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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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fitting into my carry-bag so I can use it in line at the post office" is already possible for a PC and many people do it all the time.

That's not remotely true. The only person I've ever seen in public using something like https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to STAND in line while using a laptop is me.

That looks like something a dweeb would use, I want one

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? What’s missing?

* Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as "music" by uploaders, to start. * Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc. * Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device. * If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device. (Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)

* Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music app.

* There is a liked videos playlist

Yes, I read your comment above.

Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.

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

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?…

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.

There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?…

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later. I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.

Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.

And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.

Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.

The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.

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

#226

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.

> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard ` ` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other. The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what…

Plain elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.

I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).

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

#228
post #4
post #3

In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging demographic.

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

I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.

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

#229

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 bl…

There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind of irrelevant to the point.

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

#230

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.

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. I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends. By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they do…

You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
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