Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

Post by johnisgood » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:35 AM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #504

mrsilencedogood wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fortunately it is now easier than ever to do small-scale scraping, the kind yt-dlp does. I can literally just go write a script that uses headless firefox + mitmproxy in about an hour or two of fiddling, and as long as I then don't go try to run it from 100 VPS's and scrape their entire website in a huge blast, I can typically archive whatever content I actually care about. Basically no matter what protection mechani…

> fortunately it is now easier than ever to do small-scale scraping, the kind yt-dlp does. this is absolutely not the case. I've been web scraping since 00s and you could just curl any html or selenium the browser for simple automation but now it's incredibly complex and expensive even with modern tools like playwright and all of the monthly "undetectable" flavors of it. Headless browsers are laughably easy to detect…

Post by johnisgood » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:41 AM UTC

ACCount37 wrote: post #19

progbits wrote: post #4

Can anyone explain specifically what the YT code does that the existing python interpreter is unusable and apparently quickjs takes 20 minutes to run it? Is it just a lot of CPU-bound code and the modern JIT runtimes are simply that much faster, or is it doing some trickery that deno optimizes well?

YouTube is mining cry- I mean, running some unknown highly obfuscated CPU-demanding JS code on your machine - and using its results to decide whether to permit or deny video downloads. The enshittification will continue until user morale improves.

Post by DecentShoes » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #208

nikcub wrote: post #94

Just the other day there was a story posted on hn[0][1] that said YouTube secretly wants downloaders to work. It's it's always been very apparent that YouTube are doing _just enough_ to stop downloads while also supporting a global audience of 3 billion users. If the world all had modern iPhones or Android devices you'd bet they'd straight up DRM all content [0] https://windowsread.me/p/best-youtube-downloaders [1] h…

That conspiracy theory never even made sense to me. Why would anyone think that a payment and ad-supported content platform secretly wants their content to be leaked through ad and payment free means?

Post by elric » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:47 AM UTC

wraptile wrote: post #58

Days of just getting data off the web are coming to an end as everything requires a full browser running thousands of lines of obfuscated js code now. So instead of a website giving me that 1kb json that could be cached now I start a full browser stack and transmit 10 megabytes through 100 requests, messing up your analytics and security profile and everyone's a loser. Yay.

Post by Gabrys1 » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 7:51 AM UTC

cranberryturkey wrote: post #370

bigyabai wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NewPipe is incredible. If Google ever stops signing apps like that, I'll be switching to a Linux phone.

as soon as they have a map app that works with car play i'm switching to linux phone.