[MKinley]

I am not in law enforcement myself, but do some online investigations, and like many others in my field we use YouTube-dl to save a copy of video evidence relevant to a case we are working on. It can be instrumental for archiving the evidence if it is ever removed or taken down, can also be used to grab extra info (CC text log is one example) and then manually searched for specific strings. This tool has made ma y investigations pay off in ways they never could have otherwise.

[beagle3]

How is this significantly different than placing a video camera in front of a screen?

Yt-dL is surely nicer and more convenient, but from an evidence standpoint, a one time $500 (to go wild) setup should have you covered, no?

(Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)

[pfranz]

Eek, the thought of that makes me cringe. I guess it would be passable in some circumstances, but I can imagine a bunch of reasons why it would be miserable or useless:

* the quality drop; recompressing, non-matching frame rates, non-matching resolution--all the same goes for audio. You're very likely clipping (losing) data. This is assuming you're doing screen-capture. If you're literally video taping a monitor you will get moiré in the video, room tone in the audio, losing any stereo separation, and other audio/video artifacts.

* performance; must be done in real-time, cannot queue up multiple sources. This is likely the biggest efficiency killer and makes things 100x more labor intensive.

* reliable Internet; if you get a blip or have a slow connection you have to hopefully catch it and start over. With youtube-dl you can pause, resume, confirm even on the slowest, spottiest connections.

* metadata, organizing, indexing; likely hand-typed separately, prone to error, prone to not knowing if you've done that video already.

* Chain of custody; grabbing the original video allows you to prove two identical copies match (using file hashes or other comparisons) screen recording makes that difficult to impossible to confirm--maybe with fancy AI you'd have to run by the courts?

[kortex]

This, along with screen capture, is known as a form of rebroadcast and it's used to obscure and obfuscate digital alterations, watermarks, deepfake artifacts and the like. When doing media forensics, it's optimal to get as close to the raw source as possible.

[scoutt]

I'm afraid to ask how you take screenshots.

[kawsper]

Yt-dl lets you download whole accounts or playlists.

[judge2020]

Using a screen recorder like shadowplay or obs also doesn't seem like it would be out of the realm of possibility.

[wodenokoto]

I think this is absolutely reasonable question.

Filming the screen, means that in order to fake it, you have to setup something that routes youtube.com to your own fake version of youtube, before filming. To me, that sounds much harder than say "this file was downloaded from here on that date"

[qwerty456127]

> Mourning the loss of ytdl myself but trying to be realistic)

It's just a GitHub repository which is lost, not ytdl itself.

[talaketu]

Obviously CC stream is not readily searchable if you record it with a video camera.