It’s really hard to save videos on the Internet, now – is this entirely to do with the video player/website? Or are web browsers part of the problem?
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For example, the right click “save video” function is no longer available on many, if not most videos. Is this entirely due to the website itself? Does the Internet browser share any blame?
Additionally, on mobile Reddit is Fun app (since the official app is the worst Reddit client out there), saving videos result in a corrupted file, every time. It wasn’t like this 10 years ago. Is Reddit corrupting the file intentionally? Or is the app itself broken?
Typically if you can’t save the video it’s because the data of the video are encrypted.
YouTube knows how to “decode” this encryption inside their code for the website. Although the stream may come from one of it’s many data servers, the front end(web page) has a “key” that knows how to read the video data.
If you want to bypass all of that, just screen capture the video. Or use a capture card that sits between your monitor and the computer.
The biggest hurdle with saving video files is that they nowadays get broken up into small segments. Apart from intentionally making downloading harder, this also enables the distributor to cache individual segments on mirror servers, and to switch quality levels on the fly. You can no longer extract a single URL and download it. This issue also happens with new style “radio” streams. You need some kind of a program like “YouTube-DL” to interpret the playlist and join the video together. But those programs need to be constantly updated to keep up with changes that web site authors make.
Web browsers have also been getting more oriented for content consuption, and have been removing advanced features. Most often the playback is done by an “app” downloaded from the server, which has no interet in allowing download.
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The barrier is copyright law and fear of lawsuits. They intentionally make it difficult to save video so that the platform can be used to control and monitor your access to the content. There is big money tied up in this.
But yes, it does vary by website and content. Browsers and website operators do not have to force content to be encrypted and streaming-only, but the technology to do that is there for those who want it, which is most of them.
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