Live data from Hacker News

Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

github.com

11–20 of 635 posts

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#12
post #5

I was surprised they went with Deno instead of Node, but since Deno has a readily available single-exe distribution that removes a lot of potential pain. This was pretty much just a matter of time, though; the original interpreter in Python was a brilliant hack but limited in capability. It was discussed a few years ago for the YouTube-dl project here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793061

The sandboxing features of Deno also seem to have played a role in that choice. I wouldn't overly trust that as a security layer but it's better than nothing.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#17
post #6

No requirements for me. I don´t use YT at all :) There are plenty of better alternatives.

My brother sent me a long talk on YouTube and pleaded with me to listen to it. Watching was pointless the video was just talking heads sitting in chairs. However you can’t just play a video and turn off your phone while listening to the audio on headphones. The mobile browser sleeps and the audio stops. So I used yt-dlp to rip the audio and dropped it into my Plex server to listen to with Prologue. It wasn’t even about the ads, I just wanted to do some gardening and listen to something on headphones while I worked, without my phone screen on.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#19
post #4

Can anyone explain specifically what the YT code does that the existing python interpreter is unusable and apparently quickjs takes 20 minutes to run it? Is it just a lot of CPU-bound code and the modern JIT runtimes are simply that much faster, or is it doing some trickery that deno optimizes well?

YouTube is mining cry-

I mean, running some unknown highly obfuscated CPU-demanding JS code on your machine - and using its results to decide whether to permit or deny video downloads.

The enshittification will continue until user morale improves.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#20
post #12
post #5

I was surprised they went with Deno instead of Node, but since Deno has a readily available single-exe distribution that removes a lot of potential pain. This was pretty much just a matter of time, though; the original interpreter in Python was a brilliant hack but limited in capability. It was discussed a few years ago for the YouTube-dl project here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793061

The sandboxing features of Deno also seem to have played a role in that choice. I wouldn't overly trust that as a security layer but it's better than nothing.

Deno sandboxing is paper thin, last time I looked they had very simple rules. It's a checkbox feature. If you want isolation use WASM.
Post reply on HN