Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads

Post by Squarex » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:06 PM UTC

weq wrote: post #515

I started this fight with youtube back when it was called google video, because i wanted to watch content but my 28.8kbps modem didnt have the grunt todo it in one session. When i started getting 100,000's of downloads a day, google updated their html and blocked me from their search engine. I did the cat and mouse a few times but in the end it wasnt worth it. Glad to see the legacy still lives on :D https://gvdownlo…

Post by lawgimenez » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 2:47 PM UTC

galaxy_gas wrote: post #392

moralestapia wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential. The TIDAL app is absolute trash, it has this same issue all the time; not just that, but also, if a download fails it just hangs there and does not download the rest of the album/playlist. Also, why would you want to download things in the first place? To watch them offline, right? Well, guess what happens when you open the app w/o an internet connection ... it asks you to login, so you cannot even access…

When I try it for a month, the worst part.. your entire download queue fails forever unless you manually remove hundreds of items one by one There is no way to remove the stuck item if it's been pull from streaming library or you in country that -- such traveling etc -- does not have r ights to it. You simply cannot open the track to undownload it

Post by sharpshadow » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 3:25 PM 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 int_19h » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 3:58 PM UTC

cakealert wrote: post #502

gamer191 wrote: post #482

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"Attack vectors" is a very interesting choice of words. Yt-dlp is literally using a public API for its intended purpose (accessing videos). The only difference is how yt-dlp is delivering the videos to the user. Probably as much of an "attack" as user-agent spoofing or using browser extensions. But to answer your question, no, there aren't any suitable APIs (I've looked into it). They all either require JavaScript (y…

What about the smart TVs? There have to be a lot of them, do all of them run JS? Also what kind of environments are executing the JS? If Google begins to employ browser fingerprinting that may become relevant.

Post by ewoodrich » Thu, Sep 25, 2025, 4:02 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #291

ac29 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel That's been a policy for a while, the sign up page prominently says "Plan members must be in the same household". No idea if its enforced though.

I have 2 homes. Every time I "go up north" I have to switch my Netflix household and then back again when I return. This sounds like that won't even be possible.