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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

#371

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.

I think companies always prioritized their own interests.

A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal information to third parties.

Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they thought they'd get richer that way.

I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that you can get away with #2 so they do that.

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

#372
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.

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

#373

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 unnatura…

Hopefully most of what the bots are ruthlessly scraping is all the AI slop that is filling YT. Hopefully garbage in - garbage out will kill off all the AI nonsense.

yes, "AI" can be useful, but nonsense and slop are not.

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

#374

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.

A media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not really obvious how to create a business that deals in media without some kind of protection over the copying and distribution of that media.

I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information.

I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.

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

#375
post #49
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.

There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.

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

#376
post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...

Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).

Guess why it was asymmetrical in the first place ... Telcos wanted to sell the upload bandwidth to streaming companies. Another double dipping Telco monopoly squeeze and customer boxing / enshitification from very early on.

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

#377
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You people always make everything more complicated than necessary. yt-dlp -o '%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s' --cookies-from-browser chrome https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL

Yep. But.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#378

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's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.

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

#379
post #186

Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just add another flag to the invocation: yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX' It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me. [youtube] [js…

Glad to hear it’s faster now! YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!

I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did

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

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they can't. Way too many devices, including televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to mention antitrust would be all over that. With their dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple governments filing lawsuits ASAP.

What OS are televisions using to run all of their streaming media apps? It's not iOS.

Samsung Smart TVs run Tizen.
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