[HN Gopher] Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for...
___________________________________________________________________
Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube
support
Author : bertman
Score : 1039 points
Date : 2025-11-12 10:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tensegrist wrote:
| previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
| xeonmc wrote:
| In ten years time YouTube will be entirely inaccessible from the
| browser as the iPad kids generation are used to doomscrolling the
| tablet app and Google feels confident enough to cut off the aging
| demographic.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| The YouTube web app is so full of bugs it's almost unusable on
| a phone.
|
| Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
| neuroelectron wrote:
| Google is having a hard time conforming to their own
| javascript standards.
| RGamma wrote:
| Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it
| happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For
| example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months
| already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.
|
| In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures
| against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.
|
| What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.
| mring33621 wrote:
| dumb middle management driven by dumb metrics
|
| a very old story...
| hbbio wrote:
| > livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already
|
| maybe it's vibe coded nowadays
| sussmannbaka wrote:
| I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the
| URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a
| meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile
| Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google
| account. After almost two decades of making the website worse
| they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I
| wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)
| Barbing wrote:
| Works dandily here.
|
| Suspicion: they've fingerprinted me hard and know I have
| premium but like to watch occasionally from Safari private
| (with content blockers) and don't hassle me.
|
| Mainly suspect this given lack of anti-adblocking symptoms.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This was happening to me browsing in FF with uBO. It would
| work as soon as I disabled uBO. I realized uBO needed an
| update, and it went back to working with uBO active after
| the update. For a couple of hours I was ready to never use
| YT again if it meant suffering their obnoxious
| interruptions with ads.
| goku12 wrote:
| > Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...
|
| I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends
| a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much
| deliberate censorship.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > It's very much deliberate censorship.
|
| Also known as "moderation"
| goku12 wrote:
| That 'moderation' is in the same spirit as 'Enhanced
| Interrogation Techniques' at Guantanamo Bay,
| 'Administrative Segregation' in US prisons or Russia's
| 'Special military operations' in Ukraine. Tomayto,
| tomahto.
|
| Disclaimer: To anybody getting ready to be offended by
| these references, don't be selectively blind to the word
| 'spirit' above. If you still can't make it out, I'm
| obviously referring to euphemisms here and no additional
| equivalences are implied. Anything else you attribute to
| my statement reflects your own views and is your own
| responsibility. It's such a shame that I have to explain
| such basic facts with a disclaimer that's longer than the
| comment itself. But the reality is that some people are
| so sensitive that they insist on imposing their version
| political correctness to not just implied speech, but
| also to unimplied speech, language and even thought,
| while totally disregarding others' cultural perspectives.
| I leave this here just in case I have to explain my
| intentions to someone again.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works
| well enough and I can play videos in the background and block
| ads.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Pffft, and good riddance, comrade! Just think about _native_
| application and _native_ performance, great _native_ animations
| and _native_ experience (and _native_ ads, of course)! We won
| 't have this god-awful Web (that propelled modern tech world in
| the first place) anymore, we can finally have personal vendetta
| against awful JS and DOM. No more interoperability, no more
| leverage against corpos, just glorious proprietary enclaves
| where local tyrant can do anything they want!
| oblio wrote:
| Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack
| on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except
| for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.
|
| The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just
| in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and
| even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that
| the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the
| Apple Gods, anyway.
|
| Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages:
| C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and
| they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but
| money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear.
| Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.
|
| But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and
| polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if
| you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or
| whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.
|
| And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably
| 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that
| is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because
| phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever
| slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery
| techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
| goku12 wrote:
| > Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very
| close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.
|
| Could you elaborate a bit, please? Any links are
| appreciated.
| oblio wrote:
| https://www.androidauthority.com/silicon-carbon-
| batteries-ex...
|
| Silicon Carbon batteries. And others, but this tech is
| already in production.
| goku12 wrote:
| Good article. Thanks!
| ux266478 wrote:
| > No more interoperability
|
| > no more leverage against corpos
|
| > just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can
| do anything they want!
|
| These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are
| things like attestation in consumer hardware.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as
| are things like attestation in consumer hardware.
|
| Totally this, and not because powers suddenly realized they
| can't control Web like they controlled early "smart" dumb
| phones circa J2ME times.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| It's not YouTube though, but downloader :)
|
| "yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
| with support for thousands of sites. The project is a fork of
| youtube-dl based on the now inactive youtube-dlc."
| nicce wrote:
| I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because
| of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to
| native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and
| denying access to the unencrypted content.
| easton wrote:
| I think these days yt-dlp is possible because they're
| relying on the infra YouTube has for their TV apps, which
| are html5 (ish) browser apps. so they'd also have to
| dedicate time to building native apps for every TV in
| existence, even if youtube.com went away.
| freefaler wrote:
| I think that too. When the people refresh their TVs with
| the newer, more DRM friendly/updated version this channel
| will meet its end :(
| somat wrote:
| My understanding is that the original yt-dl used the
| browser interface. yt-dlp uses the android app interface.
| Thorrez wrote:
| >This impacts yt-dlp as we currently request video data
| from YouTube as if we were YouTube on TV.
|
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
| goku12 wrote:
| > Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent
| downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.
|
| It would still be possible with native apps. Somebody will
| have to reverse engineer it continuously. So it will be
| slower, but still possible.
|
| However, that won't be the case if they start using some
| secret (like a private key) that you can't access directly
| from an app, or if they decide that you can't run
| custom/modified apps. That's what I believe to be the true
| intentions behind their push to adopt dystopian
| technologies like secure enclaves and platform attestation.
| Not really about security as they claim.
| nicce wrote:
| > That's what I believe to be the true intentions behind
| their push to adopt dystopian technologies like secure
| enclaves and platform attestation. Not really about
| security as they claim.
|
| Yeah, that is exactly I was thinking.
| bluGill wrote:
| Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They
| can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done
| in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.
| hu3 wrote:
| They know that. yt-dlp uses browser-like access to download.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is obviously not plausible. They're never going to shut
| off browser access on people's laptops. Watching YT at work is
| a major thing.
|
| I have to assume you're joking, but I honestly can't figure out
| what point you're even trying to make. Do it think it's
| surprising that an ad-supported site has anti-scraping/anti-
| downloading mechanisms? YouTube isn't a charity, it's not
| Wikipedia.
| reddalo wrote:
| They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill
| all non-Chromium browsers.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No, they can't. Way too many devices, including
| televisions, access YT via all sorts of browsers. Not to
| mention antitrust would be all over that. With their
| dominant browser share, getting people to switch to Chrome
| by removing access to YT for Firefox would get multiple
| governments filing lawsuits ASAP.
| mapmeld wrote:
| What OS are televisions using to run all of their
| streaming media apps? It's not iOS.
| HeinzStuckeIt wrote:
| Samsung Smart TVs run Tizen.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I don't think it's such a wild possibility that more and more
| jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and
| smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops.
| We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are
| entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices
| exclusively. The amount isn't huge (like 10 or 15% in the US
| IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.
|
| I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the
| first generation where tech literacy has actually _dropped_.
| And I don't blame them! When you don't have to troubleshoot
| things and most of your technology "just works" out the box
| compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don't need
| to know how to work under the hood as much and you don't need
| a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and
| generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need
| with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless
| when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation
| could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part
| of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and
| locked down, including cars, but you get my point).
|
| The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where
| using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe
| choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they
| become strictly "work" tools for heavy lifting while mobile
| devices are for everything else. In that world many companies
| will simply go "well over 90% of our users are only using the
| app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support
| as it continues to trend downwards so...why bother?"
|
| Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come
| out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I
| could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and
| the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the
| past for a larger percentage of the population.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Just because the balance shifts doesn't mean the
| desktop/laptop stops being supported.
|
| Laptops aren't going anywhere. Even if phones and tablets
| replace them for a third of tasks, or a third of people.
|
| The idea that laptops with browsers would become so rare
| that YouTube would drop support, within any reasonably
| predictable future timeframe, is pure fantasy.
| Barbing wrote:
| All the ewaste MS generated w/Win11 min requirements...
| I'm thinking that kinda maneuver. Eh not really but
| anyways:
|
| A slow dropping of support for those who aren't using an
| app or Chrome with some Play(Video) Integrity Extension
| installed.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| >within any reasonably predictable future timeframe
|
| I think given the pace of technological advancement and
| given how every generation we see at least one major
| piece of electronics completely wipe out generations of
| predictions, this statement doesn't serve a productive
| purpose other than to make "I don't agree" sound like
| some variation of "it's an objective fact that what you
| said is impossible." You're just spiking the
| conversation, even if that is not your intention.
|
| I didn't say this is definitely going to happen. I'm just
| saying clearly the way we engage with computers is
| shifting and that means companies will adjust
| accordingly. It's not that far fetched.
|
| As for "within any reasonably predictable future
| timeframe," for all we know YouTube will become a relic.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It's not that far fetched._
|
| That's what I'm disagreeing with. Your scenario _is_ far-
| fetched. This isn 't between two comparably plausible
| scenarios. You can look at current objective trends of
| desktop/laptop sales and see they're not moving such that
| they're going to meaningfully disappear to the extent
| where a popular site like YouTube would remove support.
| It's absolutely far-fetched. I'm not "spiking" any
| conversation, I'm simply completely disagreeing based on
| current actual trends.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I'm not too proud to admit that I am way out on a limb
| and probably wrong. I'm just kind of musing and thinking
| out loud about a broader question. I don't mind you
| disagreeing, I don't mind being wrong, but I don't know
| man...maybe try and ease off the gas a bit?
| dawnerd wrote:
| Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I'd argue it'd
| helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for
| corporate videos. Yeah there's other solutions but the number
| of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.
| astura wrote:
| >Watching YT at work is a major thing.
|
| Where are these jobs where I can get paid to watch YouTube?
| phantasmish wrote:
| Lots of people listen to the audio. It's like a podcast, or
| having the radio on, which is fine in lots and lots of
| jobs.
|
| Some people probably also literally _watch_ it, but I know
| multiple people who basically use it as a radio at work.
|
| Plus, never worked anywhere where half of everyone,
| including management, is more-or-less openly watching
| sports more than working during major tournaments?
| crazygringo wrote:
| And nobody's saying you're getting paid to watch YouTube
| _all day_. But video links get sent around, and people
| check out whatever 3 minute video. They watch during
| lunch. You know how it is.
| JimmyBiscuit wrote:
| In small shops youtube is quite a handy source of
| information. I have to prototype and 3D print lots of
| stuff.
| ux266478 wrote:
| I think it would give me a life crisis and I'd feel like a
| failure of a boss if I learned my otherwise productive
| employees felt they couldn't watch sloptube the clock. A
| sysadmin that isn't constantly jacked into nethack is
| hardly a sysadmin at all. You should really demand more
| humane working conditions if you feel like you have to
| micro-optimize your work day.
| iggldiggl wrote:
| Working in infrastructure design (specifically railways),
| cab ride videos are often useful to fill in gaps in as-
| built plans or the pictures you took on a site visit
| (you'll always miss out to photograph something that'll be
| of major interest later), especially in early planning
| phases. Plus there's the odd software tutorial video here
| and there, too, of course.
| vachina wrote:
| They'd need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective
| DRM. Encrypted bitstream generated on the fly watchable only on
| L2 attested device.
| fsflover wrote:
| Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.
| goku12 wrote:
| TPM isn't the only misfeature that makes Windows 11 an
| abomination. People who don't switch to a respectful
| platform is in for a lot of pain.
| icpmoles wrote:
| DRM protection schemes usually don't rely on TPM, the real
| magic happens inside your GPU and the monitor.
| fsflover wrote:
| They can use all available tools at the same time.
| gruez wrote:
| TPMs existed for at least a decade though.
| fsflover wrote:
| They can even be based on free software like in my Librem
| laptop. This is however not what Microsoft wants.
| lloeki wrote:
| Netflix is already there for 4k streams
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| And it's an entirely useless effort. No idea how it is done
| but the internet is full 4k rips.
| alex7o wrote:
| They find devices that are easy to hack (and I mean rip
| and tear) and extract the decryption keys from each of
| them, from what I have heard cheap chinese tvs and set
| top boxes, they extract the keys from the chips (hardware
| hacking, heard some even use microscopes to read the keys
| by hand), and then use them to decrypt streams, I heard
| that they catch them pretty fast to they use like 1
| device per season. This is why they use mostly stollen
| devices.
| 13hunteo wrote:
| Interesting - do you have any sources to read further?
| 47282847 wrote:
| Search for widevine decrypt. You'll find code and forums
| where at least some L3 (software) keys are publicly
| shared. For high resolution on some platforms, you need
| L1 keys, but as far as I understand the decryption
| process basically stays the same once you have a working
| key.
|
| Random article: https://www.ismailzai.com/blog/picking-
| the-widevine-locks
|
| Claimed to be L1 key leaks (probably all blacklisted by
| now): https://github.com/Mavrick102/WIDEVINE-
| CDM-L1-Giveaway
| sodality2 wrote:
| You won't find a ton of up-to-date info that would let
| you do the same - the scene groups hold their methods
| closely specifically because of this cat-and-mouse game.
| gpderetta wrote:
| The analog hole is real.
| allan_s wrote:
| I was wondering how easy it is
|
| I.e I know that hdmi stream can be encrypted so I guess
| for Netflix you can't juste have a "hdmi splitter"? Do
| you need to go as far as plugging yourself just before
| the lcd pixels ? And if so , is it the moment where its
| easier to have a high def camera pointed at your lcd
| screen with post processing?
