[HN Gopher] Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
___________________________________________________________________
Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads
Author : phewlink
Score : 897 points
Date : 2025-09-24 11:41 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| progbits wrote:
| 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?
| progbits wrote:
| From https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/33186
|
| > Currently, a new style of player JS is beginning to be sent
| where the challenge code is no longer modular but is hooked
| into other code throughout the player JS.
|
| So it's no longer a standalone script that can be interpreted
| but it depends on all the other code on the site? Which could
| still be interpreted maybe but is a lot more complex and might
| need DOM etc?
|
| Just guessing here, if anyone knows the details would love to
| hear more.
| zenmac wrote:
| Yeah that is guess google using spaghetti code to keep their
| yt moat.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Could something like tree-shaking be used to reduce the
| player code to just the token generating bit? Or does the
| whole player js change for each video?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Sounds like a really silly way to engineer things, but then
| again Google has the workforce to do lots of silly things and
| the cash to burn, so they can afford it.
| Klonoar wrote:
| It's silly from an engineering perspective, but
| unfortunately clever from YT's perspective of "how do we
| complicate this as much as possible".
| ACCount37 wrote:
| 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.
| adzm wrote:
| I was surprised they went with Deno instead of Node, but since
| Deno has a readily available single-exe distribution that removes
| a lot of potential pain. This was pretty much just a matter of
| time, though; the original interpreter in Python was a brilliant
| hack but limited in capability. It was discussed a few years ago
| for the YouTube-dl project here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32793061
| nicce wrote:
| Node does not have the concept of security and isolation like
| the Deno has. There is maintainer comment in the same thread.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| What evidence is there that Deno's "security and isolation"
| works?
|
| It's their application, yt-dlp can use whatever it wants. But
| they made their choices for stylistic/aesthetic reasons.
| nicce wrote:
| What evidence is telling the opposite?
|
| Scripts use V8 isolation, identical to Chrome. What comes
| to rest, we can only trust or review by ourself, but it is
| certainly better than nothing in this context.
| arbll wrote:
| Identical to Chrome except the part where Chrome uses os-
| level sandboxing on top. V8 exploits are common, Deno
| sandboxing by itself is not a good idea if you are
| executing arbitrary code.
| nicce wrote:
| We are comparing to situation where the alternative is
| nothing. Maybe we just should remove locks from the doors
| because someone has lockpicked door somewhere.
| arbll wrote:
| I never said it was a poor choice in this specific
| context but propagating the idea that Deno's sandboxing
| is safe and "basically the same security as chrome" is
| wrong and can easily do damage the next time someone that
| has read this thread needs a way to execute untrusted JS.
| nicce wrote:
| Someone who understands what V8 isolation means, knows
| that it means process-level memory and garbage
| collectors. I didn't claim that it includes Chrome's OS
| sandbox features too.
|
| But the usage of V8 means that Deno must explicitly
| provide the access (for V8) for networking and filesystem
| - the foundations for sandboxing are there.
| arbll wrote:
| The sandboxing features of Deno also seem to have played a role
| in that choice. I wouldn't overly trust that as a security
| layer but it's better than nothing.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Deno sandboxing is paper thin, last time I looked they had
| very simple rules. It's a checkbox feature. If you want
| isolation use WASM.
| ndjddirbrbrbfi wrote:
| It doesn't have granularity in terms of what parts of the
| code have what permission - everything in the same process
| has the same permission, but aside from that I'm not sure
| what you mean about it being paper thin. Certainly WASM is
| a great option, and I think it can facilitate a more
| nuanced capabilities model, but for cases like this AFAIK
| Deno should be secure (to the extent that V8 is secure,
| which Chrome's security depends on).
|
| It being a checkbox feature is a weird way to frame it too,
| because that typically implies you're just adding a feature
| to match your competitors, but their main competitors don't
| have that feature.
|
| In what ways does it fall short? If there are major gaps,
| I'd like to know because I've been relying on it (for
| personal projects only myself, but I've recommended it to
| others for commercial projects).
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Last I looked it was just very basic pattern matching
| allow/deny with no real isolation, and there have been
| multiple real escapes already. It's better than nothing,
| and probably good enough for bush league security, but I
| wouldn't pitch it to my milspec customers.
| yborg wrote:
| Why are your milspec customers downloading from YouTube?
| This is the Deno use case being discussed.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Don't be reductive, people reading this aren't going to
| fence their opinion of Deno to the "use in YTDLP" case.
| arbll wrote:
| Chrome does not rely exclusively on V8's security or else
| it would routinely get exploited (See v8 CVEs if you
| don't believe me). The hard part of browser exploitation
| today is escaping from the os-level sandbox put on the
| processes that run each of your tabs.
|
| Trusting Deno's sandboxing by itself isn't a great idea.
| An attacker only has to wait for the next V8 exploit to
| drop, probably a question of a few months at worse.
|
| Now like I mentioned above it's probably ok in yt-dlp
| context, Google isn't going to target it with an exploit.
| It's still important that folks reading this don't
| takeaway "deno sandbox safe" and use it the next time
| they need to run user-supplied JS.
| silverwind wrote:
| WASM can not run JavaScript unfortunately.
| em-bee wrote:
| WASM can run a javascript interpreter or compiler. if
| isolation is the goal, that may even make sense.
| hyperrail wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard of Deno so I'm only going
| by their Security & Permissions doc page [1], but it looks
| like the doc page at the very end recommends using system-
| level sandboxing as a defense in depth. This suggests that
| Deno doesn't use system sandboxing itself.
|
| To me this is a bit alarming as IIRC most app runtime
| libraries that also have this in-runtime-only sandboxing
| approach are moving away from that idea precisely because it
| is not resistant to attackers exploiting vulnerabilities in
| the runtime itself, pushing platform developers instead
| toward process-level system kernel-enforced sandboxing
| (Docker containers or other Linux cgroups, Windows
| AppContainer, macOS sandboxing, etc.).
|
| So for example, .NET dropped its Code Access Security and
| AppDomain features in recent versions, and Java has now done
| the same with its SecurityManager. Perl still has taint mode
| but I wonder if it too will eventually go away.
|
| [1] https://docs.deno.com/runtime/fundamentals/security/
| arbll wrote:
| Deno is a V8 wrapper, the same JS engine as Chrome.
| Vulnerabilities are very common there, not necessarily
| because it's poorly designed but more because there's
| massive financial incentives in findings them.
|
| This plus what you mentioned is why I would never trust it
| to run arbitrary code.
|
| Now in the context of yt-dlp it might fine, google isn't
| going to target them with exploits. I would still prefer if
| they didn't continue to propagate "DeNo iS SaFe BeCauSe It
| HaS sAnDbOxInG" because I've seen projets that were
| actually executing arbitrary JS rely on it thinking it was
| safe.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Keep in mind that yt-dlp doesn't just support YouTube, which--
| notwithstanding the claims of "all DRM is malware" etc.--
| probably won't download actively harmful code to your computer:
| it also supports a huge number of video streaming sites,
| including some fairly obscure and sketchy ones. Sandboxing in
| the interpreter that's at least as good as what you'd get in a
| browser is a must, because by design this is doing untrusted
| code execution.
| trilogic wrote:
| No requirements for me. I don't use YT at all :) There are plenty
| of better alternatives.
| frizlab wrote:
| until someone shares a video with you
| jamesnorden wrote:
| Thanks for letting us know!
| VladVladikoff wrote:
| My brother sent me a long talk on YouTube and pleaded with me
| to listen to it. Watching was pointless the video was just
| talking heads sitting in chairs. However you can't just play a
| video and turn off your phone while listening to the audio on
| headphones. The mobile browser sleeps and the audio stops. So I
| used yt-dlp to rip the audio and dropped it into my Plex server
| to listen to with Prologue. It wasn't even about the ads, I
| just wanted to do some gardening and listen to something on
| headphones while I worked, without my phone screen on.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| https://newpipe.net/
|
| You're welcome
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Firefox Mobile has an extension "Video Background Play Fix"
| to disable the Page Visibility API anti-feature.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| on iphone, if you use youtube in the browser in stead of the
| app (as you should), then you can do background listening if
| you play the video, lock the phone, unlock the phone, play th
| video again, lock the phone, unlock the phone, resume play
| with the media controls, lock the phone.
| exitb wrote:
| It's obviously not about YT the product, but about YT the
| content library. I don't think there are better alternatives to
| that content library.
| blacklion wrote:
| I'm watching not youtube but video creators. There is no even
| worse alternative if person you want to watch doesn't publish
| video on other site.
|
| Maybe, for watching "recommended" stream without any
| subscriptions there are alternatives (which? I cannot name good
| ones, anyway), but if you watch your subscription you are bound
| to platform which contain this subscription. And no, content
| creators are not interchangeable.
| exe34 wrote:
| any recommendations?
| trilogic wrote:
| Dailymotion, Vimeo etc. No ads, no bs it feels like freedom
| again. And if they change others will replace them.
| exe34 wrote:
| And how do you watch content on dailymotion and vimeo when
| the content creators only post them on YouTube?
| piyuv wrote:
| I'm a paying YouTube premium subscriber. Last weekend, I wanted
| to download something so I can watch it on my way in the train.
| The app got stuck at "waiting for download.." on my iPad. Same on
| iPhone. Restart did not work. I gave up after an hour (30 mins
| hands on trying stuff, 30 mins waiting for it to fix itself).
| Downloaded the video using yt-dlp, transferred it to my USB c
| flash drive, and watched it from that.
|
| Awaiting their "premium cannot be shared with people outside
| household" policy so I can finally cancel. Family members make
| good use of ad-free.
| beerandt wrote:
| Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of
| all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with
| practically no customer service options, no real solutions
| besides cancel.
|
| I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and
| this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so
| it was a last straw.
| masklinn wrote:
| Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to
| download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you
| were live-streaming and didn't think to save a local copy or it
| impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render
| while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.
| hmstx wrote:
| Oh, that reminds me of a similar experience with Facebook
| video. Did a live DJ stream a few years ago but only recorded
| the audio locally at max quality. Back then, I think I
| already had to use the browser debugger to inspect the url
| for the 720p version of the video.
|
| When they recently insisted by email I download any videos
| before they sunset the feature, their option only gave me the
| SD version (and it took a while to perform the data export).
| shantara wrote:
| I'm another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock
| Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I
| pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my
| less technical family members, and to use their native iOS
| apps. If they really tighten the rules on Premium family
| sharing, I'll drop the subscription in an instant.
| al_borland wrote:
| I'm a Premium user and primarily watch on AppleTV. A little
| while ago they added a feature where if I press the button to
| skip ahead on the remote when a sponsor section starts, it
| skips over the whole thing. It skips over "commonly skipped"
| sections.
|
| While it doesn't totally remove it, it lets me choose if I
| want to watch or not, and gets me past it in a single button
| press. All using the native app. I was surprised the first
| time this happened. I assume the creators hate it.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for
| offline downloads?
| piyuv wrote:
| I'm not using brave browser so did not know it could download
| videos
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| I'm using Brave, but didn't know either :p
| pcdoodle wrote:
| Nice, didn't know Brave could do that.
| godelski wrote:
| > Why not use Brave browser
|
| Why not use a non-chromium browser and help prevent Google
| from having larger control over the Internet?
|
| We still need competition in the browser space or Google gets
| to have a disproportionate say in how the Internet is
| structured. I promise you, Firefox and Safari aren't that
| bad. Maybe Firefox is a little different but I doubt it's
| meaningfully different for _most_ people [0]. So at least get
| your non techie family and friends onto them and install an
| ad blocker while you 're at it.
|
| [0] the fact that you're an individual may mean you're not
| like most people. You being different doesn't invalidate the
| claim.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Firefox is in decline and Brave will soon overtake it.
| Brave blocks ads natively. There is a lot of advantage in
| that but we also may eventually have a new model that funds
| the internet. And I don't see Firefox or Safari disrupting
| advertising.
|
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
|
| https://brave.com/transparency/
| godelski wrote:
| I think you've missed the point entirely.
|
| The point is that if everyone is using a single browser
| (not just Chrome/Chromium) then that actor gets
| disproportionate control over the internet. That's not
| good for anyone.
|
| The specific gripe to Chromium is that __Google__ gets
| that say, and I think they are less trustworthy than
| other actors. I 'm not asking anyone to trust Mozilla,
| but anyone suggesting Mozilla is less trustworthy than
| Google probably has a bridge to sell you. Remember that
| being Chromium still means that Brave is reliant upon
| Google. That leads to things like this[0,1]. Remember,
| the chromium source code is quite large, which is why
| things like [0] aren't so easily found. I also want to
| quote a quote from [0.1] This is
| interesting because it is a clear violation of the idea
| that browser vendors should not give preference to their
| websites over anyone elses.
|
| That wouldn't be the first time people have found Google
| preferencing their browser and it is pretty known this
| happens with YouTube. Do we really want _ANY_ company
| having such control over the internet? Do we really want
| _Google_ to? >
| https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity >
| https://brave.com/transparency/
|
| I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me here. That
| Brave has 64% of the number of users as Firefox? That
| Brave users really like Gemini, Coinbase, and Uphold?
| That Brave users are linking their Brave account to sites
| like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, GitHub, Vimeo, and Twitch?
| That Brave Ads is tracking via the state level? Honestly
| I have more questions looking at the Brave "transparency"
| report, as it seems to have more information about users
| than Firefox...
|
| If you're extra concerned about privacy and that's your
| reason for Brave, then may I suggest the Mullvad
| browser[2]? It is a fork of Firefox and they work with
| Tor to minimize tracking and fingerprinting. You get your
| security, privacy, and out from under the boot of Google.
|
| [0] https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/39660
|
| [0.1] https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servic
| esthunkjs...
|
| [1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/google-
| to-kill-...
|
| [2] https://mullvad.net/en/browser
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| > I'm not sure what you're trying to tell me here.
