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Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

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Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#41

Post by Barbing »

sussmannbaka wrote: post #32
andy_ppp wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on a phone. Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...

I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)

Works dandily here.

Suspicion: they’ve fingerprinted me hard and know I have premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private (with content blockers) and don’t hassle me.

Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#42

Post by moralestapia »

bdz wrote: post #36

I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site. I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.

Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to keep forever.

I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.

Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.

So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.

And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#43

Post by everdrive »

Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#44

Post by crazygringo »

globular-toast wrote: post #29

It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.

What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those creators can upload wherever they want.

And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or something?

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#46

Post by phantasmish »

astura wrote: post #34
crazygringo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is a major thing. I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not Wikipedia.

>Watching YT at work is a major thing. Where are these jobs where I can get paid to watch YouTube?

Lots of people listen to the audio. It’s like a podcast, or having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of jobs.

Some people probably also literally watch it, but I know multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.

Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone, including management, is more-or-less openly watching sports more than working during major tournaments?

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#47

Post by bitmasher9 »

Arainach wrote: post #30
bilekas wrote: post #27

More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these…

>outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.

That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#48

Post by crazygringo »

everdrive wrote: post #43

Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.

You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.

Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#49

Post by blarg1 »

bdz wrote: post #36

I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of them are not available anymore on the site. I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.

I started after channels started removing their own videos because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good stuff just gone.

Re: Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

#50

Post by matsemann »

everdrive wrote: post #43

Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.

With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording software sees a blank screen.

I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably get rid of that fallback as well.

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