I know YouTube is a terrible provider of pirated content and also that it is almost impossible to pirate without a VPN, but I would like to know: if I download a movie from YouTube (directly from it, of course) without a VPN, will I receive "that type of message" from my ISP?

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[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Your ISP cannot differentiate between weather the YouTube app is streaming the video or any program is downloading the video.

No to be pedantic, but this isn't true. If you're watching via the YouTube app, the content is served via chunks, and not in one continuous stream. I'm sure it would depend on the ISP, but they could potentially be able to differentiate the two.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 9 hours ago

Regarding that argument: Basically throttle the download to watch time (e.g. 5mbps for 1080p).
This way it would look like it's constantly refreshing the buffer.

Not that anyone would care

[–] dicksteele@lemm.ee 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

~~yt-dlp streams those chunks into the final file tbh so it should be fine.~~

I was wrong about this part. I doubt the isp would do anything about it though, just for different reasons

[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

yt-dlp streams those chunks into the final file

This is entirely incorrect;

--http-chunk-size SIZE          Size of a chunk for chunk-based HTTP
                                                downloading, e.g. 10485760 or 10M (default
                                                is disabled).

Chunks are disabled by default with yt-dlp. You're thinking of fragments, which are not how the video file is captured, just how its saved.

[–] dicksteele@lemm.ee 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I was basing what I said on the http.py file:

while True:
                try:
                    # Download and write
                    data_block = ctx.data.read(block_size if not is_test else min(block_size, data_len - byte_counter))
                except TransportError as err:
                    retry(err)

                byte_counter += len(data_block)

I might still be wrong but that’s how I thought it downloaded any video file over http

Edit. After reading the code a bit more I see that you were correct.