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| The really shitty thing is that vulnerable devices get
| blacklisted en masse, so all legitimate users get stuck
| with 480p video content on streaming services. The Nexus
| 5 got this treatment, as I understand it, because it was
| too easy to extract the keys.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It provides a good incentive for manufacturers to invest
| into security for their devices.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| No, it provides no incentive at all!
|
| It's the users who suffer when this happens, not the
| manufacturers. The manufacturers couldn't care less, the
| money is already in the bank.
|
| If the manufacturers were required to replace all the
| revoked devices at their cost, _that_ would be a real
| incentive.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Manufactures suffer reputational damage from it. Also
| keys could be revoked before they finish selling through
| all of their stock of produced phones.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Not a Netflix user here: Are you saying that paying
| customers get cut off from higher video quality, that
| they are possibly paying for, and pressured into buying
| new devices? That shit should be illegal!
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what happens!
| alerighi wrote:
| More easily in the past (I don't think if it's still true
| for 4K) you only needed an HDMI splitter to bypass HDCP
| copy protection.
| jasomill wrote:
| Now you need both a buggy HDCP 1.4 splitter and an HDCP
| 2.1 to 1.4 converter.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Breaking HDCP is a lot easier than breaking the other
| things. You don't have to attack the torment nexus
| directly. This is not the most ideal option but it is
| information theoretically correct assuming your capture
| rig is set up properly.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It would be harder to break HDCP and you wouldn't even
| get the original compressed media content. It's a worse
| idea.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| Yeah. The HDCP1 master key was leaked over a decade ago,
| it's a joke compared to widevine. Encoding the raw input
| is very feasible on modern hardware.
| piperswe wrote:
| You can only get a WEBRip that way, not a WEBDL, since
| you'll need to re-encode and introduce some generational
| loss. The gold standard for streaming piracy is stripping
| the DRM from the original compressed bitstream, remuxing
| it to mkv, and uploading that as-is for maximum quality.
| sabatonfan wrote:
| I knew of this chrome bug which could allow netflix to be
| ripped. I had heard it in comments of some section of
| youtube and I might need to look further into it but its
| definitely possible.
| kelvinjps10 wrote:
| It's not as easy as downloading a YouTube video though
| oblio wrote:
| I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by
| pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more
| professional approach based on external recording.
| devsda wrote:
| I might be recalling it wrong,but I remember reading that
| there was some old hardware that refused to record
| protected TV/Movies probably a VCR or a DVR.
|
| Camera manufacturers can easily refuse to record a stream
| of they detect it is protected, may be via watermarks or
| other sidechannel.
| jedberg wrote:
| Old VCRs looked for a hidden signal that rental videos
| put out so you couldn't record them. But it was easy to
| block with a cheap device that you put in the middle.
| tshaddox wrote:
| HDCP is how modern digital displays (and digital display
| recorders) do it.
|
| You might be thinking of Macrovision, which was
| integrated in a lot of DVD players and would embed pulses
| into the vertical blanking interval of the analogy video
| output. These pulses could be detected by compliant DVD
| recorders and used to refuse recording. The pulses would
| also cause playback defects in some older VCRs and TVs.
|
| I remember connecting my first DVD player to an old TV
| via a VCR (effectively using the VCR as an RF modulator)
| and being plagued with the image brightness constantly
| lowering and rising. At the time, I fixed this by
| switching to a dedicated RF modulator. I now suspect
| Macrovision is what caused this.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_Protection_System
| piperswe wrote:
| Macrovision worked by outputting signals that were just
| barely out of spec, such that TVs would be able to
| correct for the issues just fine but VCRs would
| constantly lose sync.
| ericd wrote:
| Wonder if you could train a neural net to take camera
| recordings and basically reconstitute the original. For a
| given setup, the distortions should be pretty consistent.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Can you explain in simple terms what would prevent one from
| running the decryption programmatically posing as the end
| client?
| Thorrez wrote:
| Here are a couple ideas:
|
| The decryption code could verify that it's only providing
| decrypted content to an attested-legitimate monitor, using
| DRM over HDMI (HDCP).
|
| You might try to modify the decryption code to disable the
| part where it reencrypts the data for the monitor, but it
| might be heavily obfuscated.
|
| Maybe the decryption key is only provided to a TPM that can
| attest its legitimacy. Then you would need a hardware
| vulnerability to crack it.
|
| Maybe the server could provide a datastream that's fed
| directly to the monitor and decrypted there, without any
| decryption happening on the computer. Then of course the
| reverse engineering would target the monitor instead of the
| code on the computer. The monitor would be a less easily
| accessible reverse engineering target, and it itself could
| employ obfuscation and a TPM.
| robmccoll wrote:
| Let's say the only devices you can get that will run
| YouTube are running i/pad/visionOS or Android and that
| those will only run on controlled hardware and that the
| hardware will only run signed code. Now let's say the only
| way to get the YouTube client is though the controlled app
| stores on those platforms. You can build a chain of trust
| tied to something like a TPM in the device at one end and
| signing keys held by Apple or Google at the other that
| makes it very difficult to get access to the client
| implementation and the key material and run something like
| the client in an environment that would allow it to provide
| convincing evidence that it is a trusted client. As long as
| you have the hardware and software in your hands, it's
| probably not impossible, but it can be made just a few
| steps shy.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Attestation requiring a hardware TPM 2.0 (or higher), and
| not being able to extract the private key from the TPM on
| your system.
|
| TPM is _Mathematically Secure_ and you can 't extract
| what's put in. See, _Fritz-Chip_.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Yes, it's called: Web Environment Integrity + hardware
| attestation of some kind
|
| > "the technical means through which WEI will accomplish
| its ends is relatively simple. Before serving a web page, a
| server can ask a third-party "verification" service to make
| sure that the user's browsing environment has not been
| "tampered" with. A translation of the policy's terminology
| will help us here: this Google-owned server will be asked
| to make sure that the browser does not deviate in any way
| from Google's accepted browser configuration" [1]
|
| https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/web-environment-
| integrit...
| immibis wrote:
| You don't get access to the decryption code nor the keys -
| both are hardwired in silicon.
|
| We'll eventually be able to reverse-engineer that and run
| it programmatically, but it will take a long time.
|
| And when they catch you doing so, they'll ban your
| (personalized) encryption key so you'll just have to buy
| another graphics card to get another key.
|
| This is how it already works, not some future thing. But
| the licensing fees make it so it only gets used for
| Hollywood-level movies.
| ticulatedspline wrote:
| maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only
| would get them pretty much all the way there.
|
| They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the
| inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you
| to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view
| the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast
| majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in
| sandboxes and their content would be safe.
| spwa4 wrote:
| "their" content? This is Youtube.
|
| Of course, the same can be said for FB, Tiktok, instagram,
| Pintrest, reddit, ... and I'm sure the list keeps going.
| Frankly, Youtube is pretty damn good about this, really.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| No where else to go that pays. They can pay which entices
| those to stay.
|
| Google owns that monopoly.
| gruez wrote:
| >They'd need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of
| effective DRM.
|
| That's already here. Even random aliexpress tablets support
| widevine L1 (ie. highest security level)
| bpye wrote:
| How often are their keys extracted?
| kevincox wrote:
| iOS can already attest to websites that they are running in
| unmodified Safari.
| https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k
|
| I guess that isn't quite enough to prevent screen recording
| but these devices also support DRM which does this.
| Fokamul wrote:
| I hope they will do that, yes really.
|
| Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community
| solution, where creators will be paid directly by their
| viewers.
|
| I have NO problem, what so ever, to pay content creators
| directly.
|
| But I have HUGE problem to pay big corpos. It's ridiculous that
| we pay for Netflix same price as US people and for you it's
| cheaper than coffee and for us, if you compare median-salary,
| it's 5-10x MORE expensive. (cancelled every streaming platform
| year before as all of my friends, cloud seedbox here we go) And
| I don't even wanna mention Netflix's agenda they want to push
| (eg.: Witcher)
|
| That's why piracy is so frequent here in small country in EU :)
| Also it's legal or in grey-area, because nobody enforce it or
| copyright companies are unable to enforce it if you don't make
| money from sharing. (yes, you don't even need to use VPN with
| torrents)
| latexr wrote:
| > Because this will mean major shift to open-source and
| community solution, where creators will be paid directly by
| their viewers.
|
| That's an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven't moved off of
| closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and
| haven't flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula.
| The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat
| whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad
| things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour
| of something more open.
| mbac32768 wrote:
| I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically
| choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have
| elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them.
|
| You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from
| YouTube.
|
| If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using
| YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right
| to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| i think a lot of millenials and older gen-z use youtube on
| browsers. It has more and more alternative competitors too,
| like bilibili in China.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China,
| then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get
| added to my doomscrolling itinerary.
| butlike wrote:
| They'll never leave money on the table like that. The older
| demographic are the only ones that can buy things.
| BenGosub wrote:
| One constant about Google, they always bet on the web.
| xandrius wrote:
| Until the profits tells them not to.
| reddalo wrote:
| I wonder why YouTube doesn't implement full DRM, such as
| Widevine, at this point.
|
| Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices? Is
| it too expensive?
|
| (not that I'd like that; I always download videos from YouTube
| for my personal archive, and I only use 3rd party or modified
| clients)
| haunter wrote:
| They are already experimenting with DRM on all videos in
| certain clients (like the HTML5 TV one) https://github.com/yt-
| dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563
|
| Sooner or later, in the next couple of years, it will happen.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> Is it because it would break compatibility with some
| devices?_
|
| This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices
| that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As
| those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when
| then this sort of limitation will be removed.
|
| I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is
| certainly part of the equation.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| Yeah, it's pretty much to support backwards compatibility with
| old smart TVs and the like. They already enforce stricter rules
| on new hi-res content, and once those old devices cycle out of
| service you can expect the support to go away.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| It's just an understandable reluctance to insert a bunch of
| additional dependencies in your playback stack unless you
| really, really have to.
|
| People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in
| over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much
| playback start latency, and replicating that over literally
| millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-
| transcoding.
|
| It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a
| YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as
| part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of
| devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to
| keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate
| to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It
| wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used
| an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
| alerighi wrote:
| I think because it cost money and they get little benefit on
| doing so.
|
| Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since
| they care, it's because they content they distribute requires
| that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the
| content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not
| have this requirement.
|
| Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad
| for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are
| able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content
| creators on other platforms that does not implement these
| requirements.
| djoldman wrote:
| From
|
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
|
| it looks like deno is recommended for these reasons:
|
| > Notes
|
| > * Code is run with restricted permissions (e.g, no file system
| or network access)
|
| > * Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm
| (--remote-components ejs:npm).
| arbll wrote:
| It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the
| business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp users but _please do
| not use deno sandboxing as a your main security measure to
| execute untrusted code_. Runtime-level sandboxing is always
| very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker
| & co) is the right way for this.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| i wonder if it would be legal if they did, as an anti-
| circumvention counter-measure.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| > It's fine for this project since google is probably not in
| the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp
|
| yt-dlp supports a huge list of websites other than youtube
| blackhaj7 wrote:
| Is there a full list? I struggled to find one
| dcassett wrote:
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/blob/2025.09.23/supportedsi...
