I never understood why do they not limit downloading data to the speed at which you could be possibly watching it. Yesterday I downloaded a 15hour show in like 20 minutes. There is no way I could have downloaded that much data in a legit way through their website/player

Im glad I wasn't blocked or throttled, but it seems like it'd be trivial to block someone like me

Am I missing something? It does sort of feel like they're allowing it

EDIT: Spooky skeletons.. Youtube suddenly as of today forces a "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot" on both the website and yt-dl .. So maybe I've been fingerprinted and blacklisted somehow

▲

axiolite 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

You could have been a legit viewer... clicking to skip over segments of the video, presumably trying to find where you left off last time, or for some scene you remember, or the climax of the video... whatever.

Youtube does try to throttle the data speeds, when that first happened, youtube-dl stopped being useful and everyone upgraded their python versions and started using yt-dlp instead.

▲

brutal_chaos_ 5 days ago | parent [-]

If you click to skip over, even clicking every minute, you're still not grabbing the whole thing, right? Whereas downloading is grabbing every second.

	▲	axiolite 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You are actually. Watch one second, the player buffers the next minute of video, then you skip ahead 1 minute. Process repeats.
	▲	zenmac 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Depending on the player and how they cache it. Yes, if google monitor every byte to which client had downloaded, but that just seems like ultra micro managing, and have no idea how many players will it break. Youtube seems like one of those site, should allow people to download or make them a public utility on IPFS or something like that.

▲

bheadmaster 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They still want the YouTube experience to be smooth, to allow users to skip small parts of videos without waiting for it to load every time, to be able to watch multiple videos at the same time, to be able to leave video paused until it loads, etc., which limiting downloading data would hinder. I assume blocking downloads is just not worth destroyinf user experience.

	▲	jamiek88 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Also they allow downloads for premium subs maybe it’s more efficient to not check that status every time.

▲

Waraqa 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There is an official download option inside the app. If they limit the download speed to the watching time, it won't be useful.

▲

alright2565 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

The official download option doesn't download it to your filesystem as a file. It just lets you watch the video offline in the official app/website. Just tested it now.

▲

soared 4 days ago | parent [-]

Meaning the video file exists in your file system somewhere, so downloading at a higher speed than possibly viewing the video is an existing functionality in the app.

	▲	mschuster91 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you're on iOS no way to access it, and I think on Android it's in protected storage as well.

▲

Biganon 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This option is only available to premium users afaik

▲

phoronixrly 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think they are, yt-dlp just circumvents it

▲

RobotToaster 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

As some people already said, skipping section. Also you can increase video speeds, I normally watch youtube at 2x speed but I think you can go up to 5x.