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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

#111

Post by random29ah »

It's almost funny, not to mention sad, that their player/page has been changed, filling it with tons of JS that makes less powerful machines lag.

For a while now, I've been forced to change "watch?v=" to "/embed/" to watch something in 480p on an i3 Gen 4, where the same video, when downloaded, uses ~3% of the CPU.

However, unfortunately, it doesn't always work anymore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0 https://www.youtube.com/embed/xvFZjo5PgG0

While they worsen the user experience, other sites optimize their players and don't seem to care about downloaders (pr0n sites, for example).

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

#114

Post by pwg »

rwmj wrote: post #81
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure that's a problem for Youtube. What does it have to do with me rendering Youtube videos on my own computer in the way I want?

> What does it have to do with me rendering Youtube videos on my own computer in the way I want?

It doesn't. That interferes with google's ad revenue stream, which is why YT continues to try to make it harder and harder to do so.

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

#117

Post by supriyo-biswas »

ACCount37 wrote: post #83
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If any of this was done to combat viewbotting, then any disruption to token calculation would prevent views from being registered - not videos from being downloaded.

From my perspective both problems are effectively the same. I want to count unique users by checking for asset downloads and correlating unique session IDs. People can request the static assets directly, leading to view booting and waste of egress bandwidth.

The solution: have clients prove they are a legitimate client by running some computationally intensive JS that interacts with DOM APIs, etc. (which is not in any way unique to big tech, see Anubis/CreepJS etc.)

The impact on the hobbyist use case is, to them, just collateral damage.

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

#118

Post by jaffa2 »

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…

on iphone, if you use youtube in the browser in stead of the app (as you should), then you can do background listening if you play the video, lock the phone, unlock the phone, play th video again, lock the phone, unlock the phone, resume play with the media controls, lock the phone.

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

#119

Post by jollyllama »

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 wonder how long until it gets split off into its own project. For the time being, it could do with a lot more documentation. At least they've got some tests for it!

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

#120

Post by AbuAssar »

on why they chose Deno instead of node:

"Other JS runtimes (node/bun) could potentially be supported in the future, the issue is that they do not provide the same security features and sandboxing that deno has. You would be running untrusted code on your machine with full system access. At this point, support for other JS runtimes is still TBD, but we are looking in to it."

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