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| There's a supportedsites.md file in the base directory of
| the git repo.
| arbll wrote:
| I assumed they only use this setup for youtube, that might
| be wrong
| ethmarks wrote:
| But YouTube is the only one that yt-dlp uses Deno for. No
| other website on yt-dlp's list has put up enough of a fight
| to merit an external JS runtime; only YouTube.
|
| From the September announcement:
|
| > The JavaScript runtime requirement will only apply to
| downloading from YouTube. yt-dlp can still be used without
| it on the other ~thousand sites it supports
| zahlman wrote:
| > Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on
| OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right
| way for this.
|
| ... Isn't the web browser's sandboxing runtime-level?
| franga2000 wrote:
| Yes, and it's only reasonably secure because of years of
| exploits being found and fixed by some of the best (and
| very well-funded) software security engineers out there.
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| Great news! Deno uses the same runtime as chrome, so you
| benefit from all those found exploits.
| arbll wrote:
| While you benefit from the V8 fixes it lacks OS-level
| sandboxing (see above). Chrome is safe because it stacks
| security layers. Runtime sandboxing is just one of them
| and arguably the weakest one.
| arbll wrote:
| That's not true. It's secure because they are stacking
| OS-sandboxing on top, forcing attackers to find a chain
| of exploits instead of a single issue in V8
| arbll wrote:
| It used to be 100% runtime-level and it was the golden age
| of browser exploits. Each of your tabs are now a separate
| process that the OS sandboxes. They can only access a
| specific API over IPC for anything that goes beyond
| js/rendering (cookie management, etc...). An exploit in V8
| today only gives access to this API. A second exploit is
| needed in this API to escape the sandbox and do anything
| meaningful on the target system.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Yes, but browser sandboxing is an absolute marvel of
| software design that also cost millions and millions of
| dollars in developers salaries and CVE bounties to develop.
| Neither Deno nor yt-dlp have anywhere close to millions of
| dollars to spend on implementing secure JS sandboxing.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| I would not put it past them. And I'm not sure I trust the
| yt-dlp team to implement sandboxing securely. The codebase is
| already full of shortcuts that lead to vulnerabilities like
| file extension injection.
|
| I mean, this gives me pause:
|
| > Both QuickJS and QuickJS-NG do not fully allow executing
| files from stdin, so yt-dlp will create temporary files for
| each EJS script execution. This can theoretically lead to
| time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities.
|
| https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
|
| TOCTOU from temporary files is a _solved_ problem.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| For a long time, yt-dlp worked completely with Python. They
| implemented a lightweight JavaScript interpreter that could run
| basic scripts. But as the runtime requirements became more
| sophisticated it struggled to scale
| KingMob wrote:
| As they put it, it was less of an interpreter, and more like
| 3 regexes in a trench coat.
| bilekas wrote:
| More and more recently with youtube, they seem to be more and
| more confrontational with their users, from outright blocking
| adblockers, which has no bearing on youtube's service, to
| automatically scraping creators content for AI training and now
| anything API related. They're very much aware that there is no
| real competition and so they're taking full advantage of it. At
| the expense of the 'users experience' but these days, large
| companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer experience
| anymore.
| Arainach wrote:
| >outright blocking adblockers, which has no bearing on
| youtube's service
|
| The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth
| to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that
| adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing
| HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are
| (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and
| absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| That's fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the
| ads they serve aren't scams. They are falling short of that
| obligation.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Could you elaborate on why? It seems to me that YouTube's
| implicit contract with the user is "these people paid us to
| show you this advert", not "we vouch for the integrity and
| veracity of this advert". I obviously agree that it'd be
| nice if YouTube would put more effort into screening
| adverts, but I don't see why they're _obligated_ to. I'm
| happy to be corrected, though.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| They have the money and the world would be better.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Because taking money from a con artist to deliver marks
| based on profiles you've collected on everyone to see
| who's most likely to be taken in makes you an accessory
| if not accomplice to fraud.
|
| Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency
| in the world) should know who they are partnering with.
| Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is
| _at best_ negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people
| to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud
| (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful.
| Someone either approved the scams or the system which
| allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should
| be a criminal investigation into how this came to be.
| _Especially_ considering people have anecdotally said
| online that they 've reported scam ads and received a
| reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not
| violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any
| case this applies to anyone). At that point they
| unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a
| participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies
| should be looking at prison time if that is indeed
| happening.
| ethmarks wrote:
| That's a fair point. Thanks for the detailed response.
|
| I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually
| are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the
| adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous.
| Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps,
| shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of
| slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many
| that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm
| curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that
| are so outrageous.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Tons of blatant phishing, rug-pull crypto coins, illegal
| medications, or just fraudulent websites. Very content-
| dependent though
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I also use a malware blocker at all times (to not have
| one on all computers would be like running an open telnet
| server: insane), so can't say I have personal experience
| with it, but there is plenty of anecdotal discussion
| about blatant financial scams, e.g. [0][1]. That first
| one OP claims Youtube acknowledged receiving their
| report, investigated it, and determined that the ad was
| acceptable. If true, they are admitting they are
| specifically aware of these ads and that users are
| raising complaints about them (they don't exist now, but
| a court could subpoena information about whether OP's
| story is true).
|
| Additionally, Google has a well known policy of allowing
| people to take out ads (which look exactly like a search
| result) for _someone else 's trademark_ (defeating the
| entire purpose of a trademark), and the FBI has a
| frequently referenced notice[2] to US citizens to be
| aware of fraud where scammers take out impersonating ads
| on "Internet search results" to e.g. lead people to the
| wrong site for financial institutions. It absolutely
| blows my mind that no one is prosecuted for participating
| in this.
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18gjiqy/you
| tube_do...
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1h6rdtj/massi
| ve_incr...
|
| [2] https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2022/PSA221221
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| What do you think about YouTube showing pornographic
| advertisement to kids? Do you think they could, or do you
| think they must ensure that it's not displayed ?
|
| Because I don't see how scam are less illegal than
| showing pornography to children, yet you wouldn't dare to
| tell me it's fine.
| tgv wrote:
| YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on
| servers and staff in three months.
| Arainach wrote:
| Making a profit doesn't mean that their costs aren't so
| high that adblocking isn't compatible.
|
| Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business
| model isn't compatible with people just walking in and
| grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical
| to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
| tgv wrote:
| I don't see how ad-blocking is unethical.
|
| There are companies that make money by placing ("out of
| home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those
| would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou
| shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the
| bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing
| Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian
| thought.
| sodality2 wrote:
| It would be like attending a time-share dinner and
| putting in earplugs during their speech. I definitely
| think it's permissible to do it, but it's also
| permissible for them to kick you out for doing it.
| engeljohnb wrote:
| It's more like tearing out the ad pages of a magazine
| before reading it. Even if the magazine has fine print
| saying "the reader may not tear out the ad pages..." It's
| still a ridiculous rule and it isn't wrong for people to
| ignore it.
| bitpush wrote:
| The right analogy would be a newspaper delivering you the
| paper in ~milliseconds when you ask for it, whereever in
| the world, for free, and then you proceed to rip off the
| ads and read it.
|
| The reason newspaper do the delivery was the promise that
| you'll see the ads, and they get to make money from that
| ads.
|
| If they notice that you do all of the work of providing
| you the newspaper almost instantly and you dont see the
| ads, they are either gonna have to a) politely refuse to
| serve you b) point you to an alternate way of accessing
| the newspaper ("Newspaper Premium" for $$)
| engeljohnb wrote:
| Firstly, ad watch time is not currency.
|
| Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I
| want with it, and the expectations of the paper company
| has no bearing on it.
|
| If they don't want to give me the paper for free, they
| should stop, but they haven't yet. Their expectation to
| make a certain amount of revenue from ads doesn't
| obligate the consumer. If their business model isn't
| making them the profit they need, it's on them to change
| their strategy.
| bitpush wrote:
| > Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I
| want with it, and the expectations of the paper company
| has no bearing on it.
|
| Absolutely! I run an adblocker as well!
|
| At the same time, you'd agree they have the right to
| refuse to serve you (access denied) or make you jump
| through hoops (solve a challenge etc)
| engeljohnb wrote:
| Sure. YouTube can put everything behind a paywall one day
| and I won't complain. But I reject the increasingly
| common belief that it's somehow wrong to block ads.
| bitpush wrote:
| Again, not wrong to block ads. But they can make it very
| difficult to have you and I access to videos if we're
| running adblocker.
|
| We're right, and they're right as well.
| lukan wrote:
| The biggest difference is still the difference between
| physical stuff that only exist once and information, that
| just needs to be copied without loosing any value.
| titzer wrote:
| > (presumably, I haven't looked into it)
|
| YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been
| profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more
| than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more
| growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you
| know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't
| have it. Welcome to enshittification.
|
| Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On
| my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.
| Arainach wrote:
| You can absolutely have that. You can pay for YouTube
| Premium and you don't get ads. It's shockingly reasonable
| in my opinion* - dollars spent to hours I watch, it's my
| personal best value streaming service.
|
| *Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube.
| There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
| titzer wrote:
| I refuse to pay on principle. The idea that a megacorp
| can field a loss leader for nearly a decade, enticing
| users to create enormous crowd-sourced content, then
| later, _even when profitable_ can gradually reduce the
| quality of the service to the point where users have to
| pay to get back to an experience _they used to have_ is
| textbook enshittification.
| devsda wrote:
| Ads, I can tolerate occasional ones but not signing in to
| YT or premium has a biggest benefit of all, no more
| creepy tracking and ads based on Google search keywords,
| no more shitty recommendations.
|
| I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app
| data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not
| tainted by previous videos.
|
| PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person
| who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on
| YT videos with no way to change language on mobile,
| please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless
| frustrated users.
| goku12 wrote:
| > At the expense of the 'users experience' but these days,
| large companies simply don't suffer from a bad customer
| experience anymore.
|
| This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer
| satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's
| just that you and I are not their customers. It's not even the
| YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad
| service company and their primary customers have always been
| the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience.
| For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of
| each ad.
|
| Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who
| subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive
| resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the
| advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor
| quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is
| visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to
| workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of
| your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your
| account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of
| politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can
| only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it
| catches the attention of someone over there.
|
| Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be
| their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and
| attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their
| customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait
| and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube
| for free and killing off all their competition in the process.
| Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this
| is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not
| complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull
| these sort of corporate shenanigans.
| bilekas wrote:
| > This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by
| customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market
| forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.
|
| Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not
| but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when
| you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron,
| only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.
|
| The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't
| recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers
| who make the new system.
| goku12 wrote:
| > Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't
| matter.. Line must go up..
|
| I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All
| these big companies keep driving up our cost of living,
| while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also
| a cost to not participating, so that's not an option
| either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point
| where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their
| influence on our lives.
|
| > The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't
| recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of
| hackers who make the new system.
|
| I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the
| internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the
| next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created
| by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now
| isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over
| merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in
| everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet
| trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't
| know how we'll overcome that.
| spockz wrote:
| I'm recently also encountering more unskippable ads, especially
| in kids videos. There were always two ads. Sometimes the first
| wasn't shippable and the second always was. That has gradually
| shifted to neither being skippable.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| Enshitiffication is the user experience. The passive,
| impassive, drooling hordes don't even notice.
| TechSquidTV wrote:
| adblocking "users" are not Youtube's users. What do you mean
| blocking ads has no bearing on their service? It sounds like
| you are saying user experience is "I should get this for free".
| bilekas wrote:
| YouTube itself is offered for free. The creators of content
| are not Google employees. Adblocking is a safety measure on
| my own physical machine.
|
| Not YouTube's users? Maybe. But I am, so by that metric
| there's some doubt.
|
| I paid for over 2 years for the premium, the cost increases
| and it's cheaper to pihole everything and support the usual
| suspects on patreon.
|
| It's become a scenario of "I've given you so many adverts,
| you should pay me to get less."
| worldsavior wrote:
| yt-dlp feels like a whole army fighting Google. Users reporting
| and the army performs.
| dewey wrote:
| If by army you mean underfunded open source volunteers then
| yes.
| worldsavior wrote:
| That's the point, they don't have the fund but still give the
| sense of fight and power of an army.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| If it's free, can you even talk about underfunding?
| dewey wrote:
| You can donate to a free project, including yt-dlp
| (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/blob/master/Maintainers.md#...)