|
| I'm telling you that Firefox is going to be out of
| business soon because users favor ad blocking and
| blocking trackers. That is the trend. Firefox isn't
| growing anymore.
|
| > Honestly I have more questions looking at the Brave
| "transparency" report, as it seems to have more
| information about users than Firefox...
|
| Metrics can be transmitted without revealing the user.
| This is well known.
|
| You can't suggest anything. I am done with this
| conversation.
| bl4kers wrote:
| That Brave link shows growth has flatlined
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| The line isn't of MAU growth.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I'll just throw out there that zen-browser.app is a
| gentle fork of Firefox to make it look like the
| (abandoned, chromium) arc browser, it's great.
| Diti wrote:
| > Why not use Brave
|
| Reddit has the answer for you: https://www.reddit.com/r/brows
| ers/comments/1j1pq7b/list_of_b...
| femtozer wrote:
| I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my
| smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It's absolute
| madness that users can't configure this in the official app.
| piyuv wrote:
| It'll be fixed when some product manager can offer it as a
| promotion project
| ChocolateGod wrote:
| and removed when that person who is promoted doesn't work
| on it again
| godelski wrote:
| I was talking to "my friend" about how I'm annoyed my
| calendar duplicates holidays because it imports from
| multiple calendars and he asked me "what value" would be
| provided if this was solved. Confused I said it pushes
| things off so I can't read events. He clarified he meant
| monetary value...
|
| We're both programmers so we're both know we're talking
| about a one line regex...
|
| I know quite a number of people like this and they're in
| high positions at big tech companies... doesn't take a
| genius to figure out why everything has such shitty user
| experiences and why all the software is so poorly written.
| No one even seems to care about the actual product they'll
| only correct you to tell you the product is the stock and
| the customer is the shareholder, not the user.
|
| We fucked up...
| fragmede wrote:
| What did you tell him was the monetary value? Let's say
| there are like 5 holidays per year that result in days
| where some people have holidays but others do not, so
| business meetings happen that day that get missed. Let's
| say you have a 100 million people using this calendar
| software. Let's say 0.5 percent of those are in the
| executive class. Furthermore, let's say 10% of them miss
| a meeting due to this UI issue. That's 50,000 missed
| meetings. If we handwave that each of those meetings
| could have resulted in $10 million deals for their
| company, this UI bug is costing customers _half a
| trillion dollars_!
|
| So, after estimating the number of ping pong balls that
| fit on a 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp
| and put that on your promo packet. Half a trillion
| dollars!
| godelski wrote:
| Sorry, let me clarify better (but it leads to similar
| issues)
|
| On my iPhone[0] calendar I imported my Microsoft (work)
| and Google (personal) calendars, also having the iPhone
| calendar. If we take last Labor day as an example, if I
| don't disable the Holiday calendars in Microsoft and
| Google, I have 3 entries for Labor Day. Holidays sit at
| the top of the day so if I'm on my phone I basically
| won't see any other events. If I'm on my macbook and my
| Calendar is using 60% of my vertical space I see "Labor
| Day +3 more". Full screen I can see 4 maybe 5 entries....
|
| So I can save a large chunk of real estate by doing a
| simple fucking 1 line regex. At the same time I can
| effectively merge the calendars, so I get to see the
| holidays that are in one but not the others.
|
| Effectively, I can ACTUALLY SEE WHAT I HAVE SCHEDULED FOR
| THE DAY[1]
|
| This, of course, also affects other things. Sometimes
| Google will add an event because I got an email later.
| Fuck, now I have dupes... Same thing happens with
| birthdays... Or you can hit that fun bug where you have
| for some god damn reason duplicate contacts with the same
| name, phone number, and birthday, you get triplicate
| calendar entries and merging[2] and results in quadruple
| entries!
|
| I have missed so many fucking things because I didn't see
| it on my calendar[3]. And someone has the audacity to ask
| how much money would be saved? We've spent longer
| discussing the problem than it would take to fix it!
| These aren't junior people I'm talking to (who ask dumb
| things like "but I can't control or merge the other
| calendars" not recognizing it's a display issue), but
| like a L6 at Amazon.[4] > So, after
| estimating the number of ping pong balls that fit on a
| 747, the thing to do is to go write the regexp and put
| that on your promo packet.
|
| I swear, the problem is no one realizes the point of
| leetcode questions was never to get the answers right,
| but to just have some problem for an interviewee work on
| and see how they go about solving it. I'd rather an
| engineer get the wrong answer with a good thought process
| than get the right answer with shitty code that was
| obviously memorized. It's much harder to teach people
| _how_ to think than it is to teach them some specific
| thing to remember.
|
| [0] I've almost immediately regretted this decision...
|
| [1] General frustration yelling, not yelling at you
|
| [2] No, the "find duplicate contacts" option does not in
| fact find duplicate contacts (what fucking data are they
| looking for? Because it sure as hell isn't identical
| names. Why isn't it even trying to do similar names?!)
|
| [3] I've also missed so many fucking things because that
| little scroll wheel wasn't completely finished with its
| animation and so saved the wrong day or switched AM to
| PM. I've missed so many things because I have so little
| control over notifications and they disappear not if I
| dismiss them, but if I just unlock my god damn phone. So
| not just that one liner needs to be done, but it would do
| a lot and these other one-liners would also greatly help.
|
| [4] Dude was complaining about candidates using GPT to do
| leetcode problems and how he had a hard time figuring out
| if they were cheating or not. One of my many suggestions
| was "why not do in person interviews?" which was answered
| with how expensive plane tickets were (his interviewees
| were local) and contradicted his prior and later
| statements about how costly it is to hire/interview
| someone. I'm sorry, what percentage of 6 engineer's
| salaries to do 6 interviews for an hour is a single round
| trip ticket for a domestic flight? Or to have someone...
| drive in...
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Obviously they meant monetary value _for the software
| company_. How much more revenue will they make if they
| implement it?
| indymike wrote:
| Hmm. If the annual subscription is $100 then the value of
| fixing this is $100.
|
| If it is free, then, what's the profile worth for a
| year... there's the value.
|
| User retention is a thing.
| godelski wrote:
| I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why are
| engineers concerned with them? The idea of _engineers_
| needing to justify _monetary_ value is just... ill
| conceived. They should be concerned with engineering
| problems. Let the engineering manager worry about the
| imaginary money numbers. > User retention
| is a thing.
|
| Problem is no one needs to care about the product's
| quality if the product has the market cornered... Even
| less of a concern if the users don't know how to pick
| good products from bad products. Tech illiteracy directly
| leads to Lemon Markets
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _I mean these numbers are just made up anyways, so why
| are engineers concerned with them?_
|
| That's what they're directly or indirectly being graded
| on. Even if they don't have to show how their work
| impacted the company's bottom line, their managers or
| their managers' managers have to, and poop just rolls
| downhill.
|
| > _The idea of engineers needing to justify monetary
| value is just... ill conceived. They should be concerned
| with engineering problems. Let the engineering manager
| worry about the imaginary money numbers._
|
| If this was only possible in this industry. If you're in
| a small company, you're wearing multiple hats anyway. If
| you're in a big corp, well, my wife hates that I see this
| in everything, but - hidden inflation is a thing. As
| roles are eliminated (er, "streamlined"), everyone is
| forced to be responsible for things they're not really
| supposed to care about (my favorite example is filing
| expense reports).
|
| As you aptly put it upthread: we fucked up...
| reflexco wrote:
| User retention is not much of a thing anymore thanks to
| the stickiness afforded by integrated services and
| network effects.
|
| You can't just switch calendar/video streaming when
| everything else is integrated with it/everyone is
| exclusively posting on this network.
| yacthing wrote:
| > We're both programmers so we're both know we're talking
| about a one line regex...
|
| As a big tech programmer, it's almost never that
| simple...
|
| Small edges cases not covered by a one line regex can
| mean big issues at scale, especially when we're talking
| about removing things from a calendar.
| the_af wrote:
| The auto-dub feature is madness. I noticed it first a couple
| of days ago, I'm crossing my fingers that few authors choose
| to enable it, and that YouTube makes it easy to disable as a
| default in settings (not currently possible, you have to do
| it as you watch, every time).
|
| I'm in a Spanish speaking country, but I want to watch
| English videos in English.
|
| Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but I
| want to listen to the original voices!
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't want it dubbed whether I speak the language or not.
| the_af wrote:
| Yes, this is what I mean. I NEVER want it dubbed.
|
| I'd rather use auto-generated subtitles (even if flawed),
| but I want to hear the original voices!
| zahlman wrote:
| > Auto-generated subtitles for other languages are ok, but
| I want to listen to the original voices!
|
| The first time I saw this feature, it was on a cover of
| some pop song in a foreign language. Why on Earth... ?
| LtdJorge wrote:
| What about the auto translated titles? It also happens for
| chapters in the video...
|
| Sames languages as you. It drives me nuts because the
| translations are almost always wrong.
| Bootvis wrote:
| This "feature" amazes me. It is badly done and a bad
| idea. I haver never watched a dubbed video so why show me
| a translated title? It's also surprising, Google has
| plenty ESL employees on staff.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| There has to be some KPI tied to how often the AI model
| is used in production for providing translations on
| YouTube etc. Someone's promotion hangs on the translation
| feature being used as often as possible on YouTube.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Comments are quite good at pointing out when the creator
| has accidentally left it on (it is of course enabled by
| default and authors have to actively disable it).
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It is enabled by default. One creator of English language
| content had their video misclassified as Spanish and people
| were getting a machine English dub on an English video.
| Support to fix it appears to be a nightmare.
| the_af wrote:
| Wait, do you mean it's enabled by default but the author
| can disable it?
|
| If not, I wonder why I can still watch most videos in
| their original language (even though I'm in a Spanish-
| speaking country), and I only encountered this once so
| far.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There is supposed to be a procedure to manually remove
| each language dub but it was broken (at least as of last
| year).
| rodrigodlu wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation.
|
| I was using the browser feature that disables the mobile mode
| on smartphones.
|
| The autodub feature should be disabled asap. Or at least have
| a way to disable globally on all my devices.
| ekianjo wrote:
| I wonder who got the idea at Youtube that forced auto-dub was
| a good idea. This shows how dysfunctional the management is.
| It's one thing to have assholes in your team, it's a
| different thing to not look at what they are doing.
| ac29 wrote:
| > 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| 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.
| beala wrote:
| I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same
| issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for
| my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the
| first try.
|
| I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off
| ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load
| whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in
| it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC
| app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative
| YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is
| actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the
| official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the
| sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.
| moralestapia wrote:
| 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 your music. 900k/year
| TOC genius work there.
|
| The only reason why I haven't canceled is because I'm too
| lazy to reset my password in order to login and cancel, lol.
| Might do it soon, though.
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| 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
| xienze wrote:
| One thing I like about Tidal though: you can download
| everything, DRM-free, using tidal-ng.
| aeyes wrote:
| I use yt-dlp inside of a-shell on iOS, then play files using
| VLC.
| comprev wrote:
| Nice trick I'll have to try this. Thanks!
| stirlo wrote:
| Doesn't solve VLCs suckiness on iOS. No PiP support when
| it's been in iOS for years now...
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| When your PR is ready, you can submit it here:
|
| https://github.com/videolan/vlc-ios/pulls
| fyrabanks wrote:
| i use this for things i repost on IG with commentary. i
| would rather not have a huge folder of downloads of random
| stuff i'm not even sure i want to revisit. (and i'm bad
| about clearing out space on my phone.)
| bigyabai wrote:
| NewPipe is incredible. If Google ever stops signing apps like
| that, I'll be switching to a Linux phone.
| cranberryturkey wrote:
| as soon as they have a map app that works with car play i'm
| switching to linux phone.
| bigyabai wrote:
| GNOME Maps is good enough for me. I don't know what
| Carplay is and at this point I'd rather not ask.
| m4tthumphrey wrote:
| Framework for using your cars infotainment system as your
| screen/input device. Android has something similar called
| Android Auto.
| jraph wrote:
| Don't car play and android auto rely on proprietary
| libraries? I doubt it will come to Linux phones unless
| they take off or something like microg reimplements the
| proprietary parts.
| chasil wrote:
| I use another app from F-Droid called Skytube for
| occasional downloads. I like it.
