1. Why Ytpb?

YouTube allows viewers to pause, rewind, and continue playing live streams if the DVR feature is enabled by an uploader. The seek-back limit is up to 12 hours. Several ways exist to record (e.g., FFmpeg + yt-dlp) or play (e.g., mpv + yt-dlp or Streamlink) live streams.

What if you want to seek back in a stream (especially beyond the limit of the player)? Some projects (see, for example, 1, 2, 3, or 4) try to accomplish it in different ways: by saving an entire stream from the beginning, by defining the relative offset from now, or by specifying timestamps. However, all solutions, to our knowledge, don’t take into account the streaming instability causing from intermittent stutters to large gaps. It results in inaccurate rewind timings: the desired moment could be shifted to seconds, minutes, or even hours.

Ytpb will help you to locate the rewind interval precisely and bring the desired excerpt back in two ways: by downloading or playing it instantly in a player (via MPEG-DASH).