| Almondsetat wrote:
| The developers can arbitrarily decide their own goals and
| always claim underfunding, that's why it's meaningless in
| this context
| dewey wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are arguing for or against, but the
| fact that big corporations are built on top of the work
| of volunteers (curl, ffmpeg) who mostly have to beg for
| funding is a known fact.
|
| Example from yesterday: https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-
| google-fund-us-or-stop-send...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Nobody "has to" beg for funding, because nobody is
| forcing them to work! You are underfunded if you are
| forced to accomplish a task and are given too little
| money. In community driven projects this is not the case.
| The only thing keeping the developers from taking a nice
| vacation is their abstract own sense of duty, which is
| their prerogative, but completely optional
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's quite worrying. A sizeable chunk of cultural and educational
| material produced in the last decade is in control of greedy
| bastards who will never have enough. Unfortunately, downloading
| the video data is only part of it. Even if we shared it all on
| BitTorrent it's nowhere near as useful without the index and
| metadata.
| crazygringo wrote:
| What are you talking about? It's in control of the creators. YT
| doesn't get exclusive copyright on user's content. Those
| creators can upload wherever they want.
|
| And YT isn't "greedy bastards". They provide a valuable
| service, for free, that is extremely expensive to run. Do you
| think YT ought to be government-funded or a charity or
| something?
| OGWhales wrote:
| > Do you think YT ought to be government-funded
|
| Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic,
| arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of
| it are actually not that great and a potential government
| system might actually be better:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4
|
| I will say that is something I would not have considered
| reasonable prior to watching his video.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| From the preservation point of view yes. But realistically,
| it's been the norm throughout human history that irrelevant
| culture simply gets removed.
| eviks wrote:
| So is much of relevant culture, it's not like there is a
| magic preservation wand that sorts by relevance before
| removal
| anal_reactor wrote:
| There is. If something is relevant, it'll organically be
| kept somewhere.
| bdz wrote:
| I use yt-dlp (and back then youtube-dl) all the time to archive
| my liked videos. Started back in around 2010, now I have tens of
| thousands of videos saved. Storage is cheap and a huge percent of
| them are not available anymore on the site.
|
| I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK
| honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or
| so then they permanently remove them.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Same here and my motivation was that some of my liked videos
| were randomly removed and it's pretty cool music I wanted to
| keep forever.
|
| I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album
| art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like
| 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
|
| Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I
| connect it.
|
| So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to
| click on "Like" to add more.
|
| And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have
| thought of this as a feature ...
| anamexis wrote:
| > And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have
| thought of this as a feature ...
|
| Isn't that the YouTube Music app?
| moralestapia wrote:
| No.
| anamexis wrote:
| How so? What's missing?
| moralestapia wrote:
| * Several hundred million tracks that are not labeled as
| "music" by uploaders, to start.
|
| * Native integration with my phone music player, allowing
| for things like seamless playback, etc.
|
| * Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device.
|
| * If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my
| device.
|
| (Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)
| anamexis wrote:
| * Every Youtube video is playable on the Youtube music
| app.
|
| * There is a liked videos playlist
|
| Yes, I read your comment above.
|
| Regarding the other two points, it is of course
| understandable why you'd want to download and have your
| own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue
| with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a
| feature.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Great. I'll keep using mine, though.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| I have a script that calls out to a small llm
| artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on
| this title", title)
|
| etc. with some stripping of newlines etc. It works well! they
| can often infer the correct answer even if it's not present
| in the title
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hey ^^, that's a great idea.
|
| I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me
| until now, thanks!
| dylan604 wrote:
| I doubt that it's a nobody else situation, and it's more of a
| management doesn't want it as it takes away the need for
| their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn't
| want it, as there's no more royalties coming in. Can't
| release an app that pisses of the industry.
| blarg1 wrote:
| I started after channels started removing their own videos
| because they either didn't think the videos were good enough or
| they had a mental break and deleted their channel. So good
| stuff just gone.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.
|
| Generations of talent & creativity just gone.
| kragen wrote:
| What's a "YTP"?
| Valulz wrote:
| YouTube poop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Poop
| seg_lol wrote:
| I recommend starting with Mom
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7opxguZWns
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because
| they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.
|
| Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.
| underlipton wrote:
| There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical
| artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their
| videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely
| different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in
| particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists
| as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any
| time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and
| that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a
| different title. I can't even remember how it went.
| trallnag wrote:
| Do you ever go back and actually watch those videos? Whenever I
| start to journal, track, or just document something, after some
| time I notice again and again that most of the value has
| already been created the moment I finish working on a specific
| entry. Even with something seemingly very important like
| medical records. Maybe one exception I can think of are
| recordings of memories involving people close to you
| rob wrote:
| I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching
| YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times
| where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download
| and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a
| lot of videos to just seemingly save.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Whether something is worth downloading is a good heuristic
| for whether it's worth watching in the first place. e.g.
| university lectures, technical talks, hobby technique
| tutorials, etc. are something you may want to reference in
| the future, or you may want to save for your kids in case
| they're interested in it one day, etc. The latest slop from
| professional "content creators" that you can't imagine
| keeping so you can pass it down one day? Not worth your
| time today either.
| f_devd wrote:
| I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has
| actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I
| think the difference is that you control the journal (and so
| rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos
| you're archiving are by default outside of your control and
| can be more easily lost.
| bdz wrote:
| I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays
| those videos randomly if I need some background noise.
| avhception wrote:
| I also have a ton of music videos from Youtube. Many of
| them are fan-made, many already unavailable I sometimes
| play them on a projector when I'm throwing a party.
| rob wrote:
| How many of the 20,000+ videos you've saved locally do you
| actually care about if they get "removed" from YouTube?
| bdz wrote:
| I'm not sure and that's a good question but after a point
| it was a principle of saving them rather than caring them
| about. Probably a digital hoarding attitude.
| lurk2 wrote:
| You never know until you need to find something and can't
| find it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding
| pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old
| hand written journals, just the physical process of writing
| has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There's also a
| bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting
| thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you
| might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the
| same at all
| nicman23 wrote:
| do you have a cron job or something? i know it is probably
| trivial but eh
| bdz wrote:
| No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with
| removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap
| manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Popular self-hosted solution:
| https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist
| trvz wrote:
| You people always make everything more complicated than
| necessary. yt-dlp -o
| '%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s'
| --cookies-from-browser chrome
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| That does none of the things tubearchivist does, among
| them:
|
| - Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and
| make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of
| viewed and unviewed videos
|
| Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around,
| instead of visiting a page in my browser.
| bspammer wrote:
| > Once your YouTube video collection grows, it becomes
| hard to search and find a specific video. That's where
| Tube Archivist comes in: By indexing your video
| collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize,
| search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without
| hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
|
| If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend
| that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is
| popular.
| DrammBA wrote:
| > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead
| of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"
| can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| ryandrake wrote:
| Someone should put together and publish a docker
| container that does that.
| claar wrote:
| Yep. But.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
| fragmede wrote:
| I sent the video to my friend, but his phone says
| "/home/trvz/media/youtube/george hotz archive/20251109 -
| comma ai | COMMA CON 2025 | George Hotz | Outwit,
| Outplay, Outlast | President [werrvv0MVXQ].webm" was not
| found. Plz help!
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| I'm also not a fun of such overengineered programs, but
| using raw yt-dlp alone is not enough for replicating full
| workflow.
|
| Your command is nice for downloading a single video (I
| also provide a url from clipboard via xclip), but
| archiving videos daily from a list of favorite channels
| would require a bit more scripting. Didn't manage to find
| anything both minimal and popular to link instead.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Damn, one can really build an offline internet for
| themselves these days huh?
| postexitus wrote:
| Gives me Magnum Archives vibes.
| darkwater wrote:
| Ooooh thanks! ElasticSearch? Who cares, gotta use somehow
| that spare memory in my k8s home cluster!
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| You are a digital hoarder. I have taken so many pics that I
| wouldn't even bother to look back that them (do we ever?) but
| Google memories is really a neat feature, it refreshes
| memories. I think you should run a similar service to refresh
| memory of your favourite videos like they are on speed dail.
| ge96 wrote:
| I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be
| looked at
| bluGill wrote:
| Taking pictures is important to getting better. Be glad
| that each one doesn't cost $.30 in film like it would have
| in 1980 - not inflation adjusted (prices from memory so
| perhaps off a bit). That is just the cost of the film you
| used, if you want to look at the negative you have
| development costs, and even more costs to get a print.
| Today you don't have to worry about costs of a photo and so
| can take a lot of them without worry will it be good, if it
| is bad just learn from the mistake and throw it away.
| fragmede wrote:
| BLS says $0.30 is $1.25 today. Each roll was like 30
| pictures too (24, but I like round numbers), so like her
| $30 a roll?
|
| https://data.bls.gov/cgi-
| bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...
| bluGill wrote:
| I'm going from memory, but I recall that both 25 and 36
| picture rolls were common and there were some 12 picture
| rolls. (maybe 15?) And of course there were a number of
| different sizes - 110, 120, 35mm, disc, each with
| different sizes and costs. (more film sizes at the
| professional level as well, but your local drug store had
| all of the above)
| apples_oranges wrote:
| We can't ever document all of life on earth but we can try
| a012 wrote:
| I take pictures of the sky, not to post it somewhere
| immediately but it's like documentary captures for later
| years looking back
| tmountain wrote:
| I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making
| curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going
| through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing
| the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album.
| Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with
| friends/family.
| npteljes wrote:
| I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly
| I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go
| further back to check on how living things were around me,
| and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like
| to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see
| how I lived life back then.
|
| The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit
| similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image
| dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it
| brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So
| many memories.
| anticodon wrote:
| I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all
| duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this
| for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most
| of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll
| through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.
| kristofferR wrote:
| I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that
| comparison stuck with me.
|
| As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough.
| Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old
| scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable
| and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and
| look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took.
| Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is
| enough for me.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories
| vs. Snapchat memories?
|
| Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have
| on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local
| model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be
| cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have
| text on it, so probably need OCR.
|
| > You are a digital hoarder.
|
| Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on
| YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too,
| i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space
| for me.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Is this meant to be negative?
|
| It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it
| with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their
| collections are now treasure troves of historic media not
| available from any other source. You do you.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Yeah, I still have a VHS collection of cartoons I used to
| watch as a kid.
|
| It did not sound particularly negative to me either, but
| if it was, I wonder why.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture
| once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+
| years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands
| of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once
| during my lifetime :)
| physicles wrote:
| Which frame do you use? I've been looking for this for a
| long time, but I wasn't aware color e-ink was good enough
| for this yet.
| ifdefdebug wrote:
| it's actually black and white, and needed some
| programming to work like this.
| nsonha wrote:
| > do we ever?
|
| We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.
| mynameisash wrote:
| I was just lamenting last night that we can't watch some of
| Terutsuyoshi's amazing makuuchi bouts from about three(?) years
| ago. I wish I'd archived them.
| bdz wrote:
| Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023.
| But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down
| https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-
| archive...
| chrsw wrote:
| Anything you see on the Internet can be gone in a moment. If
| something is important to you, you must save it to guarantee
| you want to see it again.
| underlipton wrote:
| The problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content,
| especially when it'll likely be outside the context you
| originally found it.
| fi-le wrote:
| What percentage, in numbers?
| lyfy wrote:
| Wasn't expecting to see a fellow sumo hoarder on HN...there's
| dozens of us, dozens!
| hexagonwin wrote:
| how do you manage the archive? I mean the file hierarchy
| structures etc. i started archiving youtube videos recently,
| now saving descriptions and other metadatas too, but simply
| having them all in one directory doesn't seem to be a good
| idea.
| politelemon wrote:
| What is your storage setup, do you have lots of hard drives, or
| does this go online somewhere?
| halapro wrote:
| With more content than we need being produced regularly, do you
| _really_ need to store everything you 've ever watched?
|
| I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized
| it was not worth my time.
|
| Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone
| (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.
| niutech wrote:
| Can you upload some most interesting deleted YT videos to Web
| Archive or even Dailymotion, so that they are preserved for the
| next generation?
| everdrive wrote:
| Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't
| potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime
| and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to
| this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have
| to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's
| therefore an option of last resort.
|
| Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the
| background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer
| is unusable.
| netsharc wrote:
| I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and
| camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is
| nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...
|
| Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...
| crazygringo wrote:
| It depends on a lot of factors. But even if it works in a
| virtual machine, your CPU is going to be pegged at 100% the
| whole time to handle the re-encoding. Unless you use a
| hardware h.264 encoder, but then the quality is pretty
| terrible since it's explicitly optimized for speed over
| quality and isn't tunable the way software encoders are.
