YT videos get special download-resistent treatment but not others

Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 29 points – 10 months ago

For example, this invidious instance offers a download option for a YoutTube video, as that instance does for all YT videos:

~~https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg~~ (see update)

Exceptionally, if you opt to download it it merely opens a player to watch realtime. While other downloads from the same invidious instance have no issues. Why is this one getting different treatment?

update Apparently it’s an instance-specific problem with that particular video:

works → https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

broken → https://iv.ggtyler.dev/watch?v=lU4vv7qCQvg

I’ve seen other instances where this particular video download is broken. AFAIK, invidious.fdn.fr is the only place where it works as expected.

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This is your browser handling the content disposition wrongly.

Why would a browser handle it incorrectly for one video on one invidious instance, but not for most other videos and other instances?

Note that I’ve seen this broken behavior both in my own Chromium installation as well as Firefox in Windows as a public library.

There are a few reasons this might be the case!

The instance's UI might not be declaring that a or button element as a resource meant to be downloaded.
The instance's web server might not have declared the downloadable file's mime type as a resource. (Apache, nginx.)
Your operating system might not recognize the file type as a thing to be downloaded, or your browser isn't telling it to download to a file.

It's probably 1 or 2 if you're seeing the same behavior across multiple browsers and OS.