Technology

strip out the HDCP

Interesting, I had figured that was possible in principle but hadn't kept up with what was actually around.

But still, the HDCP stream is decompressed video, so if you want to save it, you'll have to either put it through yet another layer or lossy compression, or burn a ridiculous amount of disk space compared to the compressed stream that Youtube sent to your computer.

We'll see how things go. Google in the past has made occasional modest gestures to get in the way of downloading, but they haven't made serious effort to prevent it. Who knows whether that will last.

it's not hard to do it yourself either

They aren't fool proof, and relatively easy to detect from the source.

Source: high end AV tech for like half a decade