|
| It's always doable, it's just an option of last resort. You
| always just want to access the original compressed
| bitstream if possible.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I think the real key is to only compress enough initially
| so that you don't blow out your storage in terms of size
| and throughput... Once you have the stream captured at a
| higher quality, you can always recompress more optimally.
|
| A relatively low compression with hardware h.264 will
| still take up a lot less space and throughput than mpeg-2
| or raw.
| npteljes wrote:
| I have written software to do this kind of recording on a
| laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes
| of the same show).
|
| It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg
| captured the video from the respective parts of the screen,
| and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy
| output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.
|
| The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver,
| Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely
| works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that
| software screen capture doesn't work.
| pabs3 wrote:
| Just move the capturing a layer further away, there is
| always the analog hole.
| npteljes wrote:
| Yes but why waste $10-$20 on a cheap HDMI recorder, when
| I can create this beautiful software in two person-days
| of work?
| everdrive wrote:
| Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping
| videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music
| performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many
| cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them
| elsewhere.
|
| eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAi1pn3kBqE
| matsemann wrote:
| With browser's and hardware's support for DRM they could make
| it impossible if they want to. Basically the OS / recording
| software sees a blank screen.
|
| I was on live TV recently and wanted to keep a recording for
| myself, that wasn't just filming the screen with my phone. I
| first tried screen recording watching the show in my browser in
| their streaming service. Got a black video. Then I tried their
| phone app, got a black video. Finally, using my phone but the
| web page they enabled playback without DRM and I could record
| and store it. When more devices support DRM they will probably
| get rid of that fallback as well.
| ethmarks wrote:
| I imagine there would be ways around this. I know from
| personal experience that Kazam screen recorder on Firefox on
| Ubuntu can record anything and everything, including YouTube
| as well as DRM content on Disney+ and Prime Video.
|
| I bet that it Google really wanted to it could force Firefox
| in line, but I imagine that actually preventing screen
| recording would require compliance at the OS level too, and I
| don't think that even Google could demand changes like that
| to Linux. Best they could do is block Linux clients from
| YouTube, but user agent spoofing or emulation could probably
| circumvent that.
|
| And even if Google does somehow manage to entirely block
| screen recording, we can always exploit the analog loophole.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| On Linux you can feed the GPU encoded bitstream and then
| GPU will use hardware to decode and display it as overlay.
| ethmarks wrote:
| Why is this relevant? To be clear, I'm asking from a
| place of ignorance. Are you saying that because the video
| player can have the video decoding happen entirely on the
| GPU, screen recording software can't pick it up? Couldn't
| the software just read from the GPU buffer?
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Couldn't the software just read from the GPU buffer?
|
| The GPU would simply return all zeros for area where DRM-
| protected video is being played. Duh.
| Maskawanian wrote:
| There is always the analog hole. Even HDCP can be worked
| around. Even if they do manage to stop all computers from
| doing direct bit copies, there are still old things such as
| Kinescopes which they used to use to broadcast television
| from film. There of course is a quality loss, but that's kind
| of irrelevant to the point.
| OGWhales wrote:
| I don't know if Youtube cares, but other website do attempt to
| block this as well. They will either black your screen or
| prevent playback if you try to screen record, even encrypting
| to prevent recording the HDMI/DP output.
| npteljes wrote:
| In the current times yes, you can basically record your screen
| with whatever tool you fancy.
|
| But even now, many video sites employ DRM, and only the weakest
| levels of DRM streams can be recorded off the screen. If they
| crank that up, which is perfectly possible today, the screen
| recordings only shows a blank rectangle, because the encryption
| goes from server to video card. At this stage, "hdmi recorders"
| are the next level - they capture the audio/video stream from
| the hdmi cable output for example.
|
| Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to
| screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we
| have a long time until this is implemented, and even then, I'm
| sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake the
| encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for
| mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end of
| time I think.
| alerighi wrote:
| > Even further, there is technology to encrypt from server to
| screen. I'm not sure on the rollout on this one. I think we
| have a long time until this is implemented, and even then,
| I'm sure we will have the ability to buy screens that fake
| the encryption, and then let us record the signal. And, for
| mainstream media, there will be pirated copies until the end
| of time I think.
|
| In the end, nobody will ever avoid people from having a
| camera pointed to a screen. At least till they can implant a
| description device in our brain, the stuff coming out of the
| screen can be recorded. Like in the past when people used to
| record movies at the cinema with cameras and upload them on
| emule. Sure, it would not be super high quality, but
| considering that is free compared to something you pay, who
| cares?
|
| To me DRM is just a lost battle: while you can make it
| inconvenient to copy a media, people will always try to find
| a way. We used to pirate in the VHS era and that was not
| convenient, since you would have needed 2 VCR (quite
| expensive back then!) and it took the time of the whole movie
| to be copied.
| npteljes wrote:
| It's a lost battle in the purist sense, but impure things
| can go far in real life. DRM is like my lock on the door.
| I'm sure it's a joke for LockpickLawyer and even a good
| many more people out there, but, it has successfully
| defended my household so far.
|
| DRM just raises the bar a bit for access. For example in
| gaming, it gives the publishers a head start over pirates.
| If the game is unavailable for pirates during the largest
| hype, a lot more people buy the product than otherwise.
|
| Also, sometimes DRM wins. For example, right now, Denuvo is
| undefeated. Some hardware dongle authenticated software are
| also unavailable in pirated form. Of course one could argue
| that eventually these would be defeated as well, but, DRM
| still served its purpose, in defending the product from
| unauthorized copying in times when it was most desirable.
|
| To me, DRM hasn't made sense when I was looking at it from
| a Free Software standpoint, but it now makes sense from a
| product management standpoint.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to
| everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any
| arbitrary data.
|
| It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with
| video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or
| complex JavaScript clients.
| throwaway94275 wrote:
| 1991 was the vibrant, exciting, crazy "adolescence" of the PC
| age and well into the period where it was cool to have a
| desktop PC and really learn about it.
|
| Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by -
| in number, not capability. The concept of copy/paste/save for
| arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the
| form of screenshots and screen recording features.
| fragmede wrote:
| "Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post
| office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage
| to achieve.
| zvitiate wrote:
| My GPD pocket 4 fits into really large cargo pants if that
| counts lol, and there is the micropc2 too that's even
| smaller :p
| fragmede wrote:
| Oh fuck you, I didn't have the $1,500 I just spent on
| Amazon for one of those! I've been waiting forever for
| them to make one with a finger print sensor, and I
| thought you were responding to a different comment so I
| looked it up and thank you :)
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| But are DRM and poor user experiences hard requirements for
| something to fit in your pocket?
|
| Otherwise, I don't think I get your point - maybe you could
| clarify?
| fragmede wrote:
| throwaway94275 wrote:
|
| > Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC
| generation by - in number, not capability.
|
| And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities.
| Don't put words in my mouth, not _all_ of them,
| obviously. I 'm just pointing out that a desktop with a
| 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket,
| and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some
| people value.
| lenkite wrote:
| "Fitting into my carry-bag so I can use it in line at the
| post office" is already possible for a PC and many people
| do it all the time.
| fragmede wrote:
| That's not remotely true. The only person I've _ever_
| seen in public using something like
| https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-018V-01637 to _STAND in
| line_ while using a laptop is me.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| That looks like something a dweeb would use, I want one
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Handhelds like the Steam Deck are PCs and can fit in some
| pockets :P
| titzer wrote:
| > use it in line at the post office
|
| If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my
| own software onto and make programmable without jumping
| through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware
| that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out
| over how to best extort billions from app developers and
| users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
|
| But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying
| the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are
| insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize
| every single thing about our daily lives.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| > ut phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying
| the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are
| insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize
| every single thing about our daily lives.
|
| Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our
| PCs as well.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| There are more options on PCs to fight back with.
| fragmede wrote:
| If you think having a developer mode switch on your
| smartphone that would enable shell access and a build env
| is what's stopping "the majority of the public" from
| "zombifying", either you need to talk with more "majority
| of the public", or I've been talking to the wrong
| "majority of the public".
|
| The general public doesn't know how to program. They
| don't know what variables are, that they have types, they
| think functions are what rich people call a dinner party
| or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such
| restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly
| become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.
|
| If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops
| (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at
| all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean,
| you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the
| majority of the public, but that want to do things that
| able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic
| of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It
| would be great if it were easier because the phones were
| more open, but at some point you gotta go with the
| serenity prayer.
| titzer wrote:
| There's definitely a mismatch between expectations
| between what you inferred I meant and what I really mean.
| We agree that the majority of people are not going to
| suddenly stop being zombies if the platform were more
| open for development. It's a complex societal issue
| that's driven by the media atmosphere and the attention
| economy and affects all platforms. But smartphones are
| the platform that seems to be the most extremely affected
| and it definitely is accelerated by the locked down,
| content-consuming, ad-laden nature of everything the
| platform drives them to do. Nothing about the interaction
| mode of a touchscreen phone lends itself to being able to
| do deep work particularly well, but then on top of that
| all the platforms' incentives push away from it again.
|
| > If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops
| (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at
| all
|
| It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm
| going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not
| being technical enough.
| fragmede wrote:
| It's not a question of being technical enough. It's
| actually a question of being too technical. You're here,
| which for me garners youa base level of respect if only
| because I've had the creators of certain subjects of
| discussion have responded directly to me grousing here.
|
| Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code
| must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But
| if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or
| swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less,
| you get into building web apps. For what people want to
| do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and
| are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.
|
| Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about
| that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on
| where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than
| a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when
| we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better
| than nothing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Well... https://www.zotac.com/page/zotac-vr-go-4
|
| There are also various handheld PCs.
| walletdrainer wrote:
| I'm also waiting for the gallon sized water bottle I can
| fit in my <1l pocket.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| _long press_ - > _save image /video_ is perfectly supported
| on a phone, it's just content diffusion platform that
| arbitrarily restrict it.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| You can't even make a screenshot if the app doesn't allow
| it. Phones are broken. (well, the OS on them is).
| leshenka wrote:
| There's a double edged sword here. Not even talking about
| DRM.
|
| I would love to be able, myself, decide if it's fine to
| capture a screen for an application but I'd also would
| love to protect me or my non-tech-savvy relatives from
| accidentally share sensitive info (e.g. banking) when
| screen casting.
|
| In my opinion there should be a waiver buried deep in the
| settings that allows me to disable such protections with
| a grace period of a week or so. Grace period is crucial
| because scammers are able to make people do virtually
| anything under stress and hurrying.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| No, it's also iOS that's arbitrarily restricting it. I
| opened a bare .webm directly in Safari and got nothing on
| long press and nothing in any of the control widgets to
| save it.
| fragmede wrote:
| Long pressing on https://www.learningcontainer.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2024/07...
|
| gets me
|
| https://imgur.com/a/bseFwX3 on iOS 18, and
| https://imgur.com/a/Ksbz3zW on iOS 26
|
| Maybe you're holding it wrong?
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I think you're holding it wrong, because that's a .webp
| image, not a .webm video.
| fragmede wrote:
| oh yeah totally. thanks!
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It's not a "phone" problem, it's yet another Apple
| craziness that their customers somehow tolerate.
|
| _Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans_
| leshenka wrote:
| Likely not really what you want but you can make a
| shortcut that saves the file to Photos.
|
| - Get URLs from (shortcut input) - Get contents from
| (URLs from previous step) - Save (contents of URL) to
| Photos
|
| Set to accept URLs and appear in share sheet.
| pxc wrote:
| > The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on
| for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and
| screen recording features.
|
| When it's not impeded by DRM, that is
| keyringlight wrote:
| The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few
| decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring
| the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it.
| Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual
| thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D
| rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound
| going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and
| spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to
| broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile.
| Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input
| devices.
|
| Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of
| awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick
| along with some of them getting discarded along the way when
| we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful
| or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal
| computer has hit maturity now and we're past that
| experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance.
| Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a
| workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about
| but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where
| the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device
| most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and
| something that'll introduce them to other areas.
| j45 wrote:
| Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones
| might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as
| they do today.
|
| There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.
|
| Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to
| adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the
| desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some
| point by Apple at least.