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.oss/
|
| https://f-droid.org/en/packages/free.rm.skytube.legacy.oss/
| maplethorpe wrote:
| What video did you watch?
| piyuv wrote:
| Nintendo Direct. Download issue persisted with all videos
| though
| meindnoch wrote:
| >Awaiting their "premium cannot be shared with people outside
| household" policy so I can finally cancel.
|
| Then I have good news for you!
| https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown
|
| In fact, I've got an email from them about this already. My YT
| is still ad-free though, so not sure when it's going to kick in
| for real.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Ya I got this message when I was on vacation for a week.
| Seems a little messy on their part.
| yolo_420 wrote:
| I am a premium subscriber so I can download via yt-dlp in peace
| without any errors or warnings.
|
| We are not the same.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| For anyone here who runs a startup, I propose two lifestyle
| benefits you should add:
|
| 1. Unlimited YouTube Premium
|
| 2. Unlimited drink reimbursement (coffee, tea, smoothies,
| whatever)
|
| The psychological sense of loss from those two things would be
| larger than any 5% raise.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I personally wouldn't want to hire a startup employee who
| couldn't figure out how to install a browser extension. ;-)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| You're assuming startups are all tech. At my job, tech is
| not even 1/3 of employees.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Browser extensions are not meant for the technical crowd,
| they're meant to be installed by all users of the
| browser. If someone is not bright enough to figure out
| how to install a browser extension, or change a
| lightbulb, or refill the ice tray, tech worker or not I
| don't need them in my startup.
| nharada wrote:
| Roku tho
| posterguy wrote:
| ah yes, let me just install a browser extension on the kids
| ipad
| whatshisface wrote:
| FYI for next time you're buying, you can install Firefox
| on Android, although this is perhaps threatened by
| Google's planned changes to user's ability to install
| software.
| godelski wrote:
| Here, this will help with that
|
| https://kagi.com/orion/
| edoceo wrote:
| I don't like that math, rather have the 5% than $8k in perks.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| The pitch is for the employer: This would likely be both
| cheaper and simultaneously stickier.
| hysan wrote:
| I also have YouTube premium and watch mostly on my iPad and TV.
| YouTube constantly logs me out at least once per day. I notice
| because I'll randomly start seeing ads again (I open videos
| from my rss reader, never their site). This never happened when
| I wasn't on premium. I don't get what they're doing, but my
| impression after almost a year is that it's only slightly less
| annoying than getting ads. At this point, I might as well not
| renew and just use ad block.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > Awaiting their "premium cannot be shared with people outside
| household" policy
|
| I recently got paused for "watching on another device" when I
| wasn't. I don't think that policy you mention is too far off.
| observationist wrote:
| ReVanced and other alternatives exist.
|
| So long as they are broadcasting media to the public without an
| explicit login system, so as to take advantage of public access
| for exposure, it will remain perfectly legitimate and ethical
| to access the content through whatever browser or software you
| want.
|
| After they blitzed me with ads and started arbitrarily changing
| features and degrading the experience, I stopped paying them
| and went for the free and adblocking clients and experience.
|
| I may get rid of phones from my life entirely if they follow
| through with blocking third party apps and locking things down.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| the problem is, you cannot be sure what Google does if they
| catch you violating their ToS. They have killed off _entire
| google accounts_ for YT copyright strikes with no recourse.
| realusername wrote:
| That's why I'm not using Google accounts for anything
| important, I left gmail in 2014 and I really advise
| everybody to do the same.
|
| You never know when the hammer can drop.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| This. I simply don't understand why some people rely on
| Google given the risk level, impact and their no-
| recourse-except-maybe-public-shaming policy.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Yeah, same. I still have a gmail account that just
| forwards emails, and I update the email on services as
| they come on. Being on your own domain for email is just
| better.Though, I use a service provider to handle the
| mail server itself
| fragmede wrote:
| Google doesn't capriciously deprecate things in a short
| amount of time. When they sunset features, there's plenty
| of warning. They'll tell you that there's a hammer, that
| it's going to drop on you in 6 months, which is plenty of
| time for you to get out from under it. Which, I mean, I'd
| rather there not be a hammer, but it's not like they're
| gonna announce on a Friday that they're shutting down
| Google Keep on Monday and I need to wreck my whole
| weekend in order to save all my notes.
| catgirlinspace wrote:
| The hammer isn't shutting down a service, it refers to
| your Google account getting banned for a violation or
| whatever reason they feel like.
| realusername wrote:
| I'm not afraid of them deprecating Gmail, I'm afraid thar
| I wake up one day and the account is banned without
| recourse.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| > ReVanced and other alternatives exist.
|
| For now. I suspect this is the real reason Google is going to
| require a developer cert even for sideloaded apps:
| https://www.techradar.com/phones/android/google-will-soon-
| st...
| paxys wrote:
| I'm constantly baffled by how bad the implementation of YouTube
| Premium downloads is. Videos will buffer to 100% in a matter of
| seconds but get endlessly stuck when I hit the download button.
| Why? All the bytes are literally on my device already.
| jerf wrote:
| The whole YouTube app is weird. Sometimes it lets you do
| 1.0x-2.0x. Sometimes it lets you range from .25x-4x.
| Sometimes it pops up a text selection box with every .05x
| option from .1 to 4.0. Sometimes it has a nicer UI with
| shortcut selections for common choices and a sliding bar for
| speed. It recently picked up a bug where if you're listening
| to a downloaded video, but turn the screen off and on again,
| the video playback seems to crash. A few months ago it became
| very, very slow at casting, all manipulations could take 30
| seconds to propagate to the cast video (pause, changing
| videos, etc)... but they didn't usually get lost. (It would
| be less weird if they did just get lost sometimes.) You
| aggressively can't cast a short to a TV, in a way that
| clearly shows this is policy for some incomprehensible
| reason, but if you use the YouTube app directly on your set
| top box it'll happily play a short on your TV. Despite its
| claims in small text that downloads are good for a month
| without being rechecked, periodically it just loses track of
| all the downloads and has to redownload them. It also is
| clearly trying to reauthorize downloads I made just 30
| minutes ago sometimes when I'm in a no-Internet zone,
| defeating the entire purpose. When downloads are about 1/4th
| done it displays the text "ready to watch on the download
| screen" but if you try to watch it it'll fail with "not yet
| fully downloaded".
|
| Feels like the app has passed the complexity threshold of
| what the team responsible for it can handle. Or possibly, too
| much AI code and not enough review and testing. And those
| don't have to be exclusive possibilities.
| knome wrote:
| the control changes sound like you might have gotten caught
| in some kind of a-b testing
| jerf wrote:
| They flop back and forth at a high frequency though. I
| can hit all three cases in five minutes and it's been
| like that for months.
|
| Also there is never a sensible reason to offer video
| speeds as a combo-box popup of all options from .05x to
| 4.00x. It's like three times the vertical size of my
| screen.
| Barbing wrote:
| All that testing and they've never thought to offer a
| one-tap way to get back into speed control once I've
| adjusted the speed one or more times on the same video.
|
| Don't get me started on the "highest quality" account
| setting absolutely never selecting 4K options when
| available. They simply have to try to save the bandwidth
| money by nesting quality options a couple taps away. (A
| userscript fixes this on desktop and even in Safari
| iOS/iPadOS, but I don't deserve the quality I'm paying
| for if I use their native app.) [Privileged rant over!]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| This is becoming a common pattern everywhere now.
|
| Case in point (and sorry for bringing up _this_ topic),
| LLM providers seem to be doubling down on automatic model
| selection, and marketing it as a feature that improves
| experience and response quality for the users, even
| though it 's a blatant attempt to cut serving costs down
| by tricking users (or taking the choice away) into
| querying a cheaper, weaker model. It's obviously not what
| users want - in this space, even more than in video
| streaming, in 90%+ of end-user cases, what the user wants
| is the best SOTA model available.
|
| At least with YouTube, I recall them being up front about
| this in the past, early in the COVID-19 pandemic - IIRC
| the app itself explained in the UI that the default
| quality is being lowered to conserve bandwidth that
| suddenly got much more scarce.
| lukan wrote:
| Because they want to control the bytes on your devices.
|
| Giving you the bytes would be easy, the hard part is
| preventing the free flow of information. And those bugs are
| the side effects.
| N0isRESFe8GXmqR wrote:
| I run into that download issue all the time. I need to pause
| downloading each video. Force close the youtube app. Then
| unpause the downloads to get them downloading again. It has
| been happening for years and is still unfixed.
| dostick wrote:
| YouTube's "Download" is not really a download, it's actually
| "cache offline" within YouTube app.
| some-guy wrote:
| Also a paying YT Premium subscriber. I live in a rural part of
| CA where there isn't much 5G reception. For extremely long
| drives in my minivan, I allow my toddler to watch Ms. Rachel on
| the screen via an HDMI port input from my iPhone. Youtube
| Premium videos have DRM that disallow downloads to play over
| HDMI, so I had to do what you did and add them as files locally
| to VLC and play them from there.
| fragmede wrote:
| I'll admit to using yt-dlp to get copies of videos I wish to
| have a local copy of, which can't be taken away from me by
| somebody else, but I pay for premium because that pays for
| content I watch. If you don't pay for content, where's it going
| to come from? Patreon only works for super dedicated stars with
| a huge following.
| icelancer wrote:
| YouTube premium "download" is also just completely fake.
| Downloaded where? What file can I copy?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Files? What era do you hail from? Prehistory?
|
| There are no files anymore. I mean, there technically are,
| but copyright industry doesn't want you to look at them
| without authorization, security people don't want you to look
| at them _at all_ , and UX experts think it's a bad idea for
| you to even know such thing as "files" exists.
|
| Share and enjoy. Like and subscribe. The world is just apps
| all the way down.
| loganlinn wrote:
| I had a similar experience on YouTube Music. I discovered the
| message was misleading and I just had to enable downloads when
| not on WiFi
| arbll wrote:
| I wonder if we're going to see JS runtime fingerprinting attempt
| from google now
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I doubt it'd be difficult for Google to detect if the client is
| a browser or not. They already need to check for signals of
| abnormal use to detect things like clickfarms and ad scams.
| cxr wrote:
| > detect if the client is a browser
|
| User agents are like journalists: there's no such thing as
| pretending to be one.
|
| If someone writes their own client and says, "This is a
| browser", then it is one.
| rs186 wrote:
| Ah, JavaScript Run-time Integrity checks!
| dishsoap wrote:
| Have they not done this for years and years already?
| tomalaci wrote:
| Looks like this runtime is written in Rust. Really does seem like
| Rust is rapidly swallowing all kinds of common tools and
| libraries. In this case a single compiled binary for multiple
| architectures is quite convenient for something like yt-dlp.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Deno itself is written mostly in Rust, but it also leverages
| [1] Google's V8 Javascript engine which is written in C++.
|
| [1]: https://choubey.gitbook.io/internals-of-
| deno/architecture/v8
| est wrote:
| I really appreciate the engineering effort went into this
| "JavaScript interpreter"
|
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/2025.09.23/yt_dlp/jsin...
| stevage wrote:
| heh, that's pretty cool.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Heh, now I wonder how much JavaScript it actually interprets
| and given that it's < 1000 lines, whether it could be used
| towards an introductory course in compilers.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Obviously not. An introductory course would introduce
| concepts like lexers, parsers, AST, etc, instead of working
| on strings.
|
| Here are lines 431 through 433: if
| expr.startswith('new '): obj = expr[4:]
| if obj.startswith('Date('):
| Too wrote:
| There's a famous presentation by David Beazley where he
| implements a WASM interpreter in Python in under an hour.
| Highly recommended.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Bytecode interpreters are quite simple compared to the
| actual lexer / parser.
| LordShredda wrote:
| I'm on mobile, this seems like an actual js interpreter that
| only does objects and arithmetic. Impressive that it went that
| far
| jollyllama wrote:
| I wonder how long until it gets split off into its own project.
| For the time being, it could do with a lot more documentation.
| At least they've got some tests for it!
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| > I wonder how long until it gets split off into its own
| project
|
| The submission is literally about them moving away from it in
| favor of Deno, so I think "never" probably gets pretty close.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Thanks for explaining - I didn't understand that this is
| what was being replaced.
| zahlman wrote:
| Aside from the fact that the point of the announcement is
| that they're dropping it entirely, this "interpreter" is a
| hack that definitely is nowhere near capable of interpreting
| arbitrary JS. For example, the only use of `new` it handles
| is for Date objects, which it does by balancing parens to
| deduce the arguments for the call, then treating the entire
| group of arguments as a string and applying regexes to that.
| sirbranedamuj wrote:
| This is the buried lede in this announcement for me - I had no
| idea they were already going to such lengths. It's really
| impressive!
| codedokode wrote:
| I decided just to look at the code for a moment and discovered
| ChainMap in Python.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| This is excellent for some of my usages. I want to have my AI
| agents "fork" their context in some ways, this could be
| useful for that instead of juggling a tree of dictionaries.
| XnoiVeX wrote:
| It's a subset of Javascript. HN discussion here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32794081
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| This is amazing, an old school but effective approach in this
| modern age. I was afraid they were going to embed a browser.
| Aurornis wrote:
| This is perfect for the problem they were solving. Really cool
| that they took it this far to avoid adding further overhead.
| jokoon wrote:
| Wait I thought they were running an entire browser engine
| ddtaylor wrote:
| Over time they probably will require that. I believe YT still
| allows most of these things because of "legacy" apps, which
| they have been killing off bit by bit. I'm not sure if anyone
| is cataloging the oldest supported app, but most things like
| using YT from a slightly older game console don't work
| anymore.
|
| Basically any publicly known method that can sip video
| content with doing the least work and authentication will be
| a common point of attack for this.
| m_ke wrote:
| I used to work on video generation models and was shocked at how
| hard it was to find any videos online that were not hosted on
| YouTube, and YouTube has made it impossibly hard to download more
| than a few videos at a time.
| fibers wrote:
| you have to feed it multiple arguments with rate limiting and
| long wait times. i am not sure if there have been recent
| updates other than the js interpreter but ive had to spin up a
| docker instance of a browser to feed it session cookies as
| well.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yeah we had to roll through a bunch of proxy servers on top
| of all the other tricks you mentioned to reliably download at
| a decent pace
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| What are your thoughts on the load scrapers are putting on
| website operators?
| raincole wrote:
| > YouTube has made it impossibly hard to download more than a
| few videos at a time
|
| I wonder why. Perhaps because people use bots to mass-crawl
| contents from youtube to train their AI. And Youtube
| prioritizes normal users who only watch a few videos at most at
| the same time, over those crawling bots.
|
| Who knows?
| m_ke wrote:
| I wonder how Google built their empire. Who knows? I'm sure
| they didn't scrape every page and piece of media on the
| internet and train models on it.
|
| My point was that the large players have monopoly hold on
| large swaths of the internet and are using it to further
| advantage themselves over the competition. See Veo 3 as an
| example, YouTube creators didn't upload their work to help
| Google train a model to compete with them but Google did it
| anyways, and creators didn't have a choice because all eye
| balls are on YouTube.
| raincole wrote:
| > how Google built their empire. Who knows
|
| By scraping every page _and directing the traffic back to
| the site owners._ That was how Google built their empire.
|
| Are they abusing the empire's power now? In multiple ways,
| such as the AI overview stuff. But don't pretend that
| crawling Youtube and training video generation models is
| the same as what Google (once) brought to the internet. And
| it's ridiculous to expect Youtube to make it easy for
| crawlers.
