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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

#121

Post by BoredPositron »

antiloper wrote: post #110
BoredPositron wrote: post #35

[flagged]

[flagged]

I know the definition precisely, which is why I used that word. If you disagree with my usage, please explain why their actions don't constitute extortion.

Here's what happened: They leveraged their platform to get 60,000 people to sign a petition.

Using this petition and the resulting legal proceeding, they forced the entire community's hand by framing it as "the last chance" to get the trademark released, which it is solely because of their actions.

They unilaterally made it the "last chance" without seeking even minimal input from the community they claim to represent. Not even OpenJS. Now they're demanding 200k, citing the difficulty of proceeding alone and suggesting they might not be able to succeed without this funding.

This is textbook extortion: creating artificial urgency, leveraging community pressure, and demanding payment under the threat that their stated goal will fail without it.

You don't need enemies with friends like that.

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

#122

Post by skydhash »

jasode wrote: post #99
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.

>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…

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

Those were already public. The issue is AI bot ddos-ing the server. Not everyone has infinite bandwith.

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

I still think that Discord is a weird channel for community stuff. There's a lot of different format for communication, but people are defaulting to chat.

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

Paid contents are good (Coursera, O'Reilly, Udemy,...). But a lot of these services wants to have free powered by ads (for audience?).

---

The fact is, we have two main bad actors: AI companies hammering servers and companies that want to centralize content (that they do not create) by adding gatekeeping extension to standard protocols.

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

#123

Post by crtasm »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #56

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?

I'm using it right now without a youtube account.

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

#124

Post by ACCount37 »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #117
ACCount37 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

No, the difference is: if I'm fighting viewbots, I want zero cues to be emitted to the client. The client should NEVER know whether its view is being counted or not, or why.

Having no reliable feedback makes it so much harder for a viewbotter to find a workaround.

If there's a visible block on video downloads? They're not fighting viewbots with that.

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

#125

Post by sirbranedamuj »

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...

This is the buried lede in this announcement for me - I had no idea they were already going to such lengths. It's really impressive!

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

#126

Post by zelphirkalt »

degamad wrote: post #67
zelphirkalt wrote: post #56

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?

When did it start requiring one? It didn't require one the last time I used it a few months ago...

I think for me it has been this way for a year or so. Maybe it is because I am on a VPN. I also cannot view YouTube videos on YouTube any longer, because it always wants me to log in, to "prove I am not a bot". So I have switched to only using invidious instances, and if they don't work, then I just cannot watch the video.

I wish content creators would think of their own good more, and start publishing on multiple platforms. Are there any terms that YouTube has for them, that reduce revenue, if they publish elsewhere as well? Or is it mostly just them being unaware?

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

#128

Post by skydhash »

random29ah wrote: post #111

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 htt…

Put that next to GitHub. The app is nearly unusable on an i5 8th, often I just download a snapshot to browse locally.

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

#129

Post by bArray »

Ronsor [1] and reply by seproDev:

> Why can't we embed a lightweight interpreter such as QuickJS?

> @Ronsor #14404 (comment)

The linked comment [2]:

> @dirkf This solution was tested with QuickJS which yielded execution times of >20 minutes per video

How on earth can it be that terrible compared to Deno?

[1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404#issuecomment-3...

[2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404#issuecomment-3...

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

#130

Post by jrochkind1 »

jasode wrote: post #99
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.

>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…

i want my content borrowed/shared, and I still need to be engaged in this stuff because the poorly behaved distributed bots that have arisen in the past year are trying to take boundless resources from my site(s), that I cannot afford.
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