to the layman download means the whole video is stored in its entirety on my disk. and possibly to lawyers too. that is not happening with streaming videos. youtube videos in particular most likely never hit the disk. not even the cache. when i am watching youtube then i am not deleting the video after it is done. the "downloaded" segments disappear automatically as i watch. so there is no delete step that i could skip in order to keep the file. rather, actually downloading a video requires an entirely different operation.

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SirFatty 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"to the layman download means the whole video is stored in its entirety on my disk."

Yes, that's exactly what it means.

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asdff 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No its the same operation just you save instead of not save.

	▲	amiga386 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It used to be but not now. Your browser is served little slices of the video and audio, and the player adapts in realtime, giving you lower or higher bitrate, depending on your network congestion. yt-dlp, as far as I know, always asks for the same consistent quality/bitrate of your choosing (and saves them to disk and joins the segments and muxes the video and audio into one stream)