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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

#91

Post by supriyo-biswas »

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.

Why is this being downvoted? Are people really gonna shoot the messenger and fail to why a company may be willing to protect their competitive position?

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

#93

Post by the_af »

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.

The auto-dub feature is madness. I noticed it first a couple of days ago, I'm crossing my fingers that few authors choose to enable it, and that YouTube makes it easy to disable as a default in settings (not currently possible, you have to do it as you watch, every time).

I'm in a Spanish speaking country, but I want to watch English videos in English.

Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I want to listen to the original voices!

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

#94

Post by nikcub »

Just the other day there was a story posted on hn[0][1] that said YouTube secretly wants downloaders to work.

It's it's always been very apparent that YouTube are doing _just enough_ to stop downloads while also supporting a global audience of 3 billion users.

If the world all had modern iPhones or Android devices you'd bet they'd straight up DRM all content

[0] https://windowsread.me/p/best-youtube-downloaders

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45300810

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

#95

Post by al_borland »

shantara wrote: post #32
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’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.

I’m a Premium user and primarily watch on AppleTV. A little while ago they added a feature where if I press the button to skip ahead on the remote when a sponsor section starts, it skips over the whole thing. It skips over “commonly skipped” sections.

While it doesn’t totally remove it, it lets me choose if I want to watch or not, and gets me past it in a single button press. All using the native app. I was surprised the first time this happened. I assume the creators hate it.

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

#97

Post by m_ke »

fibers wrote: post #41
m_ke wrote: post #24

I used to work on video generation models and was shocked at how hard it was to find any videos online that were not hosted on YouTube, and YouTube has made it impossibly hard to download more than a few videos at a time.

you have to feed it multiple arguments with rate limiting and long wait times. i am not sure if there have been recent updates other than the js interpreter but ive had to spin up a docker instance of a browser to feed it session cookies as well.

Yeah we had to roll through a bunch of proxy servers on top of all the other tricks you mentioned to reliably download at a decent pace

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

#98

Post by ndriscoll »

bob1029 wrote: post #72
MangoToupe wrote: post #36

At 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.

If you want to compete with YT you need to basically build AWS S3 in your own data centers. You'd have to find a way to make your service run cheaper than google can if you wanted to survive. You'd have to get very scrappy and risky. I'd start with questions like: how many 9s of durability do we actually need here? Could we risk it until the model is proven? What are the consequences for losing cat videos and any% sp…

Games Done Quick has raised 10s of millions for charity. I suspect they could raise a few thousand for a few dozen TB of nvme storage if they wanted to host a speedrun archive.

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

#99

Post by jasode »

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.

>If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web

I disagree with the framing of "us vs them".

It's actually "us vs us". It's not just us plebians vs FAANG giants. The small-time independent publishers and creators also want to restrict the web because they don't want their content "stolen". They want to interact with real humans instead of bots. The following are manifestations of the same fear:

- small-time websites adding Anubis proof-of-work

- owners of popular Discord channels turning on the setting for phone # verification as a requirement for joining

- web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and others pay for the content

We're long past the days of colleagues and peers of ARPANET and NFSNET sharing info for free on university computers. Now everybody on the globe wants to try to make a dollar, and likewise, they feel dollars are being stolen from them.

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

#100

Post by sporkxrocket »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #63
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.

At least for YouTube, viewbotting is very much a thing, which undermines trust in the platform. Even if we were to remove Google ads from the equation, there’s nothing preventing someone from crafting a channel with millions of bot-generated views and comments, in order to paid sponsor placements, etc. The reasons are similar for Cloudflare, but their stances are a bit too DRMish for my tastes. I guess someone could…

As a viewer, this is not even remotely my problem.
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