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I think it'd be biased more in the direction of the Ipad.
| If anything there's one feature apple's trying to avoid and
| that's Macos' waning ability to run third party binaries
| psychoslave wrote:
| Yes, I see Youtube going deep into enshitiffication. On my
| Macbook this morning with a FF-dev edition it just stopped to
| work this morning. Don't know if it's related to the fact I
| tried to install an extension to "force H264" on my Ubuntu box.
| On the latter fans started to go crazy as soon as I open a
| single youtube tab lately and a quick research led me there.
|
| Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old
| aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
|
| - it's missing snippet previews
|
| - it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
| kawsper wrote:
| It's not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have
| struggled on YouTube the past weeks.
|
| Sometimes I can't even click on the front page, sometimes
| when I open a video it refuses to play.
|
| I don't know what's up, but it works in chrome.
| z500 wrote:
| I also had it stop working completely. I thought they
| finally wised up to my adblocker, but I decided to finally
| install that update I had been sitting on for a while and
| it just started working again
| niels8472 wrote:
| That may also just be Firefox's way of telling you it has
| updated and needs to be restarted.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Probably just the typical nefarious activities of YouTube.
| Either "accidentally" driving users to switch browsers, or
| experimenting with circumventing ad blockers, or negligence
| in testing, or who knows what.
|
| If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim,
| then they should be obligated to make their services work
| perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming
| and manipulating people.
|
| One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those
| don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you
| don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube
| frontend.
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| I've got a fresh install of endeavouros/arch and yt is
| horribly slow now. The upside is I've reduced my usage of the
| site.
|
| Oh and it's not working at all on my desktop with the same
| setup, it's telling me to disable ad block. I'd rather give
| up yt.
| skirmish wrote:
| Well, the corporate policy in GOOG now is to only test
| everything on Chrome. Engineers are not even allowed to
| install Firefox. This is the result.
| guardian5x wrote:
| Back then, the focus was on optimising for the user. Now,
| however, companies prioritise their own interests over the
| user.
| vladms wrote:
| Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got
| us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://e
| n.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or
| the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor
| to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering
| what I ended up using couple of years later
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)
|
| /s
| noir_lord wrote:
| There are myriad ways to optimise for the user, user
| friendliness is only one of them.
|
| As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's
| particular about who its friends are".
| linguae wrote:
| We can have stable user-friendly software. We had a nice
| sweet spot in the early 2000s with Windows XP and Mac OS X:
| stable operating systems built on workstation-quality
| kernels (NT and Mach/BSD, respectively), and a userland
| that respected the user by providing distraction-free
| experiences and not trying to upsell the user. Users of
| workstations already experienced this in the 1990s (NeXT,
| Sun, SGI, HP, and PCs running IBM OS/2 Windows NT), but it
| wasn't until the 2000s when workstation-grade operating
| systems became readily available to home users, with both
| Windows XP and Mac OS X 10.0 being released in 2001.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| We do of course still have this in modern computing with
| Linux/KDE. Stable, snappy, and does exactly what you ask.
| The computer doesn't get in your way, nor does it try to
| get you to do something else. It just does what you tell
| it to do, immediately.
| linguae wrote:
| Yup, desktop Linux and other FOSS systems like ReactOS
| and Haiku are the last bastions of personal computing
| that haven't been made into platforms that nag and upsell
| us.
| a96 wrote:
| > first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor
| to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was
|
| My first accounts were on Linux 1.x. It was glorious.
| Simple, sensible, and with manuals one command away. And it
| allowed you to just get things done. And there were tools.
| So many tools. 80's home computers and DOS crap and Macs
| that couldn't even open a file if it hadn't been tagged as
| the property of some application... Hells I would never
| have to be a part of any more. Except for work and school.
| But for personal computing, a brighter future was coming.
| In 30+ years since I've never had to step away.
| turtletontine wrote:
| We even have a name for this now...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1
| gjm11 wrote:
| I think companies always prioritized their own interests.
|
| A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their
| products and services, so that they'll get more customers or
| customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much
| of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on
| quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal
| information to third parties.
|
| Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company
| might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if
| most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they
| thought they'd get richer that way.
|
| I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become
| easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or
| maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a
| live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that
| you can get away with #2 so they do that.
| thijson wrote:
| I was just reading how ATSC 3 (over the air TV) is kind of
| stalling because they added DRM fairly late in the roll out.
| Several people bought receivers that are now incompatible.
| Marsymars wrote:
| Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my
| impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts
| are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner
| (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.
| Telaneo wrote:
| DRM being forced into freeview TV seems like a contradiction
| in terms, and yet here we are.
| physicsguy wrote:
| Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in
| 1998!_
|
| I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over
| the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
| weberer wrote:
| I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember
| downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good
| quality due to the .rmvb format.
| physicsguy wrote:
| The BBC here used to put a ton of news content on it, it
| was pretty forward thinking really!
| deltoidmaximus wrote:
| Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to
| do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection
| without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only
| really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95.
| The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately
| sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time
| encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used),
| although I suspect video cards started to add these features
| during the 1990s at some point.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this
| year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early
| but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated
| with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your
| home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad
| panes you have to manually disable etc
|
| [0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png
| Aurornis wrote:
| > It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is
| with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or
| complex JavaScript clients.
|
| The video experience for typical video files is great these
| days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past
| through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal
| with video because you had to navigate third party players
| (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack
| installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech
| support for friends and family during that era, it was common
| to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs
| after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install
| software to watch some video they found.
|
| The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play
| common files or you can install VLC and play anything is
| infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored
| glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.
|
| I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy,
| then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do
| that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later
| releases too.
| j1elo wrote:
| You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses.
| You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with
| simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and
| selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because
| videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed
| frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant
| frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced
| compression techniques.
|
| There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way
| to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after
| years the results are mixed and only working for very
| specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the
| same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth
| the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily
| seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if
| the player was competently implemented. It's just a
| matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.
|
| What really happened was that the feature was first
| paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in
| typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do
| with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy
| was simple because videos were mostly a succession of
| independently compressed frames._
|
| That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the
| Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which _had_ to do
| temporal compression in order to support video delivery
| at usable file sizes.
|
| > _There are whole projects striving to provide a
| reliable way to just cut videos without having to
| recode..._
|
| Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
| kalleboo wrote:
| It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an
| h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it
| to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can
| scrub around in realtime.
|
| Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz
| Motorola CPUs.
| darkwater wrote:
| > It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an
| h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it
| to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can
| scrub around in realtime.
|
| I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this
| be related to patents?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use
| VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like
| playlists.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| What you're describing with QuickTime was a proprietary
| nightmare that didn't even work correctly across Apple
| products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.
|
| Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly
| anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your
| average user with basic Google search skills.
|
| And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far
| beyond what we ever had in the past.
|
| Then there's the vast improvement in codecs. It's quite
| insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8
| channel audio in a 3GiB file.
|
| The only problem about the modern world is streaming
| companies who purposely degrade the experience for money.
| And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of
| which is free.
|
| But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
|
| Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found
| anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of
| frames in .png and concatenating them together into a
| proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
| paradox460 wrote:
| ffmpeg?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I
| compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a
| video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit
| copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit
| paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a
| dedicated video editor, and a file picker.
|
| This functionality was taken for granted when video on
| personal computers were first invented.
| kccqzy wrote:
| One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of
| video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are
| excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid
| ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci
| Resolve, not to mention mobile apps behind the TikTok
| culture. There are also excellent and built-in video
| players in every browser and every OS.
|
| But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are
| seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not
| expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut,
| copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste
| are basic OS-level features. This is very much different
| from the experience of almost all other kinds of files.
| You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word
| processing documents. Or if you aren't fancy you use
| notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These
| text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I think that happens when the rift between producers and
| consumers require some learning to jump from one to the
| other, at least professionally.
|
| Some of the people who produce videos for a living
| require vastly different tools than someone who needs to
| trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI
| and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't
| be able to effectively do their job.
|
| For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way.
| You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and
| sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are
| professional tools for people who write stories for a
| living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters,
| environments and so on, and many professionals do use
| them.
|
| So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for
| everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are
| still professionals who need tools specifically for
| "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in
| other areas :)
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I used Avid VideoShop back in the day for that, which was
| Avid's consumer level offering. But I still appreciated
| being able to copy and paste from Movie Player when I
| just needed to paste a clip into a different application,
| which was much quicker when that was all I needed.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are
| seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not
| expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut,
| copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from
| the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You
| use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing
| documents.
|
| I think Word and other text documents are the exception
| not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always
| been viewed in different programs than the ones used for
| editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or
| rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway
| view in something different than the editor. Nobody
| listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.
|
| In fact I can't even think about any other format except
| for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I
| suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs
| was printing)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _What you're describing with QuickTime was a
| proprietary nightmare that didn't even work correctly
| across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux._
|
| This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that
| it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported
| standards whenever possible, but you must know that
| QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open
| media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the
| blueprint (sometimes literally, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format)
| for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do
| yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What
| technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"
| mmh0000 wrote:
| You may be "technically correct" (the best kind of
| correct), but holy je-BUS was QT NOT user-friendly nor
| cross-platform-friendly at the height of its popularity.
|
| There's a reason that once alternatives became available,
| users left QT as quickly as they could.
|
| QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against
| that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia,
| and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player
| (from the Win98 era)?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire_
|
| And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were
| through tricks: silent installations with other software,
| drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or
| fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you
| wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware
| like Comet Cursor.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| That's if you weren't using a Mac
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Ah man, Macs of yore could play .rm/.rv files natively?
| leptons wrote:
| If you weren't using a Mac and wanted to play Quicktime
| videos? Then you have to install Apple's Quicktime player
| for Windows which was a piece of garbage.
| j45 wrote:
| Real player was one of the first real video players, it
| wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon.
|
| Flash, also almost came built into every browser.
|
| By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here.
| Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video
| fine.
|
| Today, most browsers have most codecs.
| recursive wrote:
| Real Player was an early innovator. Mostly in dark
| patterns.
| j45 wrote:
| Wouldn't be surprising, likely happened more when
| competition showed up.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those
| days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft
| Media Player came out, and you could use one player for
| several formats, rather than each video format requiring its
| own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still
| a chore, though.
|
| MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but
| eventually we got VLC and things got great.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but
| eventually we got VLC and things got great.
|
| And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together
| with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had
| MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious
| aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| I'm still using the Media Player Classic Home Cinema to
| this day. https://github.com/clsid2/mpc-hc
|
| Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I did drop MPC in favor of VLC, but with the new UI of
| VLC, maybe it's time to give MPC a try again. Didn't
| realize there was forks of it, time to do some rabbit
| hole diving!
| xnx wrote:
| It's insane that clicking on the video in the VLC
| interface does nothing. In every other app it is
| play/pause. There's a way to enable it deep in settings
| (or as a plugin?) but it should be the default.
| odo1242 wrote:
| VLC has fallen slightly victim to the "developer team
| tries to rebuild the entire product from scratch and
| still isn't done with the rebuild but has stopped
| maintaining the original for like three years" issue that
| some software seems to have
| xeonmc wrote:
| Ah, the Overwatch 2 development approach.
| baal80spam wrote:
| > Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
|
| Not just you, I never liked VLC as well. MPC-HC forever!
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had
| to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?),
| Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware
| infested download sites.
|
| How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player
| and flash never made you watch ads.
| jonas21 wrote:
| It seems you may be misremembering. From Wikipedia [1]:
|
| > Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for
| containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC
| World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2
| in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time",
| writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making
| itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing
| itself as the default media player, taking liberties with
| your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that
| were really just advertisements, and so on."
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPlayer
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Ah, I was not a windows user at the time.
|
| Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying
| as being screamed at to buy a minivan.
| amomchilov wrote:
| You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious
| to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like
| any arbitrary data._
|
| I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows
| and share them with their friends.
|
| By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just
| pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics
| companies are now also the content companies, so they don't
| want to.
| crtasm wrote:
| You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs
| I've encountered over the years. Due to limited
| container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is
| with video nowadays
|
| Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using
| the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense,
| still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the
| video and download it, it's a media element like any other.
|
| The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because
| turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and
| is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click
| the video and download it, it's a media element like any
| other.
|
| I'm so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget
| RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to
| deal with to watch video on the internet?
| LaGrange wrote:
| RealPlayer was 1995, so a few years later, and arguably was
| a start of the trend of enshittification. Flash videos was
| around the times things really got bad.
|
| That does mean we go, essentially:
|
| Step 1: We barely have video at all.
|
| Step 2: Everything is terrible.
| nurettin wrote:
| Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and
| subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers,
| so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the
| economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.
| demetris wrote:
| The standard video element is really nice:
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
| US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
|
| I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works
| really well.
|
| You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video
| starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)
| jsheard wrote:
| Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great
| for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays.
| Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to
| facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking,
| and the former is especially important for users on crappier
| internet connections.
|
| I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that
| work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are
| just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the
| browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video>
| elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one
| which does that, and they only do HLS).
