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- videogamesm12
Google is reportedly conducting A-B testing in regards to adding DRM to YouTube. According to an issue on the GitHub repository for yt-dlp (a popular video downloader), attempts to grab videos with specific user accounts will only return DRM-riddled formats. This causes the program to error out and declare it to be DRM-protected, which is entirely intended behavior.
I personally tested to see if this is actually happening for my own Google account and while I didn't get any DRM-riddled nonsense, I encourage you to test this yourself. If you have yt-dlp installed, run one of these commands and see if it works:
If using Firefox:
If using Chrome:
This is yet another one of many attempts by Google to control how people watch videos on the site in a desperate move to make an otherwise unprofitable site profitable. They have employed several different measures in the past to force people to use their ad-riddled, spyware-infested, garbage official means of using the site, including (but not limited to):We are getting reports of YouTube rolling out an experiment to some accounts where normal videos only have DRM formats available on the tv (TVHTML5) Innertube client. This is not limited to yt-dlp. Tests have been run with the same account on various official YouTube TV clients (PS3, web browser, apple tv) and they are also only getting DRM formats for videos.
- Intentionally sabotaging the future of Manifest V2 in a long-winded attempt to cripple ad-blockers, thereby undermining the online safety of everyone online
- Threatening the maintainers of Grayjay (a third party application that offers an ad-free way to watch and download YouTube videos without paying a subscription) with legal action
- Sending the developers of YouTube Vanced (a popular modification which included a built-in ad blocker amongst other things) a cease and desist
- Enforcing harsh blocks on various IP addresses that mandate that people use Google accounts in order to even watch videos, allowing them to track your viewing activity
- Introducing integrity checks into various endpoints that third party player apps used to intentionally break them
I personally tested to see if this is actually happening for my own Google account and while I didn't get any DRM-riddled nonsense, I encourage you to test this yourself. If you have yt-dlp installed, run one of these commands and see if it works:
If using Firefox:
Code:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox -F -v --load-pages 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ' --extractor-arg youtube:player-client=tv
If using Chrome:
Code:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome -F -v --load-pages 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ' --extractor-arg youtube:player-client=tv