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Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

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

#51

Post by femtozer »

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.…

I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.

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

#52

Post by ndriscoll »

VladVladikoff wrote: post #17
trilogic wrote: 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 abo…

Firefox Mobile has an extension "Video Background Play Fix" to disable the Page Visibility API anti-feature.

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

#53

Post by piyuv »

femtozer wrote: post #51
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.…

I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.

It’ll be fixed when some product manager can offer it as a promotion project

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

#54

Post by codedokode »

ACCount37 wrote: post #49
Andrews54757 wrote: post #30

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…

If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked browser implementations? Now you know.

There could be valid reasons for fighting downloaders, for example:

- AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has.

- YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT" to promote bloggers migration.

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

#56

Post by zelphirkalt »

What I found much more annoying, and so far have not been able to work around, is that yt-dlp requires you to have a YouTube account, something that I have not had for a decade or so, and am unwilling to create again.

What tool can I use to simply store what my browser receives anyway, in a single video file?

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

#57

Post by LordShredda »

est wrote: post #16

I really appreciate the engineering effort went into this "JavaScript interpreter" https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/2025.09.23/yt_dlp/jsin...

I'm on mobile, this seems like an actual js interpreter that only does objects and arithmetic. Impressive that it went that far

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

#58

Post by wraptile »

Days of just getting data off the web are coming to an end as everything requires a full browser running thousands of lines of obfuscated js code now. So instead of a website giving me that 1kb json that could be cached now I start a full browser stack and transmit 10 megabytes through 100 requests, messing up your analytics and security profile and everyone's a loser. Yay.

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

#59

Post by toomuchtodo »

codedokode wrote: post #54
ACCount37 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked browser implementations? Now you know.

There could be valid reasons for fighting downloaders, for example: - AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has. - YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT" to promote bloggers migration.

- Enforce views of ads

(not debating the validity of this reason, but this is the entire reason Youtube exists, to sell and push ads)

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

#60

Post by baxuz »

codedokode wrote: post #54
ACCount37 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked browser implementations? Now you know.

There could be valid reasons for fighting downloaders, for example: - AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has. - YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT" to promote bloggers migration.

Then they should allow a download API for paying customers.
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