| Andrews54757 wrote:
| Nsig/sig - Special tokens which must be passed to API calls,
| generated by code in base.js (player code). This is what has
| broken for yt-dlp and other third party clients. Instead of
| extracting the code that generates those tokens (eg using regular
| expressions) like we used to, we now need to run the whole
| base.js player code to get these tokens because the code is
| spread out all over the player code.
|
| PoToken - Proof of origin token which Google has lately been
| enforcing for all clients, or video requests will fail with a
| 403. On android it uses DroidGuard, for IOS, it uses built in app
| integrity apis. For the web it requires that you run a snippet of
| javascript code (the challenge) in the browser to prove that you
| are not a bot. Previously, you needed an external tool to
| generate these PoTokens but with the Deno change yt-dlp should be
| capable of producing these tokens by itself in the near future.
|
| SABR - Server side adaptive bitrate streaming, used alongside
| Google's UMP protocol to allow the server to have more control
| over buffering, given data from the client about the current
| playback position, buffered ranges, and more. This technology is
| also used to do server-side ad injection. Work is still being
| done to make 3rd party clients work with this technology
| (sometimes works, sometimes doesn't).
|
| Nsig/sig extraction example:
|
| - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/4429fd0450a3fbd5e89573...
|
| - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/4429fd0450a3fbd5e89573...
|
| PoToken generation:
|
| - https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/PO-Token-Guide
|
| - https://github.com/LuanRT/BgUtils
|
| SABR:
|
| - https://github.com/LuanRT/googlevideo
|
| EDIT2: Addeded more links to specific code examples/guides
| ACCount37 wrote:
| If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare
| want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked
| browser implementations?
|
| Now you know.
| codedokode wrote:
| There could be valid reasons for fighting downloaders, for
| example:
|
| - AI companies scraping YT without paying YT let alone
| creators for training data. Imagine how many data YT has.
|
| - YT competitors in other countries scraping YT to copy
| videos, especially in countries where YT is blocked. Some
| such companies have a function "move all my videos from YT"
| to promote bloggers migration.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| - Enforce views of ads
|
| (not debating the validity of this reason, but this is the
| entire reason Youtube exists, to sell and push ads)
| baxuz wrote:
| Then they should allow a download API for paying customers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's not YT's content though.
| codedokode wrote:
| Music labels publish the music on YT in exchange for ad
| revenue, they won't be happy if someone would download
| their music for free, and making music is expensive,
| google how much just a single drum mic costs and you need
| lot of them.
| baxuz wrote:
| > for paying customers
| codedokode wrote:
| YT shares income from subscriptions with music labels? I
| didn't hear about this, and even if they shared the
| download must be paid much higher than a view because
| after downloading a person could potentially listen for a
| track hundred times in a row.
| diet_mtn_dew wrote:
| Youtube premium includes Youtube Music, which is
| alphabet's streaming service, and I assume that they are
| paying the same fees as everyone else.
| codedokode wrote:
| > as everyone else
|
| "Everyone else" do not allow to download music in an
| unencrypted format, so it makes sense if YT doesn't allow
| also.
| balder1991 wrote:
| But even if you're a paying customer, the creator is only
| paid if you watch it on the platform.
| transcriptase wrote:
| >AI companies
|
| Like Google?
|
| >scraping YT without paying YT let alone creators for
| training data
|
| Like Google has been doing to the entire internet,
| including people's movement, conversations, and habits...
| for decades?
| codedokode wrote:
| > Like Google?
|
| Like Google competitors obviously.
|
| > Like Google has been doing to the entire internet,
| including people's movement, conversations, and habits...
| for decades?
|
| Yes, but if you allowed to index your site (companies
| even spent money to make site better indexable), Google
| used to bring customers and AI companies bring back
| nothing. They are just freeloaders.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| Who says these are valid?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| Why is this being downvoted? Are people really gonna shoot
| the messenger and fail to why a company may be willing to
| protect their competitive position?
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| At least for YouTube, viewbotting is very much a thing, which
| undermines trust in the platform. Even if we were to remove
| Google ads from the equation, there's nothing preventing
| someone from crafting a channel with millions of bot-
| generated views and comments, in order to paid sponsor
| placements, etc.
|
| The reasons are similar for Cloudflare, but their stances are
| a bit too DRMish for my tastes. I guess someone could draw
| the lines differently.
| rwmj wrote:
| I'm sure that's a problem for Youtube. What does it have to
| do with me rendering Youtube videos on my own computer in
| the way I want?
| pwg wrote:
| > What does it have to do with me rendering Youtube
| videos on my own computer in the way I want?
|
| It doesn't. That interferes with google's ad revenue
| stream, which is why YT continues to try to make it
| harder and harder to do so.
| bitwize wrote:
| You don't have that right. When you view copyrighted
| content, you do so at the pleasure of the licensor.
| rwmj wrote:
| How you watch copyrighted content has never been
| something that copyright has controlled.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| > which undermines trust in the platform
|
| What? What does this even mean? Who "trusts" youtube? It's
| filled with disinformation, AI slop and nonsense.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| I provided an example is given right after that sentence.
| Trustworthiness of the content is an entirely separate
| thing.
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| you forgot the excessive censorship, of course to "fight
| disinformation"...
|
| it even became an interesting signal which
| "disinformation" they deem censorship-worthy.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| If any of this was done to combat viewbotting, then any
| disruption to token calculation would prevent views from
| being registered - not videos from being downloaded.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| From my perspective both problems are effectively the
| same. I want to count unique users by checking for asset
| downloads and correlating unique session IDs. People can
| request the static assets directly, leading to view
| booting and waste of egress bandwidth.
|
| The solution: have clients prove they are a legitimate
| client by running some computationally intensive JS that
| interacts with DOM APIs, etc. (which is not in any way
| unique to big tech, see Anubis/CreepJS etc.)
|
| The impact on the hobbyist use case is, to them, just
| collateral damage.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| No, the difference is: if I'm fighting viewbots, I want
| zero cues to be emitted to the client. The client should
| NEVER know whether its view is being counted or not, or
| why.
|
| Having no reliable feedback makes it so much harder for a
| viewbotter to find a workaround.
|
| If there's a visible block on video downloads? They're
| not fighting viewbots with that.
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| For general spam deterrence I agree, but how do you
| prevent paying for the bandwidth in this case?
| sporkxrocket wrote:
| As a viewer, this is not even remotely my problem.
| wzdd wrote:
| Youtube has already accounted for this by using a separate
| endpoint to count watch stats. See the recent articles
| about view counts being down attributed to people using
| adblockers.
|
| Even if they hadn't done that, you can craft millions of
| bot-sponsored views using a legitimate browser and some
| automation and the current update doesn't change that.
|
| So I'd say Occam's razor applies and Youtube simply wants
| to be in control of how people view their videos so they
| can serve ads, show additional content nearby to keep them
| on the platform longer, track what parts of the video are
| most watched, and so on.
| imiric wrote:
| Like another comment mentioned: that's a problem for
| YouTube to solve.
|
| They pay a lot of money to many smart people who can
| implement sophisticated bot detection systems, without
| impacting most legitimate human users. But when their
| business model depends on extracting value from their
| users' data, tracking their behavior and profiling them
| across their services so that they can better serve them
| ads, it goes against their bottom line for anyone to access
| their service via any other interface than their official
| ones.
|
| This is what these changes are primarily about. Preventing
| abuse is just a side benefit they can use as an excuse.
| jasode wrote:
| _> If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and
| Cloudflare want to restrict the web _
|
| I disagree with the framing of "us vs them".
|
| It's actually "us vs us". It's not just us plebians vs FAANG
| giants. The small-time independent publishers and creators
| also want to restrict the web because they don't want their
| content "stolen". They want to interact with real humans
| instead of bots. The following are manifestations of the same
| fear:
|
| - small-time websites adding Anubis proof-of-work
|
| - owners of popular Discord channels turning on the setting
| for phone # verification as a requirement for joining
|
| - web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize
| Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and
| others pay for the content
|
| We're long past the days of colleagues and peers of ARPANET
| and NFSNET sharing info for free on university computers. Now
| everybody on the globe wants to try to make a dollar, and
| likewise, they feel dollars are being stolen from them.
| johnebgd wrote:
| It's like we are living in an affordability crisis and
| people are tired of 400 wealthy billionaires profiting from
| peoples largess in the form of free data/tooling.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _small-time websites adding Anubis proof-of-work_
|
| Those were already public. The issue is AI bot ddos-ing the
| server. Not everyone has infinite bandwith.
|
| > _owners of popular Discord channels turning on the
| setting for phone # verification as a requirement for
| joining_
|
| I still think that Discord is a weird channel for community
| stuff. There's a lot of different format for communication,
| but people are defaulting to chat.
|
| > _web blogs wanting to put a "toll gate" (maybe utilize
| Cloudflare or other service) to somehow make OpenAI and
| others pay for the content_
|
| Paid contents are good (Coursera, O'Reilly, Udemy,...). But
| a lot of these services wants to have free powered by ads
| (for audience?).
|
| ---
|
| The fact is, we have two main bad actors: AI companies
| hammering servers and companies that want to centralize
| content (that they do not create) by adding gatekeeping
| extension to standard protocols.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| i _want_ my content borrowed /shared, and I still need to
| be engaged in this stuff because the poorly behaved
| distributed bots that have arisen in the past year are
| trying to take boundless resources from my site(s), that I
| cannot afford.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Now everybody on the globe wants to try to make a dollar,
| and likewise, they feel dollars are being stolen from them.
|
| I'm not in it for the dollar. I just want the licenses I
| put on my content/code to be respected, that's all. IOW, I
| don't what I put out there to be free forever (as in speech
| and beer) to be twisted and monetized by the people who re
| in this for the dollar.
| greenavocado wrote:
| When Nixon slammed the gold window shut so Congress could
| keep writing blank checks for Vietnam and the Great
| Society, it wasn't just some monetary technicality. It was
| the moment America broke its word to the world and broke
| something fundamental in us too. Suddenly money wasn't
| something you earned through sweat or innovation anymore.
| It became something politicians and bankers could conjure
| from thin air whenever they wanted another war, another
| corporate bailout, another vote-buying scheme.
|
| Fast forward fifty years and smell the rot. That same
| fiscal recklessness Congress spending like drunken sailors
| while pretending deficits don't matter has bled into every
| pore of society. Why wouldn't it? When BlackRock scoops up
| entire neighborhoods with Fed-printed cash while your kid
| can't afford a studio apartment, people notice. When Tyson
| jacks up chicken prices to record profits while diners
| can't afford bacon, people feel it. And when some indie
| blogger slaps a paywall on their life's work because OpenAI
| vacuumed their words to train ChatGPT? That's the same
| disease wearing digital clothes.
|
| We're all living in Nixon's hangover. The "us vs us" chaos
| you see Discord servers demanding your phone number, small
| sites gatekeeping against bots, everyone scrambling to
| monetize scraps that's what happens when trust evaporates.
| Just like the dollar became Monopoly money after '71,
| everything feels devalued now. Your labor? Worth less each
| year. Your creativity? Someone's AI training fuel. Your
| neighborhood? A BlackRock asset on a spreadsheet.
|
| And Washington's still at it! Printing trillions to "save
| the economy" while inflation eats your paycheck alive.
| Passing trillion-dollar "infrastructure bills" that somehow
| leave bridges crumbling but defense contractors swimming in
| cash. It's the same old shell game: socialize the losses,
| privatize the gains. The factory worker paying $8 for eggs
| understands this. The nurse getting lectured about "wage
| spirals" while hospital CEOs pocket millions understands
| this. The teenager locking down their Discord because bots
| keep spamming scams? They understand this.
|
| Weimar happened when money became meaningless. 1971
| happened when promises became meaningless. What you're
| seeing now the suspicion, the barriers, the every-man-for-
| himself hustle is what bubbles up when people realize the
| whole system's running on fumes. The diner owner charging
| $18 for a burger isn't greedy. The blogger blocking AI
| scrapers isn't a Luddite. They're just building levees
| against a flood Washington started with a printing press
| half a century ago.
|
| The tragedy is that we're all knee-deep in the same muddy
| water, throwing sandbags at each other while the real
| architects of this mess the political grifters, the Fed
| bankers, the extraction-engine capitalists watch dry-eyed
| from their high ground. Until we stop accepting their
| counterfeit money and their counterfeit promises, we'll
| keep drowning in this rigged game. The gold window didn't
| just close in '71. The whole damn social contract rusted
| shut.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Wow. That was eloquent, and coherent, and depressing. I'd
| be grateful for someone to counter with something less
| dismal. Good things are still happening in the world. A
| positive future remains possible -- but we have to be
| able to imagine it to bring it into being.
| sillyfluke wrote:
| Well on the bright side blood avocados are still green.
| Which the poster also seems to appreciate.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Lately I've had to resort to buying avocados from Costco
| in those little plastic cups because whole avocados in
| many supermarkets in my region have started to spoil too
| quickly. Sad.
