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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

#551
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…

adblocking "users" are not Youtube's users. What do you mean blocking ads has no bearing on their service? It sounds like you are saying user experience is "I should get this for free".

YouTube itself is offered for free. The creators of content are not Google employees. Adblocking is a safety measure on my own physical machine.

Not YouTube's users? Maybe. But I am, so by that metric there's some doubt.

I paid for over 2 years for the premium, the cost increases and it's cheaper to pihole everything and support the usual suspects on patreon.

It's become a scenario of "I've given you so many adverts, you should pay me to get less."

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

#552
post #464
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recently I've found Youtube to just show a white screen if it detects Firefox+uBO.

There's probably scripts you can add to your ubo to combat this.

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

#553

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 ?

yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)

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

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.

This absolutely screams graphics card drivers problems to me.

Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being downloaded?

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

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work... Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...

I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show). It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course. The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefo…

Just move the capturing a layer further away, there is always the analog hole.

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

#556
post #432

I wonder how the whole thing works when I open a youtube video from a preview inside a chat application on my mobile phone. It looks like the video loads and starts playing in some kind of in-app browser, but there is just full-screen video and nothing else. I also never faced any ads in this "mode" of playing a video, yet recently some strange things started happening where the playback would start together with an…

Not sure what you’re asking.

You can get fullscreen video in a desktop browser by pressing F or clicking the fullscreen icon (broken rectangle) below the video.

You can get ad-free playback by paying for Premium or sometimes with an ad blocker.

Outside the browser, you can get both with yt-dlp, which also integrates into video players like mpv.

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

#557

It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and metadata.

From the preservation point of view yes. But realistically, it's been the norm throughout human history that irrelevant culture simply gets removed.

So is much of relevant culture, it's not like there is a magic preservation wand that sorts by relevance before removal

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

#558
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience anymore. This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary custo…

> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers. Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth. The intern…

> Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up..

I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All these big companies keep driving up our cost of living, while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also a cost to not participating, so that's not an option either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their influence on our lives.

> The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.

I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't know how we'll overcome that.

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

#559
post #129

Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more attention and each modification will have to be done only once. Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be written in JS, TS or something else that compiles…

You mean, like the yt-dlp-ejs package?

Hmm! Close enough, I guess. I didn't notice that. But I hope that it has a flexible interface and that all projects adopt it.
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