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Chrome has finally just landed enabled by default native
| HLS playback support within the past month. See
| http://crrev.com/c/7047405
|
| I'm not sure what the rollout status actually is at the
| moment.
| jsheard wrote:
| > See go/hls-direct-playback for design and launch stats
| analysis.
|
| Is that an internal Google wiki or something? I can't
| find whatever they're referring to.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller
| niche video sites aren't even implemented properly. On some
| sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL
| and cookies in the request, and download it to view
| locally.
|
| Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is
| properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as
| Accept-Range: bytes.
| noirscape wrote:
| The problem with a standard video element is that while it's
| mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the
| server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser
| video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec
| you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is
| that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy
| use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser
| only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at
| a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage
| format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to
| VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible
| browser ecosystem.
|
| Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately
| rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want
| to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason
| than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that
| can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive
| amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively
| being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap
| either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that
| aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a
| couple million users without having to think about your
| bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry
| about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a
| well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief.
| That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you
| burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default
| amount) and in reality, probably less because some people
| might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where
| your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.
|
| And that's before we get into other expected niceties like
| scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video
| players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video
| _and_ jump to any point in the video, even if it 's outside
| the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video
| element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly
| downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into
| server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will
| just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until
| that point.
|
| It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice
| it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well
| that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only
| because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad
| is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated
| techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because
| hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth
| bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why
| there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of
| hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of
| money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care
| about your finances in the first place.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Chrome desktop has just landed enabled by default native
| HLS support for the video element within the last month.
| (There may be a few issues still to be worked out, and I
| don't know what the rollout status is, but certainly by
| year end it will just work). Presumably most downstream
| chromium derivatives will pick this support up soon.
|
| My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported
| it for some time by way of delegating to android's native
| media support which included HLS.
|
| Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long
| time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
|
| So this should eventually help things.
| 9cb14c1ec0 wrote:
| Any serious video distribution system would not use metered
| bandwidth. You're not using a VPS provider. You are
| colocating some servers in a datacenter and buying an
| unmetered 10 gigabit or 100 gigabit IP transit service.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've always found it insane how much software development web
| sites are willing to undertake, just to avoid using the
| standard video, audio, and img HTML elements. It's almost
| hilarious how over engineered everything is, just so they can
| 'protect' things they are ultimately publishing on the open
| web.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Around 2012?, I had some extension that forced YouTube videos
| to play with Quicktime in-browser, which was leaner. Original
| file, no conversion.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| A specific issue with video data is that it's much denser: the
| same concept in video takes up more bytes than in text or
| image. Therefore hosting is more expensive, so less people host
| and the ones that do (e.g. YouTube) expect revenue.
| Furthermore, because videos are dense, people want to download
| them streaming, which means hosts must not just have storage
| but reliable bandwidth.
|
| Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula,
| PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and
| PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video
| hosting and streaming is expensive.
| gloosx wrote:
| The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the
| platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They
| could have charged creators directly for hosting and left
| monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the
| middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content
| itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse
| for such centralisation.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > They could have charged creators directly for hosting and
| left monetization up to them
|
| A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform
| would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can
| get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on
| a VPS.
| bobdvb wrote:
| There are lots of platforms where people pay for their
| distribution, but they're not as successful.
|
| The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford
| the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT
| provides.
|
| As someone who's spent many years building streaming
| platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and
| this kind of massive over simplification is really sad.
|
| There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of
| the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which
| has paid out billions to creators.
| dev0p wrote:
| YouTube should have been a distributed p2p system with local
| storage of your favorite videos. A man can dream...
| amelius wrote:
| Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which
| now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an
| early advantage).
| gbin wrote:
| Guess why it was asymmetrical in the first place ... Telcos
| wanted to sell the upload bandwidth to streaming companies.
| Another double dipping Telco monopoly squeeze and customer
| boxing / enshitification from very early on.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I thought it was just trading more download for less
| upload when last mile bandwidth was limited by re-using
| old POTS copper.
|
| Wasn't dialup largely asymmetric too? I don't think p2p
| streaming was even on the radar back then.
| dev0p wrote:
| Now largely more feasible. We should try again.
| dsamarin wrote:
| Would you like to work with me to create OurTube?
| dcreater wrote:
| Yes!
| dev0p wrote:
| I mean, PeerTube is already halfway there. The problem is
| that it's a pain in the ass to host, last time I tried.
| Which sums up the whole problem as to why we have YouTube
| in the first place.
| jasomill wrote:
| 1000/40 is rather asymmetric and the fastest service
| available in my area.
| duped wrote:
| A media business is predicated on exclusive rights over their
| media. The entire notion of media being freely copied and saved
| is contrary to their business models. I think there's a healthy
| debate to be had over whether those models are entitled to
| exist and how much harm to consumers is tolerable, but it's not
| really obvious how to create a business that deals in media
| without some kind of protection over the copying and
| distribution of that media.
|
| I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea
| that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they
| represent information that society has granted individuals or
| businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't
| treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to
| regulate the rights over that information.
|
| I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and
| they have a very different view of intellectual property than
| the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the
| most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys,
| because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa
| mural or something.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Experience with video is excellent for most people. All the
| complexity is hidden from the end user, unless you are trying
| to hack something. In the 1990s, streaming effectively didn't
| exist because people didn't have enough bandwidth (it was
| mostly dial-up), and there was very little legal offering, and
| the little that existed was terrible. Home video was limited
| too, as few people knew how to make video files suitable for
| online diffusion.
|
| Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience
| was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure
| players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is
| now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001.
|
| I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the
| mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now,
| back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
| a96 wrote:
| It took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour
| displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as
| well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a
| postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It
| started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.
| LucavagoHellman wrote:
| god damn they the youtube is at fault, always says: forbidden
| when trying to download a book audiobook
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just
| add another flag to the invocation: yt-dlp
| --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components ejs:github -f
| "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best"
| 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
|
| It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second
| in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems
| to me. [youtube] [jsc:deno] Solving JS
| challenges using deno [youtube] [jsc:deno] Downloading
| challenge solver lib script from https://github.com/yt-
| dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.solver.lib.min.js
|
| It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a
| separate command, before running the download command, as I'm
| probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment,
| and being able to package it up together with the solver before
| runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that
| environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start
| of downloads seems much faster now.
| gamer191 wrote:
| > It would be great if we could download the solver manually
| with a separate command
|
| Download a random video and then copy ejs from yt-dlp's cache
| directory (I think it's in /home/username/.cache)
|
| > being able to package it up together with the solver
|
| `make yt-dlp-extra`
| WD-42 wrote:
| Glad to hear it's faster now!
|
| YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to
| the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
| gilfoy wrote:
| I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete
| hyperbole.
| phplovesong wrote:
| Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and
| links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in
| recent years.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's
| because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube
| music).
|
| Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is
| becoming a law rather than a tendency.
| cons0le wrote:
| I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's
| already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and
| they have playlists of the top charts already.
|
| What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my
| phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would
| never pay just for that feature, because I remember when
| it was free and they took it away )
| weaksauce wrote:
| > I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt
| vanced
|
| there's a lot of iphone/ipad users out there.
|
| > Everything's already on youtube and they let you make
| playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts
| already
|
| I don't use it but ui probably. ads maybe. plenty of
| people have money and don't want the inconvenience of
| trying to get around it.
| j45 wrote:
| You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any
| chromecast device including chromecast homes with the
| microphone turned off.
|
| Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
|
| Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home,
| travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging
| the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
|
| Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a
| different experience.
| charcircuit wrote:
| No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to
| freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video),
| background playback, downloading music to your device.
| These all are big value ads for me.
| jack_pp wrote:
| You get music discovery, radios, go to album, go to
| artist
| raydev wrote:
| For me, it just comes with Premium, and I buy Premium to
| support the creators I watch often without having to
| watch ads. I want them to get paid.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Quick, everyone start sending unwanted junk mail to this
| guy's house, he'll pay you to stop!
| dyselon wrote:
| Heaven forbid someone pay for an online service they use
| and enjoy.
| a96 wrote:
| I do, but not for services that treat their users (and
| content creators!) like YT does.
| tripzilch wrote:
| Their point is that it's not "paying for" but it's
| "paying off".
| supportengineer wrote:
| No one ever got a promotion for maintaining software
| shermantanktop wrote:
| No idea what you are talking about. I don't have premium
| and use in both logged in and logged out.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| If I'm logged out, I get "Sign in to confirm you're not a
| bot" about once a week from both home and the office.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| No issues here for me with uBO, logged in or not, no
| premium
| kiwijamo wrote:
| They limit the buffer to around 30secs or so like all
| other streaming services but otherwise 95%+ of the time
| it just plays smoothing with no buffering at all from
| start to end. YouTube is generally in the top 3 of the
| video streaming services I use. Even on 4G wireless
| (which I occassionally use) it works well enough which is
| impressive as other video steaming services struggle
| (with the sole exception of Netflix which is probably the
| only one better than YouTube).
| komali2 wrote:
| I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I
| scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely
| have to scroll super far down to get past recommended
| videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the
| tab.
|
| On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos
| freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
|
| I freely admit to holding google software to a higher
| standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from
| startups, however I also believe google has the talent,
| time, and money to where their software should basically be
| the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's
| not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
|
| The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps
| "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route
| you change" thing...
| zimpenfish wrote:
| As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it
| will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying
| to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the
| video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the
| page with no way to get to the controls, etc.
|
| (This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers,
| etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which
| may have me on a naughty list.)
| sebra wrote:
| I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm
| adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker
| it loads the ads instantly.
|
| But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried
| watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5
| ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and
| it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
|
| Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and
| the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-
| roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
|
| Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let
| you view them without ads via something like Infuse with
| a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
|
| [0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I
| don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in
| front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really,
| because it's a horror show without
| adblock/circumventions.
|
| [1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the
| pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed
| sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at
| least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video
| from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to
| find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc.
| (which it also won't properly show you until after the
| pre-roll!)[2]
|
| [2] I hate YouTube corporate.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because
| your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser
| engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct
| competition with Google themselves, maybe people using
| those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling
| out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you
| don't actually have broad experience enough to say if
| that's true or not.
|
| FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux,
| everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it
| works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in
| Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default
| user-agent. Make of that what you will.
| darkwater wrote:
| > That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble
| because your Fiat doesn't have a problem.
|
| No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website
| developer can test their website against a wide array of
| browsers, in a more or less automated way.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to
| prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds
| more work for them, when the same company is also
| developing a competing browser?
|
| No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google
| properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon
| either. Why would they make it better when status quo
| means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
| badlibrarian wrote:
| It's not 2003, the browser isn't the battle.
|
| I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome
| managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars
| every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in
| favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an
| increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an
| increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and
| in the US more people are now watching on TVs than
| phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has
| huge influence over ads.
|
| The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems?
| turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the
| mysteries lie here.
|
| They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're
| probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-
| browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize
| that experience, so you get what you get.
| Too wrote:
| When it comes to video it's not only the browser. It's
| also your gpu, your OS and your gpu drivers.
|
| Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if
| you don't have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of
| systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it
| completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to
| force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu
| decoding back.
|
| Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations,
| it's even more complex than that to test in practice.
| Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and
| manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into
| a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
|
| What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I'm sure
| they already do, is to collect metrics from all
| playbacks. That should show black on white how many users
| struggle with each codec.
|
| I don't think I'm in any minority here given how many
| million installations the h264ify extension has. Google
| simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user
| experience.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works
| great for me.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but
| every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting.
| Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm
| not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just
| throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless
| experience anymore.
| cons0le wrote:
| you don't get the "are you still watching" popups?
| sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed
| dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails.
| They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like
| learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec
| algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
| a96 wrote:
| Brave is a series scam company.
| recursive wrote:
| I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these
| problems.
| latexr wrote:
| Are you using Chrome or a Chromium browser? From experience
| and reports I've seen, that seems to make a huge
| difference.
| recursive wrote:
| Firefox
| taneq wrote:
| There are dozens of us!
