This will be interesting to see how it affects the numerous Android apps on F-Droid that are essentially wrappers around yt-dlp to create a YouTube Music clone.
Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
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Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#32I’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.…
I’m another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my less technical family members, and to use their native iOS apps.
If they really tighten the rules on Premium family sharing, I’ll drop the subscription in an instant.
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#33I wonder if we're going to see JS runtime fingerprinting attempt from google now
I doubt it'd be difficult for Google to detect if the client is a browser or not. They already need to check for signals of abnormal use to detect things like clickfarms and ad scams.
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It doesn’t have granularity in terms of what parts of the code have what permission - everything in the same process has the same permission, but aside from that I’m not sure what you mean about it being paper thin. Certainly WASM is a great option, and I think it can facilitate a more nuanced capabilities model, but for cases like this AFAIK Deno should be secure (to the extent that V8 is secure, which Chrome’s security depends on).
It being a checkbox feature is a weird way to frame it too, because that typically implies you’re just adding a feature to match your competitors, but their main competitors don’t have that feature.
In what ways does it fall short? If there are major gaps, I’d like to know because I’ve been relying on it (for personal projects only myself, but I’ve recommended it to others for commercial projects).
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#35[flagged]
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#36At some point we’re going to need a better place to put videos than YouTube. The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is beginning to be a real problem on the internet.
Yes, we have archive.org. We need more than that, though.
I’m sure there’s some distributed solution like IPFS but I haven’t seen any serious attempt to make this accessible to every day people.
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#37I’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.…
Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for offline downloads?
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#38I really appreciate the engineering effort went into this "JavaScript interpreter" https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/2025.09.23/yt_dlp/jsin...
heh, that's pretty cool.
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#39Can 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?
From https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/33186 > Currently, a new style of player JS is beginning to be sent where the challenge code is no longer modular but is hooked into other code throughout the player JS. So it's no longer a standalone script that can be interpreted but it depends on all the other code on the site? Which could still be interpreted maybe but is a lot more complex and might need DOM etc…
Yeah that is guess google using spaghetti code to keep their yt moat.
Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
#40SABR
"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…
Thanks for the comment, OP just throwing out just "SABR" like we're all supposed to know what it means.