Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by akudha » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 3:59 PM UTC

hackingonempty wrote: post #215

Havoc wrote: post #183

Really feels like the somewhat open nature of yt is running on borrowed time

First you spend money to create something people really want and build a big user base. Then you open it up to third party businesses and get them tied to your platform, making money off your users. Once locked in you turn the screws on the businesses to extract as much money from them as possible. Finally you turn the screws on the users to extract every last bit of value from the platform before it withers and fade…

What you say is true for most companies/software, but YouTube can play a nasty game for a very long time before it withers into irrelevance (if at all). They have enormous moat, one would need enormous resources to take on YouTube, I don't think anyone has that kind of patience or resources to even attempt. Like it or not, we are stuck with YT for a while.

I have learned so much from YouTube - I wish it was more open and friendly to its creators and users :(

In the meantime, all we can do is support smaller alternatives like https://nebula.tv/

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

#262

Post by advisedwang » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

lyu07282 wrote: post #78

apetresc wrote: post #47

The writing is on the wall for easy ripping. If there's any YT content you expect you'll want to preserve for a long time, I suggest spinning up https://www.tubearchivist.com/ or something similar and archiving it now while you still can.

They already had the proper-DRM tech for youtube movies for years, why didn't they already turn that on for all content?

YT probably HAD to put the DRM on in order to get the license deal with the studios. Nobody is twisting their arm as much so other interests (wider audience, less server side resources, not getting around to it) can prevail.

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

#263

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:00 PM UTC

balder1991 wrote: post #255

toomuchtodo wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs solve challenges. Can we not solve these challenges with sufficiently advanced LLMs? Gemini even, if you're feeling lulz-y.

Yes, by spending money.

I agree, in some cases and depending on LLM endpoint, some money may need to be spent to enable ripping. But is it cheaper than paying Youtube/Google? That is the question.

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

#264

Post by jerf » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:01 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #241

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 constantly baffled by how bad the implementation of YouTube Premium downloads is. Videos will buffer to 100% in a matter of seconds but get endlessly stuck when I hit the download button. Why? All the bytes are literally on my device already.

The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x. Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again, the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30 seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its claims in small text that downloads are good for a month without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30 minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone, defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet fully downloaded".

Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those don't have to be exclusive possibilities.

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

#265

Post by encom » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

nananana9 wrote: post #207

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what Accelerate means? I want them to go overboard. I want BigTech to go nuts on this stuff. I want broken systems and nonsense. Because that’s the only way we’re going to get anything better.

If you showed me the current state of YouTube 8 years ago - multiple unskippable ads before each video, 5 midrolls for a 10 minute video, comments overran with bots, video dislikes hidden, the shorts hell, the dysfunctional algorithm, .... - I would've definitely told you "Yep, that will be enough to kill it!" At this point I don't know - I still have the feeling that "they just need to make it 50% worse again and we…

It's classic frog boiling. I want them (for whatever definition of "them") to just nuke the frog from orbit.

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

#266

Post by astroflection » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #89

degamad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Google started using IP range blocks recently. If they decide that your IP stinks, they'll block YouTube viewing and demand that you log in. It's inconsistent as fuck, and even TOR exit nodes still work without a log in sometimes.

I can confirm this. I guess they didn't like me using Invidious.

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

#267

Post by posterguy » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #153

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anyone here who runs a startup, I propose two lifestyle benefits you should add: 1. Unlimited YouTube Premium 2. Unlimited drink reimbursement (coffee, tea, smoothies, whatever) The psychological sense of loss from those two things would be larger than any 5% raise.

I personally wouldn't want to hire a startup employee who couldn't figure out how to install a browser extension. ;-)

ah yes, let me just install a browser extension on the kids ipad

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

#268

Post by raincole » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:03 PM UTC

m_ke wrote: post #236

raincole wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube has made it impossibly hard to download more than a few videos at a time I wonder why. Perhaps because people use bots to mass-crawl contents from youtube to train their AI. And Youtube prioritizes normal users who only watch a few videos at most at the same time, over those crawling bots. Who knows?

I wonder how Google built their empire. Who knows? I’m sure they didn’t scrape every page and piece of media on the internet and train models on it. My point was that the large players have monopoly hold on large swaths of the internet and are using it to further advantage themselves over the competition. See Veo 3 as an example, YouTube creators didn’t upload their work to help Google train a model to compete with t…

> how Google built their empire. Who knows

By scraping every page and directing the traffic back to the site owners. That was how Google built their empire.

Are they abusing the empire's power now? In multiple ways, such as the AI overview stuff. But don't pretend that crawling Youtube and training video generation models is the same as what Google (once) brought to the internet. And it's ridiculous to expect Youtube to make it easy for crawlers.

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

#269

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:04 PM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #58

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.

I think this is just another indication of how the web is a fragile equilibrium in a very adversarial ecosystem. And to some extent, things like yt-dlp and adblocking only work if they're "underground". Once they become popular - or there's a commercial incentive, like AI training - there ends up being a response.

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

#270

Post by jsheard » Wed, Sep 24, 2025, 4:06 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

YouTube's economy of scale goes way beyond having their own datacenters, they have edge caches installed inside most ISP networks which soak up YT traffic before it even reaches a Google DC. It would take a staggering amount of investment to compete with them on cost.