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| until people learn money, the concept, nothing will
| change. and that in turn will hardly happen while the bad
| guys own childhood (compulsory schooling).
| zahlman wrote:
| What does any of this have to do with yt-dlp?
| dotancohen wrote:
| Ostensibly the same forces that drove Nixon to move the
| dollar off of gold, are driving Google to destroy third
| party YouTube clients.
| btown wrote:
| But this, too, skips over some nuance. There are a few
| types of actors here:
|
| - small content creators who want to make their content
| accessible to individuals
|
| - companies that want to gobble up public data and resell
| it in a way that destroys revenue streams for content
| creators
|
| - gatekeepers like Cloudflare who want to ostensibly stop
| this but will also become rent-extractors in the process
|
| - users who should have the right to use personal tools
| like yt-dlp to customize their viewing experience, and do
| _not_ wish to profit at the expense of the creators
|
| We should be cautious _both_ that the gatekeepers stand to
| profit from their gatekeeping, _and_ that their work
| inhibits users as well.
|
| If creators feel this type of user (often a dedicated fan
| and would-be promoter) is a necessary sacrifice to defend
| against predatory data extractors... then that's absolutely
| the creator's choice, but you can't say there's a unified
| "us" here.
| bitwize wrote:
| Duh. I've known this for decades. The biggest advocates for
| DRM I've known are small-time content creators: authors,
| video producers, musicians. They've been saying the same
| thing since the 90s: without things like DRM, their stuff
| would be pirated, and they'd like to earn a living doing
| what they love instead of grinding at a day job to support
| themselves while everybody benefits from their creative
| output. In addition, major publishers and record labels
| won't touch stuff that's been online because of the piracy
| risk. They don't want to make an investment in smaller
| creators without a return in the form of sales of copies.
| That last bit is less true of music now than it used to be
| because of streaming and stuff, but the principle still
| applies.
|
| This is why the DMCA will never be repealed, DRM will never
| go away, and there is no future for general purpose
| computing. People want access digital content, but the
| creators of that content wouldn't release it at all if they
| knew that it could be copied endlessly by whomever receives
| it.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The small-time independent publishers and creators also
| want to restrict the web because they don't want their
| content "stolen"
|
| ... or just keep their site on the Internet. There hasn't
| been any major progress on sanctioning bad actors - be it
| people running vulnerable IoT crap that ends up being taken
| over by a botnet, cybercriminals and bulletproof hosters,
| or nation state actors. As long as you don't attack targets
| from your own geopolitical class (i.e. Russians don't
| attack Russians, a lot of malware will just quit if it
| spots Russian locale), you can do whatever the fuck you
| want.
|
| And that is how we end up with darknet services where you
| can trivially order a DDoS taking down a website you don't
| like or, if you manage to get your opponent's IP leaked
| during an online game, their residential IP address. Pay
| with whatever shitcoin you have, and no one is any wiser
| who the perpetrator is.
| pryelluw wrote:
| I don't feel like dollars are stolen from me. It's more of
| companies abusing my goodwill to publish information
| online. From higher bills as a result of aggressive
| crawling, to copying my work and removing all
| copyright/licensing from the code. Sure, fair use and all,
| but when they return the same exact code it just makes me
| wonder.
|
| Nowadays, producing anything feels like being the cows
| udder.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The small-time independent publishers and creators also
| want to restrict the web
|
| Oh really? Does Linus's Floatplane go to this extent to
| prevent users from downloading stuff? Does Nebula? Does
| whatever that gun youtuber's version of video site do this?
|
| Does Patreon?
| einpoklum wrote:
| > The small-time independent publishers and creators also
| want to restrict the web because they don't want their
| content "stolen".
|
| I'm sure some music creators may have, years ago, been
| against CD recorders, or platforms like Napster or even
| IRC-based file transfer for sharing music. Hell, maybe they
| were even against VCRs back in the day. But they were
| misguided at best.
|
| People who want to prevent computer users from freely
| copying data are, in this context at least, part of "them"
| rather than "us".
| mtrovo wrote:
| I don't know, it's really hard to blame them. In a way, the
| next couple of years are going to be a battle to balance easy
| access to info with compensation for content creators.
|
| The web as we knew it before ChatGPT was built around the
| idea that humans have to scavenge for information, and while
| they're doing that, you can show them ads. In that world,
| content didn't need to be too protected because you were
| making up for it in eyeballs anyway.
|
| With AI, that model is breaking down. We're seeing a shift
| towards bot traffic rather than human traffic, and
| information can be accessed far more effectively and, most
| importantly, without ad impressions. So, it makes total sense
| for them to be more protective about who has access to their
| content and to make sure people are actually paying for it,
| be it with ad views or some other form of agreement.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Don't worry!
|
| Ads are coming to AI. The big AI push next will be context,
| your context all the time. Your phone will "help" and get
| all your data to OpenAI...
|
| "It looks like you went for a run today? Good job, you
| deserve a treat! Studies show a little ice cream after a
| long run is effectively free calories! It just so happens
| the nearest Dairy Queen is running a promotion just for the
| next 30 minutes. I'm getting you directions now."
| bitwize wrote:
| This is why contra Louis Rossman, Clippy was not a good
| thing for humanity.
| codedokode wrote:
| It would not be that much of a problem if ads promoted
| healthy and tasty food but they will probably promote an
| ice-cream made from a powder and chemicals emulating
| taste of berries rather than from milk and fresh-picked
| berries.
| therein wrote:
| It still would be. Loss of agency. Ads are text and
| images you see. Native advertising in a chatbot
| conversation is a third party bidding their way into your
| conversation. Machine showing you an ad versus injecting
| intention into your context are very different things.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| "I'm calling the user analysis tool... it seems this user
| is health conscious. I'll suggest a trail app for their
| next run instead of ice cream."
| nebula8804 wrote:
| If open source AI becomes good enough would this model
| hold? I guess they will try to shut down the open models
| as they come close?
| chrisweekly wrote:
| I think your point is valid, but FTR the "shift" happened
| long before ChatGPT; bot traffic has exceeded that of
| humans for over a decade.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Everything trends towards centralization on a long enough
| period.
|
| I laugh at people who think ActivityPub or Mastodon or
| BlueSky will save us. _We already had that, it was called
| e-mail, look what happened once everyone started using it._
|
| If we couldn't stop the centralization effects that occurred
| on e-mail, any attempt to stop centralization in general is
| honestly a utopian fool's errand. Regulation is easier.
| numpad0 wrote:
| e-mail can't handle 24/7 1k posts/sec traffic which Twitter
| was about. A more appropriate analogue is IRC.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I am a big supporter of AT Protocol, and I contribute some
| money to a fund to build on it. Why laugh at running
| experiments? Nothing will "save us," it is a constant
| effort as long as humans desire to use these systems to
| connect. Email exists today, and is very usable still as a
| platform that cannot be captured. The consolidation
| occurred because people do not want to run their own
| servers, so we should build for that! Bluesky and AT
| Protocol are experiments in building something different,
| with different use cases and capabilities, that also cannot
| be captured. Just like email. You can run your own PDS. You
| can run your own stack from PDS to users "end to end" if
| you so choose. You can pay to do both of these tasks. No
| one can buy this or take it away from you, if it is built
| on protocols instead of a platform someone can own and
| control.
|
| Regulation would be great. The EU does it well. It is
| lacking in the US, and will be for some time. And so we
| have to downgrade to technical mitigations against
| centralization until regulation can meet the burden.
| th0ma5 wrote:
| Weird people talking about small time creators wanting DRM
| I've never seen that... Usually they'd be hounding for any
| attention? I don't know why multiple accounts are seemingly
| independently bringing this up, but maybe it is trying to
| muddy the waters? This concept?
| eek2121 wrote:
| The fact you shoved Cloudflare in there shows your ignorance
| of the actual problems and solutions offered.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > For the web it requires that you run a snippet of javascript
| code (the challenge) in the browser to prove that you are not a
| bot.
|
| How does this prove you are not a bot. How does this code not
| work in a headless Chromimum if it's just client side JS?
| Andrews54757 wrote:
| Good question! Indeed you can run the challenge code using
| headless Chromium and it will function [1]. They are
| constantly updating the challenge however, and may add
| additional checks in the future. I suppose Google wants to
| make it more expensive overall to scrape Youtube to deter the
| most egregious bots.
|
| [1] https://github.com/LuanRT/BgUtils
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| LLMs solve challenges. Can we not solve these challenges
| with sufficiently advanced LLMs? Gemini even, if you're
| feeling lulz-y.
| balder1991 wrote:
| Yes, by spending money.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree, in some cases and depending on LLM endpoint,
| some money may need to be spent to enable ripping. But is
| it cheaper than paying Youtube/Google? That is the
| question.
| dylan604 wrote:
| sometimes, it's not about the cost. it's about who/where
| the money is being spent.
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Once JavaScript is running, it can perform complex
| fingerprinting operations that are difficult to circumvent
| effectively.
|
| I have a little experience with Selenium headless on
| Facebook. Facebook tests fonts, SVG rendering, CSS support,
| screen resolution, clock and geographical settings, and
| hundreds of other things that give it a very good idea of
| whether it's a normal client or Selenium headless. Since it
| picks a certain number of checks more or less at random and
| they can modify the JS each time it loads, it is very, very
| complicated to simulate.
|
| Facebook and Instagram know this and allow it below a certain
| limit because it is more about bot protection than content
| protection.
|
| This is the case when you have a real web browser running in
| the background. Here we are talking about standalone software
| written in Python.
| dylan604 wrote:
| why can a bot dev not just get all of these values from the
| laptop's settings and hardwire the headless version to have
| the same values?
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| Because the expected values are not fixed, it is possible
| to measure response times and errors to check whether
| something is in the cache or not, etc.
|
| There are a whole host of tricks relating to rendering
| and positioning at the edge of the display window and
| canvas rather than the window, which allow you to detect
| execution without rendering.
|
| To simulate all this correctly, you end up with a
| standard browser, standard execution times, full
| rendering in the background, etc. No one wants to
| download their YouTube video at 1x speed and wait for the
| adverts to finish.
| cylemons wrote:
| How does testing rendering work? Can javascript get pixel
| data from the DOM
| Beretta_Vexee wrote:
| https://www.w3schools.com/tags/canvas_getimagedata.asp
| Aperocky wrote:
| And barely a few days after google did it the fix is in.
|
| Amazing how they simply couldn't win - you deliver content to
| client, the content goes to the client. Could be the largest
| corporation of the world and we still have yt-dlp.
|
| That's why all of them wanted proprietary walled gardens where
| they would be able to control the client too - so you get to
| watch the ads or pay up.
| sphars wrote:
| This will be interesting to see how it affects the numerous
| Android apps on F-Droid that are essentially wrappers around yt-
| dlp to create a YouTube Music clone.
| BoredPositron wrote:
| Ugh... Deno. After they started to extort the JS community for
| money to fund their PR stunt against Oracle and the resulting
| "last chance" trademark dispute, I stay as far away from it as I
| can.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| At some point we're going to need a better place to put videos
| than YouTube. The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is
| beginning to be a real problem on the internet.
|
| Yes, we have archive.org. We need more than that, though.
|
| I'm sure there's some distributed solution like IPFS but I
| haven't seen any serious attempt to make this accessible to every
| day people.
| zenmac wrote:
| There are: peertube, odysee, minds, rumble, bitchute web
| torrent)...
|
| It is the same reason why people just can't get off IG. Network
| effect and in YT case a lot of disk space and bandwidth.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| I don't think network effect matters much if you're not
| trying to advertise the content. Organizations can just link
| to it from their site.
|
| I admit I haven't looked into peertube, and I didn't think
| that rumble was any better than YouTube. I don't recognize
| the others. Thank you; I'll resurvey.
| coldpie wrote:
| > The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is beginning
| to be a real problem on the internet.
|
| There are many thousands of paid hosting services, feel free to
| pick one. It turns out hosting TB of data for free is a pretty
| tricky business model to nail down.
| superkuh wrote:
| There have been plenty of free distributed hosting services
| for the web that worked perfectly (popcorn time, etc, etc).
| It's just that every time they become popular they are
| attacked legally and shut down. The problem is not technical,
| or even resource based, the problem is legal. Only a mega-
| corp can withstand the legal attacks.
|
| And even if the legal attacks could be mitigated most people
| would still use youtube because they're there for the money
| (or for people who are there for the money). They are not
| there for a video host. Youtube enables distribution of money
| and there's no way that any government would let any free
| system distribute money without even more intense legal, and
| indeed physically violent, attacks.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I keep seeing ads on TV for Photobucket (Which I thought was
| dead) for 1TB of storage for either free, or $5, depending on
| the ad.
|
| Maybe there is an opportunity for that company to expand.
| bob1029 wrote:
| If you want to compete with YT you need to basically build AWS
| S3 in your own data centers. You'd have to find a way to make
| your service run cheaper than google can if you wanted to
| survive. You'd have to get very scrappy and risky. I'd start
| with questions like: how many 9s of durability do we actually
| need here? Could we risk it until the model is proven? What are
| the consequences for losing cat videos and any% speed runs of
| mario64? That first robotic tape library would be a big
| stepwise capex event. You'd want to make sure the whole thing
| makes sense before you call IBM or whoever for a quote.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Games Done Quick has raised 10s of millions for charity. I
| suspect they could raise a few thousand for a few dozen TB of
| nvme storage if they wanted to host a speedrun archive.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| YouTube get 700,000 hours of video uploaded _every day_.
| That 's 4.3 PB added per day. You may need more than a few
| dozen TB... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskProgramming/comment
| s/vueyb9/how_...
| ndriscoll wrote:
| They don't get 700,000 hours of any particular niche
| though, so it's easy enough for small groups to compete
| with youtube for their needs.
| jsheard wrote:
| > If you want to compete with YT you need to basically build
| AWS S3 in your own data centers. You'd have to find a way to
| make your service run cheaper than google can if you wanted
| to survive.
|
| YouTube's economy of scale goes way beyond having their own
| datacenters, they have edge caches installed inside most ISP
| networks which soak up YT traffic before it even reaches a
| Google DC. It would take a staggering amount of investment to
| compete with them on cost.
| pmdr wrote:
| > I'm sure there's some distributed solution like IPFS
|
| Almost 25 years on the internet and I have not been able to
| download anything from IPFS. Does one need a PhD to do so?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| The problem with bulk storage is that it _will_ be abused at
| large scale.
|
| CSAM peddlers, intellectual property violators, unconsensual
| sexual material ("revenge porn"), malware authors looking for
| places to exfiltrate stolen data, propagandists and terrorists,
| the list of abusers is as long as it is dire.
