video has to be only in
YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, etc? Around 2000 we saw independ artists
emerging everywhere and considered successfull no matter where their
work was, now it seems we're getting back to 1990 bcause we depend on
single entities to make our work visible again." This is somewhat
similar to what is noted in [2].

If you want to make something happen in order to get shareable content
out from these places such as YouTube, see the note given by bill-auger
in [1] (he's talking about an idea given by vaeringjar from the #peers
IRC channel at chat.freenode.net).

Given the considerations above: I myself stopped working on the
evaluation of software freedom for the cases of these media
downloaders. I only evaluated VLC and ViewTube, if I'm not mistaken. I
think our time should be better spent working on vaeringjar's idea.

[1]
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2017-09/msg00008.html.

[2] https://downloads.softwarefreedom.org/2017/conference/0-keynote.webm
(under CC-BY-SA-3.0-US).

2018-01-12T16:55:44+0100 name at domain wrote:
> I have posted several posts the last month asking for tips to how to
> watch youtube videos without supporting all the bad stuff that come
> with it. I would just like to summarize what I have learned and maybe
> others can fill in what is is missing.
>
> GTK-youtube-viewer
>
> -Is a package that can stream and download youtube videos and is
> completely safe regarding the javascript issue. It seems as though
> when it meets videos behind DRM it just refuses to do anything with
> them.
>
> youtube-dl
>
> -Is a package that downloads youtube videos. It has some issues
> regarding the javascript, but it is not yet fully known how big of an
> issue it is (referring to the JS interpreter thingy).
>
> mpv
>
> -Is a package that streams youtube videos? It can be totally free if
> it is running Avideo in the background, or it can be fishy if it is
> running youtube-dl in the background.
>

--
- https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno
- Palestrante e consultor sobre /software/ livre (não confundir com
gratis).
- "WhatsApp"? Ele não é livre. Por favor, veja formas de se comunicar
instantaneamente comigo no endereço abaixo.
- Contato: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/User:Adfeno#vCard
- Arquivos comuns aceitos (apenas sem DRM): Corel Draw, Microsoft
Office, MP3, MP4, WMA, WMV.
- Arquivos comuns aceitos e enviados: CSV, GNU Dia, GNU Emacs Org, GNU
GIMP, Inkscape SVG, JPG, LibreOffice (padrão ODF), OGG, OPUS, PDF
(apenas sem DRM), PNG, TXT, WEBM.

GrevenGull
Offline
Joined: 12/18/2017

Thanks, I did not know about these things.

Makes me feel kind of sad that I didn't read this before fuzzing with all these youtube packages.. anyway, better late than never :)