(googler, opinions are my own. I know nothing about youtube specifically)

Youtube likely has lots of moving parts to host all the different systems. Video content, search, browse, player, etc... could all be different bits. And it's also fun to know that video content itself may not be hosted directly by Google, as you could get it from the GGC (Google Global Cache)[0].

When you have a system as big as Youtube, you need to think about all the different ways you can slice different parts of the service. If any of those parts could be more optimized by having the data stored/sorted in some different way, it likely is.

[0] https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en

given that the outage affects redirector.googlevideo.com and youtube.com/get_video_info, but as you say, not the f3---<something>.googlevideo.com domains serving the actual streams, i suspect they have problems with the database storing where streams are actually hosted.

In other words, the metadata service. The actual content servers are still up, so provided you know where the content is, you can still access it.

(Does anyone still remember when you could easily download videos from YT by simply replacing "watch" with "get_video" in the URL? I miss those days... when corporate greed hadn't gotten to where it is today.)

DASH isn't driven by greed really, it simply allows flexibly and seamlessly switching audio and video streams to vary quality. You can change resolution, and it still plays things continuously for you.

But it makes it hard to download, unless you stitch all that on the receiving end, something that youtube-dl does.

Greed and etc. were already piled on top of that with DRM, obfuscation and the like.

youtube videos are drm protected?

That’s what the RIAA argued in the request that made their member Microsoft take down youtube-dl.

Some of them are. IIRC the whole fiasco with YouTube-dl was because the repository had tests indicating how to decode DRM protected videos.

IIUC part of the fiasco was the tests needing to use certain non-libre videos as they were the only ones with the worst DRM, but the RIAA also argued that the simpler obfuscation of normal videos was a “rolling cipher” and an “effective prevention mechanism” or whatever the DMCA legalese for DRM is as well.

Something people seem to forget is circumvention isn't always illegal. You may circumvent copy protection for a work you own the rights to view, so the complaints about youtube-dl are poorly founded.

That's the problem with DMCA 1201. It doesn't care that breaking of DRM can be done for legitimate uses. It just point blank forbids it.

The supposed excuse of that overreach in giving the Librarian of Congress the ability to define exceptions is totally lame and unacceptable.

You didn't understand what I wrote. You can break copy protection if you own the rights to a work. This means you can e.g. circumvent Window's license checking if you own a copy of it already. The DMCA does not criminalize that, nor could it, and this is probably why py-kms is still up on github after a copyright challenge.

This was a change that I am assuming was added before any complaint could be mounted about this use case for fear of striking more of the DMCA down than just that provision that was modified.

Some of them have some kind of intentional obfuscation.

videos with content-matched copyrighted audio have some sort of obfuscation in the js player, mostly to deter casual downloading.

Can confirm. I have a video which was already open and still plays. Interestingly I closed the tab and opened that video again and it still worked. I'm in Sydney

I too was able to watch a 2.5 hour video to completion, while not being able to load new videos during or after that.

I noticed that the mobile UI was updated today. I'm guessing that it's a botched rollout of some bigger changes

Many other services (Google Play, Twitter, …) are affected as well although not as much as YouTube.

Let's see if you make it to the end. I usually have quite a bit of a video downloaded after a few minutes, to the point where I can unplug my network and still watch for a few minutes.

I am watching the network tab continually request from https://r3---sn-n4v7sney.googlevideo.com/videoplayback and succeed each time. There is hardly any buffer, it's all loading successfully in real time.

Also long video 2.5hrs. Still plays after rebooting router, closing and reopening browser

Yeah YouTube music works for me but no videos will play

Same here. Must be a database of some sort.