|
| And for some of these abuser classes, the risk for any storage
| service is high. Various jurisdictions require extremely fast
| and thorough responses for a service provider to not be held
| liable, sometimes with turnaround times of 24 hours or less (EU
| anti terrorism legislation), sometimes with extremely steep
| fines including prison time for responsible persons. Hell, TOR
| exit node providers have had their homes raided and themselves
| held in police arrest or, worse, facing criminal prosecution
| and prison time particularly for CSAM charges - and these are
| transit providers, not persistent storage.
|
| And all of that's before looking on the infrastructure provider
| side. Some will just cut you off when you're facing a DDoS
| attack, some will bring in extortionate fees (looking at you,
| AWS/GCE/Azure) for traffic that may leave you in personal
| bankruptcy. And if you are willing to take that risk, you'll
| still run the challenge of paying for the hardware itself -
| storage isn't cheap, 20TB of storage will be around 200EUR and
| you want some redundancy and backups, so the actual cost will
| rather be 60-100EUR/TB plus the ongoing cost of electricity and
| connectivity.
|
| That's why you're not seeing much in terms of democratization.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Maybe that's true, but YouTube is just absolutely miserable
| to use in every way. There's got to be better options.
| apetresc wrote:
| The writing is on the wall for easy ripping. If there's any YT
| content you expect you'll want to preserve for a long time, I
| suggest spinning up https://www.tubearchivist.com/ or something
| similar and archiving it now while you still can.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| They already had the proper-DRM tech for youtube movies for
| years, why didn't they already turn that on for all content?
| Mindwipe wrote:
| YouTube's delivery scale is enormous and adding additional
| complexity if they don't have to is probably considered a no
| no.
|
| But if they decide they have to, they can do it fairly
| trivially.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| It would break many millions of old consumer devices that no
| longer receive updates, like old smart TVs. They are waiting
| for that old device traffic to drop low enough before they
| can force more robust measures.
|
| You already need such things for certain formats.
| advisedwang wrote:
| YT probably HAD to put the DRM on in order to get the license
| deal with the studios. Nobody is twisting their arm as much
| so other interests (wider audience, less server side
| resources, not getting around to it) can prevail.
| Elfener wrote:
| They actually somewhat did: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/issues/12563 "DRM on ALL videos with tv (TVHTML5) client"
| occz wrote:
| It's not really a matter of just turning it on when it comes
| to the kind of scale that YouTube has on their catalogue.
| It's practically impossible to retranscode the whole
| catalogue, so you're more or less stuck with only doing it
| for newly ingested content, and even there the tradeoffs are
| quite large when it comes to actually having DRM.
|
| I think we can safely assume that the only content under DRM
| at YouTube today is the content where it's absolutely legally
| necessary.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I agree and feel that the time is now to archive all of the
| truly valuable cultural and educational content that YT
| acquired through monopolistic means.
|
| This solution looks interesting, but I am technical enough to
| know that this looks like a PITA to setup and maintain. It also
| seems like it is focused on downloading everything from a
| subbed channel.
|
| As it is now, with a folder of downloaded videos, I just need a
| local web server that can interpret the video names and create
| an organized page with links. Is there anything like this that
| is very lightweight with a next next finish install?
| Liquix wrote:
| pinchflat (https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat) is an
| alternative to tubearchivst. less mature but also less buggy
| IME
| feverzsj wrote:
| That's why youtube is so buggy and slow.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Can we remove heartdropping mystery from the title? My first
| thought is that Google makes it more difficult to download from
| YouTube.
|
| "yt-dlp moves to Deno runtime"
| Fabricio20 wrote:
| Google is making it harder to download from Youtube. Your first
| thought is correct! Every other website that yt-dlp supports
| doesn't require this change. Additionally, yt-dlp is still
| written in python, it has not moved to deno. They are only
| adding a deno dependency for the javascript challenges added by
| youtube.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I get that, but still title is too "loud".
| latexr wrote:
| > "yt-dlp moves to Deno runtime"
|
| That makes it seem like yt-dlp itself was rewritten from Python
| to JavaScript (for those who even know it's Python) or that it
| used to use Node and now uses Deno.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| What I found much more annoying, and so far have not been able to
| work around, is that yt-dlp requires you to have a YouTube
| account, something that I have not had for a decade or so, and am
| unwilling to create again.
|
| What tool can I use to simply store what my browser receives
| anyway, in a single video file?
| skydhash wrote:
| It must be a pretty recent (as in added yesterday) addition, as
| I was watching youtube with mpv+yt-dlp.
| degamad wrote:
| When did it start requiring one? It didn't require one the last
| time I used it a few months ago...
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Google started using IP range blocks recently. If they decide
| that your IP stinks, they'll block YouTube viewing and demand
| that you log in.
|
| It's inconsistent as fuck, and even TOR exit nodes still work
| without a log in sometimes.
| astroflection wrote:
| I can confirm this. I guess they didn't like me using
| Invidious.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| That's bad enough for normal VPN users who use VPN for
| privacy reasons. But a lot of countries have heavily
| censored web, and not using a VPN is simply not an option
| there.
|
| Good on Google for kicking people while they're down.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I think for me it has been this way for a year or so. Maybe
| it is because I am on a VPN. I also cannot view YouTube
| videos on YouTube any longer, because it always wants me to
| log in, to "prove I am not a bot". So I have switched to only
| using invidious instances, and if they don't work, then I
| just cannot watch the video.
|
| I wish content creators would think of their own good more,
| and start publishing on multiple platforms. Are there any
| terms that YouTube has for them, that reduce revenue, if they
| publish elsewhere as well? Or is it mostly just them being
| unaware?
| Telaneo wrote:
| It's a VPN thing, or a 'you've been downloading too much
| and are ratelimiting you' thing.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > What tool can I use to simply store what my browser receives
| anyway, in a single video file?
|
| This. I'm interested in such a tool or browser extension.
| crtasm wrote:
| I'm using it right now without a youtube account.
| wraptile wrote:
| 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.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Do you know what Accelerate means?
|
| I want them to go overboard. I want BigTech to go nuts on this
| stuff. I want broken systems and nonsense.
|
| Because that's the only way we're going to get anything better.
| nananana9 wrote:
| If you showed me the current state of YouTube 8 years ago -
| multiple unskippable ads before each video, 5 midrolls for a
| 10 minute video, comments overran with bots, video dislikes
| hidden, the shorts hell, the dysfunctional algorithm, .... -
| I would've definitely told you "Yep, that will be enough to
| kill it!"
|
| At this point I don't know - I still have the feeling that
| "they just need to make it 50% worse again and we'll get a
| competitor," but I've seen too many of these platforms get
| 50% worse too many times, and the network effect wins out
| every time.
| encom wrote:
| It's classic frog boiling. I want them (for whatever
| definition of "them") to just nuke the frog from orbit.
| jdiff wrote:
| Accelerationism is a dead-end theory with major holes in its
| core. Or I should say, "their" core, because there's a
| million distant and mutually-incompatible varieties. Everyone
| likes to say "gosh, things are awful, it MUST end in
| collapse, and after the collapse everyone will see things MY
| way." They can't all be right. And yet, all of them with
| their varied ideas still think it'll be a good idea to
| actively push to make things worse in order to bring on the
| collapse more quickly.
|
| It doesn't work. There aren't any collapses like that to be
| had. Big change happens incrementally, a bit of refactoring
| and a few band-aids at a time, and pushing to make things
| worse doesn't help.
| exe34 wrote:
| I'm not waiting for the collapse to fix things - I'm
| waiting for it so that I won't have any more distractions
| and I can go back to my books.
| jdiff wrote:
| As I said, there aren't any collapses like that to be
| had. Heaven and Earth will be moved to make the smallest
| change necessary to keep things flowing as they were.
| Banks aren't allowed to fail. Companies, despite lengthy
| strings of missteps and billions burned on dead ends,
| still remain on top.
|
| You can step away from the world (right now, no waiting
| required). But the world can remain irrational longer
| than you can wait for it to step away from you, and
| pushing for more irrationality won't make a dent in that.
| exe34 wrote:
| Oh I think the world will push me away at the next
| Android update. If I can't
| root/firewall/adblock/syncthing/koreader, the mobile
| phone will simply become a phone again.
| hnfong wrote:
| Look at history, things improve and then things get worse,
| in cycles.
|
| During the "things get worse" phase, why not make it
| shorter?
| hobs wrote:
| It doesn't foreshorten the cycle, it prolongs it and
| makes it worse.
| jancsika wrote:
| Let's give it a shot.
|
| The year is 2003. Svn and cvs are proving to be way too
| clunky and slow for booming open source development.
|
| As an ethical accelerationist, you gain commit access to
| the repos for svn and cvs and make them _slower and less
| reliable_ to accelerate progress toward better version
| control.
|
| Lo and behold, you _still_ have to wait until 2025 for
| git to be released. Because git wasn 't written to
| replace svn or cvs-- it was written as the result of
| internal kernel politics wrt access to a closed-source
| source management program Bitkeeper. And since svn and
| cvs were already bad enough that kernel devs didn't
| choose them, you making them worse wouldn't have affected
| their choice.
|
| Also, keep in mind that popularity of git was spurred by
| tools that converted from svn to git. So by making svn
| worse, you'd have made adoption of git harder by making
| it harder on open source devs to write reliable
| conversion tools.
|
| To me, this philosophy looks worse than simply doing
| nothing at all. And this is in a specific domain where
| you could at least make a plausible, constrained argument
| for accelerationism. Your comment instead seems to apply
| to accelerationism applied to software in general--
| there, the odds of you being right are so infinitesimal
| as to be fatuous.
|
| In short, you'd do better playing the lottery because at
| least nothing bad happens to anyone else when you lose.
| nananana9 wrote:
| On the bright side, that opens an opportunity for 10,000
| companies whose only activity is scraping 10MB worth of garbage
| and providing a sane API for it.
|
| Luckily all that is becoming a non-issue, as most content on
| these websites isn't worth scraping anymore.
| judge2020 wrote:
| *and whose only customers are using it for AI training
| pmdr wrote:
| > Days of just getting data off the web are coming to an end
|
| All thanks to great ideas like downloading the whole internet
| and feeding it into slop-producing machines fueling global
| warming in an attempt to make said internet obsolete and prop
| up an industry bubble.
|
| The future of the internet is, at best, bleak. Forget about
| openness. Paywalls, authwalls, captchas and verification cans
| are here to stay.
| dpedu wrote:
| And it's all to sell more ads.
| bjourne wrote:
| For now, yes, but soon CloudFlare and ever more annoying
| captchas may make that option practically impossible.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| You should be thankful for the annoying captchas, I hear
| they're moving to rectal scans soon.
| daemin wrote:
| This 1kb os json still sounds like a modern thing, where you
| need to download many MB of JavaScript code to execute and
| display the 1kb json data.
|
| What you want is to just download the 10-20kb html file, maybe
| a corresponding css file, and any images referenced by the
| html. Then if you want the video you just get the video file
| direct.
|
| Simple and effective, unless you have something to sell.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The main reason for doing video through JS in the first
| place, other than obfuscation, is variable bitrate support.
| Oddly enough some TVs will support variable bitrate HLS
| directly, and I believe Apple devices, but not regular
| browsers. See https://github.com/video-dev/hls.js/
|
| > unless you have something to sell
|
| Video hosting and its moderation is not cheap, sadly. Which
| is why we don't see many competitors.
| Zopieux wrote:
| And by "not many" you really mean _zero_ competitors.
|
| (before you ask: Vimeo is getting sold to an
| enshitification company)
| axiolite wrote:
| Those "zero" include: Rumble, Odysee, Dailymotion,
| Twitch, Facebook watch... etc.
|
| And a decent list here: https://ideaexplainers.com/video-
| sites-like-youtube/
| pjc50 wrote:
| Twitch does live streaming but recently severely limited
| the extent of free hosting for archived content.
|
| Not actually heard of the first two, what's their USP?
| pjc50 wrote:
| I think this is just another indication of how the web is a
| fragile equilibrium in a very adversarial ecosystem. And to
| some extent, things like yt-dlp and adblocking only work if
| they're "underground". Once they become popular - or there's a
| commercial incentive, like AI training - there ends up being a
| response.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Those days are not coming to an end:
|
| * PeerTube and similar platforms for video streaming of freely-
| distributable content;
|
| * BitTorrent-based mechanisms for sharing large files (or
| similar protocols).
|
| Will this be inconvenient? At first, somewhat. But I am led to
| believe that in the second category one can already achieve a
| decent experience.
| dotancohen wrote:
| To how many content creators have you written to request them
| share their content on PeerTube or BitTorrent? How did they
| respond? How will they monetize?
| einpoklum wrote:
| 1. Zero
|
| 2. N/A, but enough content creators on YT are very much
| aware of the kind of prison it is, especially in the years
| after the Adpocalypse.
|
| 3. Obviously, nobody should be able to monetize the copying
| of content. If it is released, it is publicly released. But
| they can use LibrePay/Patreon/Buy me a coffee, they can
| sell merch or signed copies of things, they can do live
| appearances, etc.
| xnx wrote:
| It's an arms race. Websites have become
| stupidly/unnecessarily/hostilely complicated, but AI/LLMs have
| made it possible (though more expensive) to get whatever useful
| information exists out of them.
|
| Soon, LLMs will be able to complete any Captcha a human can
| within reasonable time. When that happens, the "analog hole"
| may be open permanently. If you can point a camera and a
| microphone at it, the AI will be able to make better sense of
| it than a person.
