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Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

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Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. If the annual subscription is $100 then the value of fixing this is $100. If it is free, then, what's the profile worth for a year... there's the value. User retention is a thing.

I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why are engineers concerned with them? The idea of engineers needing to justify monetary value is just... ill conceived. They should be concerned with engineering problems. Let the engineering manager worry about the imaginary money numbers. > User retention is a thing. Problem is no one needs to care about the product's quality if the product has the market cornered.…

> I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why are engineers concerned with them?

That's what they're directly or indirectly being graded on. Even if they don't have to show how their work impacted the company's bottom line, their managers or their managers' managers have to, and poop just rolls downhill.

> The idea of engineers needing to justify monetary value is just... ill conceived. They should be concerned with engineering problems. Let the engineering manager worry about the imaginary money numbers.

If this was only possible in this industry. If you're in a small company, you're wearing multiple hats anyway. If you're in a big corp, well, my wife hates that I see this in everything, but - hidden inflation is a thing. As roles are eliminated (er, "streamlined"), everyone is forced to be responsible for things they're not really supposed to care about (my favorite example is filing expense reports).

As you aptly put it upthread: we fucked up...

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#452
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How on earth can it be that terrible [>20 minutes] compared to Deno? QuickJS uses a bytecode interpreter (like Python, famously slow), and is optimised for simplicity and correctness. Whereas Deno uses a JIT compiler (like Java, .NET and WASM). Deno uses the same JIT compiler as Chrome, one of the most heavily-optimised in the world. That doesn't normally lead to such a large factor in time difference, but it expla…

JIT is still banned by policy on a LOT of mobile devices, meaning that previous usage of yt-dlp on mobile is now effectively unsupportable.

well yt-dlp would also be banned surely? so it's not an issue anyway

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#453
post #258
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try. I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays v…

I use yt-dlp inside of a-shell on iOS, then play files using VLC.

i use this for things i repost on IG with commentary. i would rather not have a huge folder of downloads of random stuff i'm not even sure i want to revisit. (and i'm bad about clearing out space on my phone.)

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#454
post #9

I’m a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train. The app got stuck at “waiting for download..” on my iPad. Same on iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself). Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c flash drive, and watched it from that.…

YouTube premium "download" is also just completely fake. Downloaded where? What file can I copy?

Files? What era do you hail from? Prehistory?

There are no files anymore. I mean, there technically are, but copyright industry doesn't want you to look at them without authorization, security people don't want you to look at them at all, and UX experts think it's a bad idea for you to even know such thing as "files" exists.

Share and enjoy. Like and subscribe. The world is just apps all the way down.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://brave.com/transparency/

That Brave link shows growth has flatlined

The line isn't of MAU growth.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#456
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They flop back and forth at a high frequency though. I can hit all three cases in five minutes and it's been like that for months. Also there is never a sensible reason to offer video speeds as a combo-box popup of all options from .05x to 4.00x. It's like three times the vertical size of my screen.

All that testing and they've never thought to offer a one-tap way to get back into speed control once I've adjusted the speed one or more times on the same video. Don’t get me started on the “highest quality” account setting absolutely never selecting 4K options when available. They simply have to try to save the bandwidth money by nesting quality options a couple taps away. (A userscript fixes this on desktop and ev…

This is becoming a common pattern everywhere now.

Case in point (and sorry for bringing up this topic), LLM providers seem to be doubling down on automatic model selection, and marketing it as a feature that improves experience and response quality for the users, even though it's a blatant attempt to cut serving costs down by tricking users (or taking the choice away) into querying a cheaper, weaker model. It's obviously not what users want - in this space, even more than in video streaming, in 90%+ of end-user cases, what the user wants is the best SOTA model available.

At least with YouTube, I recall them being up front about this in the past, early in the COVID-19 pandemic - IIRC the app itself explained in the UI that the default quality is being lowered to conserve bandwidth that suddenly got much more scarce.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. If the annual subscription is $100 then the value of fixing this is $100. If it is free, then, what's the profile worth for a year... there's the value. User retention is a thing.

I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why are engineers concerned with them? The idea of engineers needing to justify monetary value is just... ill conceived. They should be concerned with engineering problems. Let the engineering manager worry about the imaginary money numbers. > User retention is a thing. Problem is no one needs to care about the product's quality if the product has the market cornered.…

[dead]

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it. Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting advertising. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://brave.com/transparency/

I think you've missed the point entirely. The point is that if everyone is using a single browser (not just Chrome/Chromium) then that actor gets disproportionate control over the internet. That's not good for anyone. The specific gripe to Chromium is that _Google_ gets that say, and I think they are less trustworthy than other actors. I'm not asking anyone to trust Mozilla, but anyone suggesting Mozilla is less trus…

> I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me here.

I'm telling you that Firefox is going to be out of business soon because users favor ad blocking and blocking trackers. That is the trend. Firefox isn't growing anymore.

> Honestly I have more questions looking at the Brave "transparency" report, as it seems to have more information about users than Firefox...

Metrics can be transmitted without revealing the user. This is well known.

You can't suggest anything. I am done with this conversation.

Re: Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

#460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side, that opens an opportunity for 10,000 companies whose only activity is scraping 10MB worth of garbage and providing a sane API for it. Luckily all that is becoming a non-issue, as most content on these websites isn't worth scraping anymore.

*and whose only customers are using it for AI training

They can afford it because the market rightfully bets on such trained models being more useful than upstream sources.

In fact, at this point in time (it won't last), one of the most useful applications of LLMs is to have them deal with all the user-hostile crap that's bulk of the web today, so you don't have to suffer through it yourself. It's also the easiest way to get any kind of software interoperability at the moment (this will definitely not last long).

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