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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

#221

A friend of mine recorded a YouTube video using OBS. She had to do some minor edits on it and could not use her system during the recording, but it worked. I told her to stop it, as that is infringing on the creator's copyright and is an assault on the nation's digital economy. She hasn't recorded a video since, at least not that I know about. I feel good about making sure YouTube can reasonably profit off of creator…

Instructions on Vine-glo grape concentrate during prohibition: "Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into wine."

I had another friend that simply recorded YouTube videos from their smartphone. As a zealous law abiding citizen, I immediately smacked the phone out of his hand and lectured on how copyright law is the foundation of the Information Age, which is the future, and disregarding it is an affront to modern life and civilization. I made him delete all his videos, and even made him hand write letters of apologies to the YouTube creators. These creators don't reveal their home addresses, but I'm sure they appreciated the emails containing the scan of the handwritten letters.

We have an old SCSI scanner, so it took about as long to scan it as it did to write it.

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

#222
post #94

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] h…

That conspiracy theory never even made sense to me. Why would anyone think that a payment and ad-supported content platform secretly wants their content to be leaked through ad and payment free means?

Mainly the theory that, if you can’t use downloaders to download videos, then people will no longer see YT as the go-to platform for any video hosting and will consider alternatives.

And I call that a theory for a reason. Creators can still download their videos from YT Studio, I'm not sure how much importance there is on being able to download any video ever (and worst case scenario people could screen recording videos)

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

#223
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!

Aside from the fact that the point of the announcement is that they're dropping it entirely, this "interpreter" is a hack that definitely is nowhere near capable of interpreting arbitrary JS. For example, the only use of `new` it handles is for Date objects, which it does by balancing parens to deduce the arguments for the call, then treating the entire group of arguments as a string and applying regexes to that.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For the web it requires that you run a snippet of javascript code (the challenge) in the browser to prove that you are not a bot. How does this prove you are not a bot. How does this code not work in a headless Chromimum if it's just client side JS?

Once JavaScript is running, it can perform complex fingerprinting operations that are difficult to circumvent effectively. I have a little experience with Selenium headless on Facebook. Facebook tests fonts, SVG rendering, CSS support, screen resolution, clock and geographical settings, and hundreds of other things that give it a very good idea of whether it's a normal client or Selenium headless. Since it picks a ce…

why can a bot dev not just get all of these values from the laptop's settings and hardwire the headless version to have the same values?

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

#225
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do. It's called YouTube Premium.

It's not though. You can't download an mp4 to use however you wish with YouTube Premium. And definitely not via an API.

None of that was mentioned in the comment?

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

#226
post #99

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…

> The small-time independent publishers and creators also want to restrict the web because they don't want their content "stolen"

... or just keep their site on the Internet. There hasn't been any major progress on sanctioning bad actors - be it people running vulnerable IoT crap that ends up being taken over by a botnet, cybercriminals and bulletproof hosters, or nation state actors. As long as you don't attack targets from your own geopolitical class (i.e. Russians don't attack Russians, a lot of malware will just quit if it spots Russian locale), you can do whatever the fuck you want.

And that is how we end up with darknet services where you can trivially order a DDoS taking down a website you don't like or, if you manage to get your opponent's IP leaked during an online game, their residential IP address. Pay with whatever shitcoin you have, and no one is any wiser who the perpetrator is.

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

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ReVanced and other alternatives exist. So long as they are broadcasting media to the public without an explicit login system, so as to take advantage of public access for exposure, it will remain perfectly legitimate and ethical to access the content through whatever browser or software you want. After they blitzed me with ads and started arbitrarily changing features and degrading the experience, I stopped paying th…

the problem is, you cannot be sure what Google does if they catch you violating their ToS. They have killed off entire google accounts for YT copyright strikes with no recourse.

That's why I'm not using Google accounts for anything important, I left gmail in 2014 and I really advise everybody to do the same.

You never know when the hammer can drop.

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

#230

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.

For now, yes, but soon CloudFlare and ever more annoying captchas may make that option practically impossible.
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