| goku12 wrote:
| Please remember that an LLM accessing any website isn't the
| problem here. It's the scraping bots that saturate the server
| bandwidth (a DoS attack of sorts) to collect data to train
| the LLMs with. An LLM solving a captcha or an Anubis style
| proof of work problem isn't a big concern here, because the
| worst they're going to do with the collected data is to cache
| them for later analysis and reporting. Unlike the crawlers,
| LLMs don't have any incentives in sucking up huge amounts of
| data like a giant vacuum cleaner.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| 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 mechanisms they have in place. Cloudflare won't
| detect a headless firefox at low (and by "low" I mean basically
| anything you could do off your laptop from your home IP) rates,
| modern browser scripting is extremely easy, so you can often
| scrape things with mild single-person effort even if the site
| is an SPA with tons of dynamic JS. And obviously at low scale
| you can just solve captchas yourself.
|
| I recently wrote a scraper script that just sent me a discord
| ping whenever it ran into a captcha, and i'd just go look at my
| laptop and fix it, and then let it keep scraping. I was
| archiving a comic I paid for but was in a walled-garden app
| that obviously didn't want you to even THINK of controlling the
| data you paid for.
| sharperguy wrote:
| Why can youtube not just give a micropayments backed API? Just
| charge a few cents per video download and be done with it.
| eitau_1 wrote:
| meanwhile Youtubers: a penny per view would be 10x what Youtube
| pays us
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nloigkUJ-U&t=4851s
| kccqzy wrote:
| The YouTube RPM (revenue per mille) strongly depends on the
| location of the audience and the topic of the video. It could
| be anywhere from $0.5 to $20. That 10x figure could very well
| be true for that YouTuber, but it's also true that other
| YouTubers already earn more than a penny per view.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| They do. It's called YouTube Premium.
| pmdr wrote:
| AFAIK Premium allows you to download to persistent browser
| storage. But is it DRM-free/open or usable format?
| Telaneo wrote:
| It's DRM-ed and somewhat broken.
| raphman wrote:
| According to [1], the downloaded video is AES-encrypted.
| Decryption key is stored locally in an IndexDB. I tried
| building a Python script using plyvel [2], a Python
| module for reading IndexDB/LevelDB, some time ago but
| IIRC, it had trouble reading the Chrome DB. Maybe
| Google's dfindexeddb [3] works. I didn't try it, however.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Marsel-marsel/youtube-premium-
| video-downl...
|
| [2] https://github.com/wbolster/plyvel
|
| [3] https://github.com/google/dfindexeddb
| yreg wrote:
| It's not though. You can't download an mp4 to use however you
| wish with YouTube Premium. And definitely not via an API.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| None of that was mentioned in the comment?
| exe34 wrote:
| did you miss the word "API"? it was there.
| rcarmo wrote:
| So, instead of using something lightweight and embeddable like
| QuickJS, they opted for Deno? Nothing specifically against it,
| just seems... overkill
| Waraqa wrote:
| See this comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359626
| rcarmo wrote:
| There are other embeddable JS engines out there.
| ohdeargodno wrote:
| And you're welcome to implement them and submit them as a
| PR.
|
| The yt-dlp contributors are not in the business of writing
| or finding JS runtimes, they're trying to download videos.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| Hmm, like bun? Are there many others?
| zb3 wrote:
| Fortunately the community is not alone in this fight, because
| many AI companies need to be able to download YT videos. But they
| should sponsor yt-dlp more directly..
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| How will this JS execution be contained/isolated? Do we have to
| run it inside a VM, or containers?
| quux wrote:
| They are running the JS in Deno, a sandboxed JS runtime.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| What are folks thoughts on jdownloader2 these days? Hell is that
| still kicking?
| tommy92 wrote:
| Yeah my go to for youtube still. Working as good as ever for
| that so far.
| Elfener wrote:
| jdownloader2 is one of those weirdly licensed things, it claims
| to be "open source" but you actually can't find the entire
| source anywhere. Worse than proprietary, tbh.
| nikcub wrote:
| 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] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45300810
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| More specifically, yt-dlp uses legacy API features supported
| for older smart TVs which don't receive software updates.
| Eventually once that traffic drops to near zero those features
| will go away.
| Aurornis wrote:
| 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?
| judge2020 wrote:
| Mainly the theory that, if you can't use downloaders to
| download videos, then people will no longer see YT as the go-
| to platform for any video hosting and will consider
| alternatives.
|
| And I call that a theory for a reason. Creators can still
| download their videos from YT Studio, I'm not sure how much
| importance there is on being able to download any video ever
| (and worst case scenario people could screen recording
| videos)
| Liquix wrote:
| i'd argue that 95%+ of users (creators and viewers)
| couldn't care less about downloading videos. creators use
| youtube because it's where the viewers and money are,
| viewers use youtube because it's where all the content is.
| none of them are going to jump ship if yt-dlp dies.
|
| also, one could assume that the remaining 5% are either
| watching with vlc/mpv/etc or running an adblocker. so it's
| not like google is going to lose ad revenue by breaking
| downloaders like yt-dlp. grandparent comment (legacy smart
| TV support) is the much more likely explanation
| dredmorbius wrote:
| It's not the 95% you're concerned about, it's the 1%, or
| 0.0001%, who are top content creators, who both archive
| their _own_ production and use YT as a research tool
| themselves (whether simple "reply videos" or something
| more substantive). Ultimately Google will kill the goose
| and lose the eggs.
|
| Those creators are what drive the the bulk of viewers to
| the platform.
|
| Though, come to think of it, as YT's become increasingly
| obnoxious to use (the native Web client is utterly
| intolerable, front-ends such as Invidious are
| increasingly fragile/broken, yt-dlp is as TFA notes
| becoming bogged down in greater dependencies) I simply
| find myself watching (or as my preference generally is,
| _listening_ ) to far less from the platform.
|
| I may be well ahead of the pack, but others may reach
| similar conclusions in 5--10 years. Or when a less-
| annoying alternative clearly presents itself.
| attila-lendvai wrote:
| being a de facto monopoly has a lot of value that is hard to
| quantify...
|
| e.g. censorship, metadata, real time society-wide trends,
| etc...
|
| google is way-way more than just a company.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Is there an official name for this endless uphill battle?
| Counter-Enshittification?
| layer8 wrote:
| Cleaning the Augean stables.
| phplovesong wrote:
| Youtube is the real monopoly. Creators are also slaves, as they
| cant monetize elsewhere, and also they cant let their users
| download their own content. And the icing on the cake is youtube
| is unbearable without an ad-blocker, and even with that youtube
| has started throttling ad-block users.
|
| Its such a shithole, with no real replacement, sad state of
| affairs.
| mavhc wrote:
| why can't they monetize elsewhere?
| layer8 wrote:
| Much, much, much smaller audience elsewhere.
| pessimizer wrote:
| And if the audiences got larger on a site, governments
| around the world would decide together to drag them into
| court and keep them there until they closed down or sold to
| Ellison's kid.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| > Here's the problem (and it's not insurmountable): right
| now, there's no easy path towards sustainable content
| production when the audience for the content is 100x smaller,
| and the number of patrons/sponsors remains proportionally the
| same.
|
| https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/self-hosting-your-
| own...
| HankStallone wrote:
| Some do, and those who are able to make the move to patronage
| or subscriber monetization seem much happier for it. But
| that's most viable for creators who have already built up a
| viable customer base, which usually started on YouTube. It's
| much harder if you start out somewhere else.
| random29ah wrote:
| It's almost funny, not to mention sad, that their player/page has
| been changed, filling it with tons of JS that makes less powerful
| machines lag.
|
| For a while now, I've been forced to change "watch?v=" to
| "/embed/" to watch something in 480p on an i3 Gen 4, where the
| same video, when downloaded, uses ~3% of the CPU.
|
| However, unfortunately, it doesn't always work anymore.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvFZjo5PgG0
| https://www.youtube.com/embed/xvFZjo5PgG0
|
| While they worsen the user experience, other sites optimize their
| players and don't seem to care about downloaders (pr0n sites, for
| example).
| skydhash wrote:
| Put that next to GitHub. The app is nearly unusable on an i5
| 8th, often I just download a snapshot to browse locally.
| bArray wrote:
| Personally I am looking to get away from Youtube and looking
| towards some form of PeerTube/peer-based platform.
| oybng wrote:
| You are not alone. In Q1 2025 I was forced to adopt the embed
| player. In Q3 2025, google intentionally broke the embed
| player. Now the only youtube access I have is via yt-dlp. Long
| live yt-dlp and its developers
| Too wrote:
| Many performance problems on YouTube are because they now force
| everyone to use the latest heavy codecs, even when your
| hardware does not have acceleration for it. I have a laptop
| that is plenty powerful for everything else and plays 4K h264
| no problem. 720p on YouTube on the other hand turns it into a
| hot slate after a minute and grinds everything to a halt.
|
| There are browser extensions like h264ify that block newer
| codecs but WHY??? Is nobody at YouTube caring about the user
| experience? It's easier and more reliable to just download the
| videos.
| jhatemyjob wrote:
| Might as well start an effort to rewrite the whole project in
| Javascript at this point
| DrStartup wrote:
| none of it will matter soon. anything you want to see or watch
| will be dynamically generated just for you. enders game is here.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| What if I want to rewatch it, offline?
| hooverd wrote:
| why would I want that?
| AbuAssar wrote:
| on why they chose Deno instead of node:
|
| "Other JS runtimes (node/bun) could potentially be supported in
| the future, the issue is that they do not provide the same
| security features and sandboxing that deno has. You would be
| running untrusted code on your machine with full system access.
| At this point, support for other JS runtimes is still TBD, but we
| are looking in to it."
| codedokode wrote:
| While deno has sandboxing, it also has potential access to
| hundreds of dangerous functions, it might be better just to
| write a tiny wrapper around JS engine that adds only the
| function to write to stdout.
| AbuAssar wrote:
| Deno blocks by default the access to network, storage and
| environment variables
| codedokode wrote:
| JS interpreter doesn't have the access at all - it is
| provided by native functions, added by the wrapper like
| deno, so there is nothing to block.
| nromiun wrote:
| TIL that you can run frontend Javascript with a package like
| Deno. I thought you need a proper headless browser for it.
| skydhash wrote:
| I think you only need something like `jsdom` to have the core
| API available. The DOM itself is just a tree structure with
| special nodes. Most APIs are optional and you can provide stubs
| if you're targeting a specific websites. It's not POSIX level.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I was thinking the same walking into this thread. I figured
| DOM/CSS/HTML would be part of the black box magic, but I
| suppose from the perspective of JS all of that can be faked
| appropriately.
| bArray wrote:
| Ronsor [1] and reply by seproDev:
|
| > Why can't we embed a lightweight interpreter such as QuickJS?
|
| > @Ronsor #14404 (comment)
|
| The linked comment [2]:
|
| > @dirkf This solution was tested with QuickJS which yielded
| execution times of >20 minutes per video
|
| How on earth can it be that terrible compared to Deno?
|
| [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/issues/14404#issuecomment-3...
|
| [2] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/issues/14404#issuecomment-3...
| jlokier wrote:
| _> How on earth can it be that terrible [ >20 minutes] compared
| to Deno?_
|
| QuickJS uses a bytecode interpreter (like Python, famously
| slow), and is optimised for simplicity and correctness. Whereas
| Deno uses a JIT compiler (like Java, .NET and WASM). Deno uses
| the same JIT compiler as Chrome, one of the most heavily-
| optimised in the world.
|
| That doesn't normally lead to such a large factor in time
| difference, but it explains most of it, and depending on the
| type of code being run, it could explain all of it in this
| case.
|
| QuickJIT (a fork of QuickJS that uses TCC for JIT) might yield
| better results, but still slower than Deno.
| ynx wrote:
| JIT is still banned by policy on a LOT of mobile devices,
| meaning that previous usage of yt-dlp on mobile is now
| effectively unsupportable.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| I haven't tested this, but in theory running deno with
| `--v8-flags='--jitless'`[^1][^2] will disable the JIT
| compiler.
|
| [^1]: https://v8.dev/blog/jitless
|
| [^2]: https://docs.deno.com/runtime/getting_started/command
| _line_i...
| Klonoar wrote:
| If the performance drops due to lack of JIT, then GPs
| comment about effectively useless on mobile might still
| hold weight.
| 1317 wrote:
| well yt-dlp would also be banned surely? so it's not an
| issue anyway
| bArray wrote:
| My concern is either that QuickJS is something like 100x
| slower, or that even when using Deno, the download experience
| will be insanely slow.
|
| In my mind, an acceptable time for users might be 30 seconds
| (somewhat similar to watching an ad). If QuickJS is taking
| >20 minutes, then it is some 40x slower? Seems very high?
|
| > QuickJIT (a fork of QuickJS that uses TCC for JIT) might
| yield better results, but still slower than Deno.
|
| Interesting, not come across it before. Running C code seems
| like an insane workaround from a security perspective.
| ronsor wrote:
| It's horrifying and Google must've worked very hard to kill the
| performance in other interpreters.
| lucianbr wrote:
| The brightest minds (or something close) working hard to make
| computation slower and more difficult, so that someone can
| profit more.
| darknavi wrote:
| That is interesting. We use QuickJS in Minecraft (Bedrock, for
| modding) and while it's much slower than V8 it's not _that_
| much slower.
| beyondcompute wrote:
| Why won't they use my browser for downloads, for example through
| TestCafe? That would also allow downloading premium quality (for
| subscribers) and so on.
| rfl890 wrote:
| I think you can get premium formats through the --cookies-from-
| browser flag
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Good to see the mice are still winning the cat-and-mouse game.
| Selfishly, I kind of want the cat to start to win, to satisfy my
| curiosity. I predict that if YouTube ever _actually_ blocked
| downloading, a YouTube competitor that supports downloading would
| start to immediately gain popularity. I want to know if I 'm
| right about that, and there's no way to test unless Google
| actually starts to win. Go, Google, go! I believe in you!
| codedokode wrote:
| Those who download videos are a minority and targeting
| minorities will never give you exponential growth. Furthermore,
| the same minority probably abuses ad blockers so it would be
| difficult to squeeze a single cent from these freeloaders.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > targeting minorities will never give you exponential growth
|
| Serving a niche is a very good way to start with many
| products. It is even common gospel in startups. With the rest
| I agree.
| amlib wrote:
| I suspect that if youtube ever fully blocks video downloads you
| will start to see a lot of piracy groups and file sharing
| communities providing youtube content.
| Alifatisk wrote:
| The length Youtube have gone to make it impossible to download
| videos. At the same time, Tiktok allows anyone to download a
| video with just right click
| doublerabbit wrote:
| With the recent forced buy of TikTok with Rupert, Larry and co,
| I doubt that's going to be a thing for much longer; they will
| want to make money some how.
| latexr wrote:
| On the other hand, I can navigate, search, and watch any video
| on YouTube without an account. With TikTok, I can't even scroll
| the page without tricks.
| benoau wrote:
| Came across this the other day - set of yt-dlp helper scripts
| loaded up with flags:
|
| https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
| novoreorx wrote:
| Surprisingly, Deno was chosen as the first JavaScript runtime due
| to its security features. I thought it was almost dead, as Bun is
| growing very quickly among developers.
