[LOCKSUIT]

I just discovered something really upsetting. All my downloaded videos (a few thousand) using youtube downloader, are not full quality as I compared a frame to the same frame on youtube. Even the new tool I've used to download the last few hundred videos, y2mate, is better but not reaching full quality. This is OK for some my videos, but not for others. YT already degrades uploaded videos, which is just profoundly compounding now. There is YT premium, but I just realized it is only for phone or tablet:

phone/tablet > https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/97399/where-does-youtubes-offline-feature-store-video-files

And I'm not sure it gives you the full video yet either. Or one you can watch truly offline without YT needing to decrypting it.

I do have access to many of the YT videos....I can SEE the HD content, but now I need to go search all their names, and somehow capture them in perfect condition. Any tool to do this? Search google, find the same video, takes me a lot of time, or to realize it is not showing up and LOST. Or even to find the same pic online and the song elsewhere and stitch them together lol! I need a scroller AI to google search each video in my folder....

BUT next, I know screen recorders work but I don't know if they can capture exactly every frame and pixel by pixel, it can lag at times for example. Yet it seems plausible since I have all pixels displaying, is this possible? Any expert computerist here know if such perfect screen capture can be made?

I know some content can be found on other sites in even higher quality, or even asking users to hand deliver them (lol), but still...

[ivan.moony]

For images there are two kinds of compression: lossless (gif, png) and lossy (jpg, fif, ...) For videos, i've seen only animated gif as a lossless compression, all other formats are lossy.

[LOCKSUIT]

That's interesting. So, RAW seems to be original movie:

"A RAW file is the uncompressed and unprocessed image data captured by a digital camera or scanner's sensors. Shooting in RAW captures a high level of image detail, with large file sizes and lossless quality."

Looks like RAW is going to be my new format any time I get a camera in my hands......lol.

AVI and MOV seem to be able to do lossless, not sure but food for thought now.

My plan of action will be perhaps to get a 4K new computer monitor and maybe computer so can do a good hard screen recording (if, that's how it's done), and screen capture first the most important yt videos I really need.....and then, maybe I can get the rest or which are important from there... But if I can find a perfect "screen sucker" that builds the exact same video instead of these lagging ones that try to snap it in 1 go, that would be 100% perfect. . . Of course I can redownload old ones using the better y2mate also if all fails, as it is quite close to the same quality actually but noticeable. If this sounds like a long adventure for me, you're right, and I'm already tired.........

[LOCKSUIT]

So odd, one video from (japan?) has exact match extraction upon using y2mate.......the frame from the downlaoded is same as the one seen on youtube website, even 5 sec in to the video. Perhaps the guy/girl uploaded it in such bursting HD quality that it degrades and has litterally 0 karma...

ok so 2 little patches from both still images have same size and are exact match my software says also.

[LOCKSUIT]

update: the little patches from each do match......ya it's so odd now, gotta try more now

[ivan.moony]

Not sure what that raw means. Uncompressed, each second in HD resolution should take 2Kx * 1Ky * 24frames = 48 MB.

[LOCKSUIT]

Hmm, 48 * 1 min is 2.8GBs, so it's actually feasible for some videos, then. Maybe not youtube's storage though lol. They still could let us download them tho.

[ivan.moony]

Oh, I almost forgot 48MB * 3colorsRGB = 144MB for each second of video

[MagnusWootton]

I use FastStone Capture,  for my "screen sucker" I use it all the time,  when I'm doing computer vision too.

A screen sucker is really easy to code,  its on the internet to copy and paste,  you just got to grab the desktop window into the windows bitmap format, and then I convert it to a direct x texture, so I can do my gpu code on it.

The cool thing the ones you buy do is grab the audio as well,  and I dont know how to do that, its a bit more secretive.

If you can do those 2 things, and have a decent interface, you can sell one on the internet,  but its only small timing so I dont want to do it.

[MikeB]

HEVC/265 is the next best thing to RAW. It used to take a lot of computing power to encode/decode but now Nvidia & AMD graphics cards do it natively.

Nvidia Maxwell V2, Pascal, Turing and onwards,
AMD GCN4 and onwards.

I don't think youtube will support it. There's a lot of patent holders & licensing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Patent_licensing

[LOCKSUIT]

This is just getting weirder and weirder omg. Now, y2mate I have discovered is giving me HIGHER quality than seen on youtube! I took the 1st and 5sec-in frames from the on-site and downloaded video, both full screen and put overlayed into paint.NET program, and upon moving over one the downloaded has less artifacts clearly I'm extremely certain. Another video, same result. More, same result. Ok so I guess I better stick with y2mate... But it only happens for big files....its worse if compare small files! Does this mean there's no way of getting the full big file then hmm.....I mean is this a pandemic decision YT made that's temporary....i.e. maybe they aren't displaying the better large file and are displaying a even crumbier than the downloaded for now..... So, it seems under "around" 30MBs it gives me on-site (displayed) a better picture than downloaded version...

[LOCKSUIT]

Ok I solved the issue....you need the webm files....i'm getting exact matches now for ones i didn't.....and you get them by this site:

https://youtube4kdownloader.com/download/video/https%253A%252F%252Fwww.youtube.com%252Fwatch%253Fv%253DACJSAOTeDC4

YT is still technically at fault. They made it tricky by not allowing downloads on youtube, and their old downloadeder i think was not giving me the fullest quality.

Wait, use below, 4K setting, the link above fails to give you the vid with sound sometimes.

https://en.loader.to/1/4k-video-downloader.html

[LOCKSUIT]

Uh oh, i can consistently get same or better quality using the new link above (will check 8K files tomorrow), but can't always know if I need to choose the same resolution or go 1 up higher. Going up 1 higher can give worse quality, sometimes better, or same. Sometimes I need to go up 2 levels ex. from 720 past 1080 to 1440......However one video all resolutions above 1080 had given me a 1080 vid in worse quality where 1080 was better, so can't go high to cover all, either...

[MagnusWootton]

Thats quite hard to handle high resolution images.
Taking the big challenge there,   smaller resolutions are easier in all respects.

[LOCKSUIT]

ok i finally got it....no really i think....use way#3 below for perfect YT capture:

https://www.makeuseof.com/chrome-extensions-download-youtube-videos/

it's local this time and happened to work on 3 hard vids I came across....tho you'll have to find which the 3 forms matches the YT version when it displays downloads, and clip the audio together using displayed tool, but it's easy for a few vids that are real important.