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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

#471

Post by zahlman »

embedding-shape wrote: post #95

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…

> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command

...Can they not just bundle a solver? For that matter, deno is available as a PyPI package.

> as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment

...An environment that doesn't allow you to install Deno, but does allow you to install yt-dlp?

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

#472

Post by titzer »

fragmede wrote: post #441
titzer wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> use it in line at the post office If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree. But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're…

If you think having a developer mode switch on your smartphone that would enable shell access and a build env is what's stopping "the majority of the public" from "zombifying", either you need to talk with more "majority of the public", or I've been talking to the wrong "majority of the public". The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functi…

There's definitely a mismatch between expectations between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean. We agree that the majority of people are not going to suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more open for development. It's a complex societal issue that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down, content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.

> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all

It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.

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

#473

Post by Too »

darkwater wrote: post #398
embedding-shape wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not. FWIW…

> That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.

When it comes to video it’s not only the browser. It’s also your gpu, your OS and your gpu drivers.

Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.

Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.

What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.

I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.

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

#474

Post by 9cb14c1ec0 »

noirscape wrote: post #257
usrbinbash wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser on…

Any serious video distribution system would not use metered bandwidth. You're not using a VPS provider. You are colocating some servers in a datacenter and buying an unmetered 10 gigabit or 100 gigabit IP transit service.

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

#475

Post by armchairhacker »

gloosx wrote: post #440
armchairhacker wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A specific issue with video data is that it’s much denser: the same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue. Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage but reliable bandwidth. Even then, there are a few competit…

The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.

> They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetization up to them

A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.

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

#476

Post by galaxy_gas »

jorvi wrote: post #467
PuercoPop wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They've also started to be really aggressive against VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're not a bot". Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN. It really makes me feel like there…

For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other separate thing require phone number )

There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN

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

#477

Post by dev0p »

dsamarin wrote: post #449
dev0p wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now largely more feasible. We should try again.

Would you like to work with me to create OurTube?

I mean, PeerTube is already halfway there. The problem is that it's a pain in the ass to host, last time I tried. Which sums up the whole problem as to why we have YouTube in the first place.

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

#478

Post by tedivm »

MrNeon wrote: post #421
PuercoPop wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has been working as well as before.

For the last two days I haven't been able to watch youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.

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

#479

Post by Wowfunhappy »

embedding-shape wrote: post #455
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from Youtube, right? That’s why we actually needed a JS runtime in the first place.

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

#480

Post by odo1242 »

JBiserkov wrote: post #420
embedding-shape wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great. And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.

I'm still using the Media Player Classic Home Cinema to this day. https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc Never liked VLC, but that's just me.

VLC has fallen slightly victim to the “developer team tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and still isn’t done with the rebuild but has stopped maintaining the original for like three years” issue that some software seems to have
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