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| A friend of mine recorded a YouTube video using OBS. She had to
| do some minor edits on it and could not use her system during the
| recording, but it worked. I told her to stop it, as that is
| infringing on the creator's copyright and is an assault on the
| nation's digital economy. She hasn't recorded a video since, at
| least not that I know about. I feel good about making sure
| YouTube can reasonably profit off of creators' content since they
| give away the storage and access for free.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Instructions on Vine-glo grape concentrate during prohibition:
| "Do not place the liquid in this jug and put it away in the
| cupboard for twenty-one days, because then it would turn into
| wine."
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| I had another friend that simply recorded YouTube videos from
| their smartphone. As a zealous law abiding citizen, I
| immediately smacked the phone out of his hand and lectured on
| how copyright law is the foundation of the Information Age,
| which is the future, and disregarding it is an affront to
| modern life and civilization. I made him delete all his
| videos, and even made him hand write letters of apologies to
| the YouTube creators. These creators don't reveal their home
| addresses, but I'm sure they appreciated the emails
| containing the scan of the handwritten letters.
|
| We have an old SCSI scanner, so it took about as long to scan
| it as it did to write it.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| Touche
| sombragris wrote:
| Many Linux distros have Firefox's JavaScript (SpiderMonkey?)
| runtime independently packaged and available. Can it be used for
| this?
| silverwind wrote:
| Yes, Spidermonkey can be ran standalone and would probably be
| much more secure than Deno would be because it does not have
| all the server-related APIs.
| Havoc wrote:
| Really feels like the somewhat open nature of yt is running on
| borrowed time
| hackingonempty wrote:
| First you spend money to create something people really want
| and build a big user base.
|
| Then you open it up to third party businesses and get them tied
| to your platform, making money off your users.
|
| Once locked in you turn the screws on the businesses to extract
| as much money from them as possible.
|
| Finally you turn the screws on the users to extract every last
| bit of value from the platform before it withers and fades into
| irrelevance.
| akudha wrote:
| What you say is true for most companies/software, but YouTube
| can play a nasty game for a very long time before it withers
| into irrelevance (if at all). They have enormous moat, one
| would need enormous resources to take on YouTube, I don't
| think anyone has that kind of patience or resources to even
| attempt. Like it or not, we are stuck with YT for a while.
|
| I have learned so much from YouTube - I wish it was more open
| and friendly to its creators and users :(
|
| In the meantime, all we can do is support smaller
| alternatives like https://nebula.tv/
| buyucu wrote:
| I was scared this morning when yt-dlp did not work, but a git
| pull fixed it.
|
| A huge thank you to the yt-dlp folks. They do amazing work.
| guywithahat wrote:
| It's incredible how much work goes into these open source
| projects for downloading youtube videos, especially since youtube
| keeps breaking them. There are nearly 1500 contributors
| jsheard wrote:
| To be fair yt-dlp supports a lot more than just YouTube
|
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/tree/master/yt_dlp/extracto...
| zahlman wrote:
| Noteworthy to me: deno is MIT licensed, but PyPI distributions
| (at least the ones I checked) include neither license nor source
| code. It's normal for pre-built distributions ("wheels") to
| contain only the Python code (which for a project like this is
| just a small bootstrap used to find the compiled executable -- it
| doesn't appear to be providing any Python API), but they should
| normally still have a LICENSE file.
|
| It's also common to have the non-Python (here, Rust) source in
| source distributions ("sdists"), but this project's sdist is only
| a few kilobytes and basically functions as a meta-package (and
| also includes no license info). It "builds" Deno by detecting the
| platform, downloading a corresponding zip from the GitHub
| releases page, extracting the standalone Rust executable, and
| then letting Hatchling (a popular build tool in the Python
| ecosystem) repackage that in a wheel.
|
| Update: It turns out that the Python package is published by a
| third party, so I submitted an issue
| (https://github.com/manzt/denop/issues/1) to ask about the
| licensing.
| zahlman wrote:
| (Update 2: the distribution has been updated. Thanks to Trevor
| Manz for an unexpectedly prompt response!)
| abaa88_ wrote:
| Viva Revanced!
| oybng wrote:
| more dependency bloat just to deobfuscate some randomly generated
| bs that's increasingly complex for no reason and has no value
| existing in the first place, much like its creators
| dandiep wrote:
| I've been using yt-dlp to download transcripts. Are there
| alternatives that don't require going through all these hoops?
| I'm guessing no.
| zeristor wrote:
| I did download YouTube videos a few years ago, I did value that
| YouTube could keep your place.
|
| But it's a real mess it keeps crashing, something I might too
| humbly put down to me having too many files, but passive
| aggressively put it down to YouTube on iPad not having a limited
| amount of storage space.
|
| On the other hand there's a number of amazing videos I've
| downloaded to watch which have been remotely wiped. Grrr
| syrusakbary wrote:
| I wonder if they could use Wasmer to execute Javascript under the
| hood without limitations.
| porphyra wrote:
| At this rate they are just gonna have to ship a whole web browser
| with it lol.
| scosman wrote:
| Great ad for deno. I hit a similar one the other day from
| pydantic. They make a MCP server for running sandboxed python
| code and the they did that... Python to WASM, and wasm running in
| deno.
| anthk wrote:
| I refuse to run JS on my n270 netbook; even less with a
| propietary license. Thus, I will just use some invidious mirror.
| jokoon wrote:
| Youtube is victim of its success
|
| I don't promote piracy, but it seems that it's easier to download
| music from youtube than using torrents, which is quite
| surprising.
|
| Who expected that such a big company would contribute to piracy?
| ddtaylor wrote:
| When I first got with my wife I seemed a bit crazier than I am
| because I am a media hoarder for 30+ years. I don't have any VHS,
| DVDs, etc. laying around because I only keep digital copies, but
| I have pretty decent archives. Nothing important really, just
| normal stuff and some rare or obscure stuff that disappears over
| time.
|
| My wife was interested in the idea that I was running "Netfix
| from home" and enjoyed the lack of ads or BS when we watched any
| content. I never really thought I would be an "example" or
| anything like that - I fully expected everyone else to embrace
| streaming for the rest of time because I didn't think those
| companies would make so many mistakes. I've been telling people
| for the last decade "That's awesome I watch using my own thing,
| what shows are your favorites I want to make sure I have them"
|
| In the last 2 years more family members and friends have
| requested access to my Jellyfin and asked me to setup a similar
| setup with less storage underneath their TV in the living room or
| in a closet.
|
| Recently-ish we have expanded our Jellyfin to have some YouTube
| content on it. Each channel just gets a directory and gets this
| command ran: yt-dlp "$CHANNEL_URL" \
| --download-archive "downloaded.txt" \ --playlist-end 10
| \ --match-filters "live_status = 'not_live' &
| webpage_url!*='/shorts/' & original_url!*='/shorts/'" \
| -f "bv*[height<=720]+ba/b[height<=720]" \ --merge-
| output-format mp4 \ -o "%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s -
| %(title)s.%(ext)s"
|
| It actually fails to do what I want here and download h264
| content so I have it re-encoded since I keep my media library in
| h264 until the majority of my devices support h265, etc. None of
| that really matters because these YouTube videos come in AV1 and
| none of my smart TVs support that yet AFAIK.
| entropie wrote:
| First I ran a simple script, now I use ytdltt [1] to allow my
| mother via telegram bot to download YT videos (in her case its
| more like audiobooks) and sort them in directories so she can
| access/download it via jellyfin. Shes at around 1.2TB
| audiobooks in like 3 years.
|
| 1: https://github.com/entropie/ytdltt
| binaryturtle wrote:
| Tried this: "yt-dlp -f
| 'bestvideo*[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' -S
| vcodec:h264 -other_options ..." ? I'm still getting proper h264
| with that (my Raspberry PI 3 only wants a proper codec too...
| none of that mushy new-era codec stuff. ;) )
| rasz wrote:
| >fails to do what I want here and download h264 content
|
| you are missing [vcodec^=avc1] ?
| axiolite wrote:
| > It actually fails to do what I want here and download h264
| content so I have it re-encoded
|
| I struggled with that myself (yt-dlp documentation could use
| some work). What's currently working for me is:
| yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[width<800][vcodec~='^(avc|h264)']+bestaudi
| o[acodec~='^((mp|aa))']"
| herzzolf wrote:
| I recently discovered Pinchflat [1], which seems like an *arr-
| inspired web alternative, and works great for me - I just need
| to add the videos I want downloaded to a playlist and it picks
| them up. Also uses yt-dlp under the hood.
|
| 1. https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat
| werid wrote:
| use the new preset feature to get h264: -t mp4
|
| you can also skip the match filters by running the /videos URL
| instead of the main channel url.
|
| if you want 720p, use -S res:720
| getcrunk wrote:
| Do you have to put in cookies to avoid the sign in/bot prompt?
| Do you use a vpn to download yt videos?
| ticoombs wrote:
| Checkout https://github.com/meeb/tubesync
| ddtaylor wrote:
| I would be really interested in hearing what Mike Hearn has to
| say about this. AFAIK he was responsible for something very
| similar that was used at Google for other products that had some
| overlap.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This change has been long overdue. The web player has been broken
| with yt-dlp for such a long time.
| icyfox wrote:
| The folks at deno have really done a fantastic job at pushing a
| JS runtime forward in a way that's more easily plug and play for
| the community. I've used `denoland/deno_core` and
| `denoland/rusty_v8` quite a bit in embedded projects where I need
| full JS support but I can't assume users have node/bun/etc
| installed locally.
|
| Not surprised to see yt-dlp make a similar choice.
| kgdbx wrote:
| That seems a lot of dev work, why not just run in browser then?
| There are extensions that work pretty well, like Tubly
| downloader, Video DownloadHelper.
| chrsw wrote:
| The whole point of YouTube (now) is it's a market for human
| attention and behavior. Eyeballs, engagements, tracking and
| analytics. They will go to great lengths to protect and increase
| the value of this market.
| oybng wrote:
| amazing how posts critical of google quickly fall off the front
| page during north american hours
| lxgr wrote:
| > Up until now, yt-dlp has been able to use its built-in
| JavaScript "interpreter" [1]
|
| Wow, this is equal parts fascinating and horrifying.
|
| Edit, after looking into it a bit: It seems like a self-contained
| build of deno weighs in at around 40 MB (why?), so I can see why
| they tried to avoid that and appreciate the effort.
|
| [1] https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/blob/2025.09.23/yt_dlp/jsin...
| cakealert wrote:
| Why are they using the web target? YouTube has multiple other
| attack vectors which have no javascript barriers.
|
| Plenty of devices have YouTube players which are not being
| capable of being updated and which must work, exploit those APIs.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| This is very related to a talk I did last year [1]. "Part 2:
| youtube-dl" starts at 18:21. It dips toes into an analysis about
| software that fundamentally depends on ongoing human labor to
| maintain (as compared to, e.g. zlib, which is effectively "done"
| for all intents and purposes).
|
| More concretely, the additional Deno dependency is quite
| problematic for my music player, especially after I did all that
| work to get a static, embeddable CPython built [2].
|
| Ideally for me, yt-dlp would be packaged into something trivially
| embeddable and sandboxable, such as WebAssembly, calling into
| external APIs for things like networking[3]. This would reduce
| the value delivered by the yt-dlp project into pure DRM-defeating
| computation, leaving concerns such as CLI/GUI to a separate group
| of maintainers. A different project could choose to fulfill those
| dependencies with Deno, or Rust, or as in my case, built directly
| into a music player in Zig.
|
| Of course I don't expect the yt-dlp maintainers to do that.
| They're doing something for fun, for free, for pride, for self-
| respect... in any case their goals aren't exactly perfectly
| aligned with mine, so if I want to benefit from their much
| appreciated labor, I have to provide the computational
| environment that they depend on (CPython[4] and Deno).
|
| But yeah, that's now going to be a huge pain in the ass because
| now I either have to drop support for yt-dlp in my music player,
| or additionally embed deno, as well as introduce Rust as a build
| dependency... neither of which I find acceptable. And don't even
| get me started on Docker.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCLrNqc9jdE
|
| [2]: https://github.com/allyourcodebase/cpython
|
| [3]: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
|
| [4]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/9674
| sedatk wrote:
| 2045:
|
| "yt-dlp needs a copy of your digitized prefrontal cortex in order
| to bypass Youtube's HumanizeWeb brain scanner"
| UltraSane wrote:
| I would pay for YouTube if Google created the best possible
| search engine they could for it. I'm talking inverted and
| semantic indexing of every word of every video with speaker
| tagging and second level timestamping. I want to be able to runs
| queries like "Give me the timestamps of every time Veritasium
| said math while wearing a blue shirt."
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(page generated 2025-09-24 23:00 UTC)