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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

#351

Post by j45 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #299
dspillett wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but…

It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another. I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downl…

It's not paranoid, it's more attack surfaces that don't need to be.

Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've found helpful to do this.

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

#352

Post by j45 »

recursive wrote: post #262
j45 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon. Flash, also almost came built into every browser. By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine. Today, most browsers have most codecs.

Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark patterns.

Wouldn't be surprising, likely happened more when competition showed up.

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

#353

Post by CharlesW »

j1elo wrote: post #223
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.

That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.

> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…

Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.

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

#354

Post by yupyupyups »

Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as big of an issue as it is today.

What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal users that YT is optimized for.

I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve the bulk of the blame imo.

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

#355

Post by dewey »

Almondsetat wrote: post #242
dewey wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can donate to a free project, including yt-dlp ( https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/master/Maintainers.md#... )

The developers can arbitrarily decide their own goals and always claim underfunding, that's why it's meaningless in this context

I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against, but the fact that big corporations are built on top of the work of volunteers (curl, ffmpeg) who mostly have to beg for funding is a known fact.

Example from yesterday: https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-send...

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

#356

Post by charcircuit »

cons0le wrote: post #293
ConceptJunkie wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music). Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.

I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already. What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )

No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.

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

#357

Post by mikkupikku »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #347
recursive wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.

do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab only for video itself to load, while rest of the page doesn't?

That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.

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

#358

Post by j45 »

throwaway94275 wrote: post #101
Tabular-Iceberg wrote: post #51

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.

Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as they do today.

There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.

Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some point by Apple at least.

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

#359

Post by kevincox »

vachina wrote: post #13
xeonmc wrote: 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.

They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on L2 attested device.

iOS can already attest to websites that they are running in unmodified Safari. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k

I guess that isn't quite enough to prevent screen recording but these devices also support DRM which does this.

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

#360

Post by dspillett »

embedding-shape wrote: post #299
dspillett wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but…

It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another. I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downl…

You could serve the files yourself from a server populated by updating them from github after review. You'd need to either sign the domain with your own CA that the host running yt-dlp trusts, or patch yt-dlp to use a different server name, but neither of those steps should be too onerous.
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