Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 635 posts

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

#22

Post by blacklion »

trilogic wrote: post #6

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

I'm watching not youtube but video creators. There is no even worse alternative if person you want to watch doesn't publish video on other site.

Maybe, for watching "recommended" stream without any subscriptions there are alternatives (which? I cannot name good ones, anyway), but if you watch your subscription you are bound to platform which contain this subscription. And no, content creators are not interchangeable.

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

#23

Post by adzm »

eth0up wrote: post #2

SABR

This is unrelated to the JavaScript challenge this post is about, and a very specific technology for video streaming. SABR means "server-side adaptive bitrate" and is a bespoke video streaming protocol that Google is moving towards, away from the existing DASH protocol. There is some info here https://github.com/LuanRT/yt-sabr-shaka-demo

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

#26

Post by beerandt »

piyuv wrote: post #9

I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting for download..” on my iPad. Same on iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself). Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c flash drive, and watched it from that.…

Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with practically no customer service options, no real solutions besides cancel.

I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so it was a last straw.

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

#27

Post by jumpocelot »

eth0up wrote: post #2

SABR

"In 2025, YouTube started rolling out a new streaming protocol, known as SABR, which breaks down the video into smaller chunks whose internal URLs dynamically change rather than provide one whole static URL. This is problematic because it prevents downloaders (such as yt-dlp) from being able to download YouTube videos at resolutions higher than 360p due to only detecting format code 18 (which is the only format code available that doesn't use SABR). So far, this issue has only affected the web client, so one workaround would be to use a different client, such as tv_embedded (where SABR has not yet been rolled out to), so for instance in yt-dlp you could add --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=tv_embedded" to use that client. It is not known how long this workaround will work as intended, as YouTube rolls out SABR to more and more clients."

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube/Technical_det...

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

#28

Post by jeroenhd »

tomalaci wrote: post #15

Looks like this runtime is written in Rust. Really does seem like Rust is rapidly swallowing all kinds of common tools and libraries. In this case a single compiled binary for multiple architectures is quite convenient for something like yt-dlp.

Deno itself is written mostly in Rust, but it also leverages [1] Google's V8 Javascript engine which is written in C++.

[1]: https://choubey.gitbook.io/internals-of-deno/architecture/v8

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

#29

Post by masklinn »

piyuv wrote: post #9

I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting for download..” on my iPad. Same on iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself). Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c flash drive, and watched it from that.…

Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you were live-streaming and didn’t think to save a local copy or it impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.

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

#30

Post by Andrews54757 »

Nsig/sig - Special tokens which must be passed to API calls, generated by code in base.js (player code). This is what has broken for yt-dlp and other third party clients. Instead of extracting the code that generates those tokens (eg using regular expressions) like we used to, we now need to run the whole base.js player code to get these tokens because the code is spread out all over the player code.

PoToken - Proof of origin token which Google has lately been enforcing for all clients, or video requests will fail with a 403. On android it uses DroidGuard, for IOS, it uses built in app integrity apis. For the web it requires that you run a snippet of javascript code (the challenge) in the browser to prove that you are not a bot. Previously, you needed an external tool to generate these PoTokens but with the Deno change yt-dlp should be capable of producing these tokens by itself in the near future.

SABR - Server side adaptive bitrate streaming, used alongside Google's UMP protocol to allow the server to have more control over buffering, given data from the client about the current playback position, buffered ranges, and more. This technology is also used to do server-side ad injection. Work is still being done to make 3rd party clients work with this technology (sometimes works, sometimes doesn't).

Nsig/sig extraction example:

- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/4429fd0450a3fbd5e89573...

- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/4429fd0450a3fbd5e89573...

PoToken generation:

- https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/PO-Token-Guide

- https://github.com/LuanRT/BgUtils

SABR:

- https://github.com/LuanRT/googlevideo

EDIT2: Addeded more links to specific code examples/guides

Post reply on HN