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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

#141

I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data. It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.

Back then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now, however, companies prioritise their own interests over the user.

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

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably trivial but eh

Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

Ooooh thanks! ElasticSearch? Who cares, gotta use somehow that spare memory in my k8s home cluster!

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

#144

I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data. It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.

1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC age and well into the period where it was cool to have a desktop PC and really learn about it. Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.

"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.

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

#145
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.

You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.

I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.

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

#147
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)

This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an update, and it went back to working with uBO active after the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious interruptions with ads.

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

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work... Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...

I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).

It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.

The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.

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

#149
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.

You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.

I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.

As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.

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