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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

#451

Post by rubyn00bie »

PuercoPop wrote: post #418
recursive wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few months Youtube usability borders on usable

Yeah, big same here. It’s pretty frustrating, because I pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox for YEARS… until maybe six months ago?

It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.

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

#452

Post by tuhgdetzhh »

recursive wrote: post #259
WD-42 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only if you use Googles Chrome Browser. Other browsers have issues like Firefox[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517

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

#453

Post by halapro »

bdz wrote: 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.

With more content than we need being produced regularly, do you really need to store everything you've ever watched?

I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time.

Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.

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

#454

Post by yupyupyups »

Alex2037 wrote: post #401
yupyupyups wrote: post #354

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…

>I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be t…

>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare

Lol, that's so true.

>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,

Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.

For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.

Who knows.

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

#455

Post by embedding-shape »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #433
embedding-shape wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise…

> The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization I meant the challenge that is the reason they need the Javascript in the first place. You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.

The original point was this:

> > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain

Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.

> You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.

That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm adding a manifest which controls what this application can actually access, which is basically a VM config, where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part that shouldn't have github.com/* access.

Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of workarounds, so not the end of the world.

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

#456

Post by nutjob2 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #412
mmaunder wrote: post #343

Scraping sucks. Imagine a broken API with new breakages every few weeks. Now imagine the provider hates you. Shout out to the team for what they do.

Exactly. I could never maintain yt-dlp. Must be exhausting.

I think being in a pitched battle with YT is kind of fun, if you enjoy that sort of challenge, and winning to boot.

I mean YT has perfect knowledge of its adversary's moves and a huge staff and they're still losing. It must at least be satisfying. Also its an important job.

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

#457

Post by metalliqaz »

tuhgdetzhh wrote: post #452
recursive wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Only if you use Googles Chrome Browser. Other browsers have issues like Firefox[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517

I can no longer watch videos on YouTube with Firefox.

When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.

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

#458

Post by nutjob2 »

bilekas wrote: post #27

More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At the expense of the 'users experience' but these…

Enshitiffication is the user experience. The passive, impassive, drooling hordes don't even notice.

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

#459

Post by blackhaj7 »

baobabKoodaa wrote: post #413
arbll wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but please do not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to execute untrusted code . Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.

> It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp yt-dlp supports a huge list of websites other than youtube

Is there a full list? I struggled to find one

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

#460

Post by raydev »

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?

Are you running any extensions that modify content?
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