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab
| only for video itself to load, while rest of the page
| doesn't?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's
| google engineers not testing on Firefox.
| mavamaarten wrote:
| Hah. I always assume it's them actively trying to make
| the experience worse on anything that is not Chrome.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+
| YouTube videos daily. Firefox.
| gaudystead wrote:
| I experience this, but only with YouTube Shorts. Video
| loads, but none of the elements around it.
| thenthenthen wrote:
| I have, and recently, i nothing is loading until i open a
| new video in another tab, then all of a sudden both pages
| start loading and playing :s
| riidom wrote:
| Yes happens sometimes to me, Vivaldi.
| recursive wrote:
| I've never seen that. I use Firefox.
| busymom0 wrote:
| This has happened to me frequently.
|
| Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the
| page, then it will play.
| raydev wrote:
| Are you running any extensions that modify content?
| wiml wrote:
| That sounds pretty nice. Is there a way to do it on
| purpose?
| shevy-java wrote:
| Since some days I suddenly get freezes in the tab; these
| unfreeze after some time, say 20 seconds or so, but I
| notice a delay.
|
| Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think
| it has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the
| UI also changed. It is important to point out that while
| you do not have any issues, other people do or may.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I had that happen some week ago too! I had to clear site
| data + cookies for YouTube in Firefox before I got it to
| work again.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I've been seeing weird stuff where the video will play
| but the page is unresponsive: can't click to pause, can't
| click the time index bar to move to a different point in
| the video, etc. Then I close the tab, and the audio keeps
| playing! It will play for 10-15 seconds before cutting
| out. Bizarre. . .
| PuercoPop wrote:
| It is likely you use Chrome or a browser that uses Blink
| for its engine and the OP uses a non-blink browser like
| Firefox. I use Firefox and I can cofirm since the last few
| months Youtube usability borders on usable
| MrNeon wrote:
| I use Firefox with uBlock and besides a couple of times
| where video start was delayed by a few seconds it has
| been working as well as before.
| viftodi wrote:
| Google does A/B testing for anti ad blockers.
|
| Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at
| all at times, but I also get a notification that explains
| that the reason is using adblockers.
| oldestofsports wrote:
| Here I am, totally given up on adblockers, and no way I'm
| paying for premium, but jesus christ the amount of ads I
| get, sometimes seems to be one every minute, making most
| videos unwatchable.
|
| Though it's mostly good for my addiction since it makes
| me use youtube less.
| o11c wrote:
| Recently I've found Youtube to just show a white screen
| if it detects Firefox+uBO.
| Ohmec wrote:
| There's probably scripts you can add to your ubo to
| combat this.
| tedivm wrote:
| For the last two days I haven't been able to watch
| youtube videos on Firefox without disabling uBlock.
| mltsd wrote:
| I've disabled adblock/vpn and can watch maybe 1-2 videos
| before the video player starts blacking out on each one.
| Only restarting firefox "resets" it and I haven't been
| able to find a reason for this happening. Time for yt-dlp
| I guess
| a96 wrote:
| I disable youtube instead when this happens.
| tedivm wrote:
| If I care enough I'll yl-dlp it to my jellyfin server,
| but yeah I mostly just don't bother.
| recursive wrote:
| I'm using Firefox.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| I use Chrome and it's not good. They recently removed
| ability to force AV1 to only low resolution videos and as
| a result I had to disable HW acceleration in Chrome
| because accelerated AV1 decoding is broken on Steam Deck.
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| Yeah, big same here. It's pretty frustrating, because I
| pay for YouTube premium, but cannot use my preferred
| browser. I have to use Chromium in order to have it work
| reliably. Doubly so considering it worked fine in Firefox
| for YEARS... until maybe six months ago?
|
| It feels like something the FTC should be investigating,
| or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The FTC will not investigate anything that was not
| reported to them. Did you report your experience? They do
| care about these issues, if you care enough to take six
| minutes to report it.
| jorvi wrote:
| They've also started to be really aggressive against
| VPNs. I've tried Private Internet Access, Mulvad and
| AirVPN and often I have to cycle through 5-15(!) servers
| before YouTube stops saying "sign in to confirm you're
| not a bot".
|
| Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it
| too, to the point that they don't even let you load
| messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
|
| It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection
| point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in
| two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of
| interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and
| scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate
| internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of
| which you'll only have access with a government ID. No
| VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| For Discord it is basic rate limiting ( anty-VPN is other
| separate thing require phone number )
|
| There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all
| public server and history via all of those VPN
| immibis wrote:
| it's already like that
| Eduard wrote:
| > It really makes me feel like there will be an
| inflection point in a few years, where the internet is
| cleaved in two.
|
| Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
|
| arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to
| stay within its walled garden.
| mikestorrent wrote:
| 100%. Web Credentials + Digital ID + age verification
| will all be handled with Secure Attestation backing it.
| Cloudflare will have a checkbox for site admins... [X]
| Require Age Verification... and that's it. Boom. Your
| site is "safe" from accidentally allowing kids in.
|
| ...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this,
| but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say
| anything the current or potential future government
| wouldn't like, do you?
| hhh wrote:
| Free speech doesn't die with this. Host your own site.
| mafuy wrote:
| The year is 2041. Google announces that only a negligible
| fraction of users acceses websites outside of the clean
| pool. These users are at risk, they claim, due to "all
| the bad stuff on the free web". They refuse to clarify if
| this refers to malware or to content not aligned with The
| Party doctrine. However, they draw the consequence that
| "free web" sites will no longer be supported by Chrome,
| to protect the users. Less than an hour later, Mozilla
| releases a new version of Firefox that also disables
| access to websites that were not whitelistet by The
| Party, using the same reasoning.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| Almost everything blocks you on a VPN until you sign in
| now. AI scrapers were the final nail in the coffin.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| What's so clean about YouTube, Discord, X etc? It's full
| of low quality content, scams, malware, influencers,
| advertisers and other scum and villainy.
| immibis wrote:
| I think it refers to the fact they can deperson you from
| their platforms if they want to. It's only "dirty" and
| "clean" if you emphasize the quote marks, but it's
| definitely "heavily censored" and "free".
|
| There are allegations going around that e.g. some
| platforms are lax on child protection because some high
| up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those
| platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're
| heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just
| have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most
| of us.
| xeonmc wrote:
| You can say Roblox directly you know, Death Eaters aren't
| coming after you for saying the name.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| Mullvad Frankfurt 102 seems to always be OK in this
| regard.
| jcalvinowens wrote:
| YT works pretty flawlessly for me with firefox on debian.
| What's the issue you're seeing?
| therein wrote:
| If you are blocking ads now, the videos will start in a
| very delayed fashion almost as if the server is waiting
| the length expected for the ad to take before streaming
| you any bytes.
| ciberado wrote:
| Same here. Still, I prefer to wait instead of suffering
| those aggressive ads.
| wvh wrote:
| I've seen that too, but it's still better than somebody
| yelling in your face about toilet paper.
| kotaKat wrote:
| The worst part is if someone doesn't put 2+2 together and
| starts blaming their ISP for poor load issues because
| their Youtube "keeps buffering" because of this continue
| cat-and-mouse game messing with the player client.
|
| I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot "Youtube isn't
| working" calls where it's because of this adblock
| 'protection' bullshit.
|
| It's just as bad as Ad-Shield's bullshit "an error
| occured loading this page" -- no, the page loaded just
| fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and
| hijack my pageload to some "error-report.com" website to
| tell me my adblocker did it.
| velcrovan wrote:
| I use it on Firefox and Safari on Mac OS (mainly Safari),
| and it's been OK except it's started doing a thing where
| it blips a bit after roughly the first 1sec of video
| plays.
|
| I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a
| factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But
| maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed
| things for the worse for people that get them.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Interesting. I use Firefox and it works flawlessly for
| me. I wonder if it's a computing power thing?
| rajamaka wrote:
| I am constantly having serious issues running YouTube
| (Pentium II, IE3, Windows SQL Server 2003)
| plugger wrote:
| I use Firefox + uBlock Origin on both Linux (Debian 12)
| and on Android to watch Youtube without ads and it works
| without issue.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Well... I have many new, emerging problems with YouTube as
| of lately.
|
| For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the
| comment section, the suggestions are all over the place,
| and so forth. Annoying.
|
| Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I
| have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the
| fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old
| layout" is a problem for me.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It feels like "serving you the video you actually want to
| see" has become some kind of unimportant side quest, as
| opposed to serving you the crap (Ads, Shorts,
| recommendations, comments, sponsored content) that they
| would rather you be looking at.
| taneq wrote:
| This is the essence of enshittification. The good fast
| useful free offering is the bait, and this... stuff... is
| the switch.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| Only if you use Googles Chrome Browser. Other browsers have
| issues like Firefox[1].
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41379517
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I can no longer watch videos on YouTube with Firefox.
|
| When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.
| immibis wrote:
| I considered it as motivation to switch more from Firefox
| to Zen, where it works, I guess because Google doesn't
| recognize it as Firefox and doesn't apply the anti-
| competition script?
| Khaine wrote:
| Airplay from youtube is broken for me. I airplay and
| instead of english, I get german and no way to change the
| language. This is not an isolated incident.
|
| See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtu
| be_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
| dotancohen wrote:
| YouTube is currently A/B testing some real annoyances:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45868987
| tux1968 wrote:
| Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often
| for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always
| just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough
| to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine
| for me, but I've never been able to download higher than
| 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without
| DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly
| you've been downloading that?
| do_not_redeem wrote:
| yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I
| remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which
| it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words,
| instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install
| yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]`
|
| The version in the Arch repos does not include the
| impersonate feature.
| xmcp123 wrote:
| This absolutely screams graphics card drivers problems to
| me.
| tux1968 wrote:
| Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being
| downloaded?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days
|
| Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments,
| the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome
| on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class
| there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And
| Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.
|
| And that's just the technical side. The content side is even
| worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention
| the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake
| I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to
| make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear
| regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp,
| AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright
| banned.
|
| And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are
| also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound
| effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.
|
| Google _makes money_ here, they could go and actually hire a
| few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with
| their sponsors.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular
| videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when
| watching videos in a (different) language that I
| understand.
|
| With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and
| have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
| WorldPeas wrote:
| I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the
| video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't
| work for video controls anymore, happened about when the
| liquid glass styled interface did
| nextlevelwizard wrote:
| How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely
| working"?
|
| I personally use Youtube almost exclusively for my
| entertainment. I am using Chromium on Raspberry Pi 5. I am
| running some flavor of uBlock, SponsorBlock, and some Shorts
| remover extension. It just works.
| khannn wrote:
| I manually installed Deno via Chocolately, but I also installed
| yt-dlp from choco so it's on v2025.10.22
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube -
| Can run Python code - Can't run JS code
|
| If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to
| great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you're
| using Deno).
|
| If you're using some sort of weird OS or architecture that
| Deno/Node doesn't support, you might consider QuickJS, which is
| written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it
| will be a _lot_ slower, I'm not clear just how slow.)
| Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it
| seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google
| on the official Youtube domain. (You don't have to trust Google
| in general to trust that they won't serve you actual malware.)
| dspillett wrote:
| _> What environment are you using that: - Has access to
| Youtube - Can run Python code - Can't run JS code_
|
| They didn't say "can't run JS code", but that from that
| location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It
| could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube
| supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external
| sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why
| youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly
| possible).
| embedding-shape wrote:
| It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply
| chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software
| touching the internet in a VM one way or another.
|
| I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it
| worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by
| domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously
| OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that,
| since it's just downloading one JS file.
|
| For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or
| just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the
| trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my
| previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval,
| can't be too positive.
| j45 wrote:
| It's not paranoid, it's more attack surfaces that don't
| need to be.
|
| Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've
| found helpful to do this.
| dspillett wrote:
| You could serve the files yourself from a server
| populated by updating them from github after review.
| You'd need to either sign the domain with your own CA
| that the host running yt-dlp trusts, or patch yt-dlp to
| use a different server name, but neither of those steps
| should be _too_ onerous.
| rwmj wrote:
| I've just hit the IPv6 problem. I routinely use yt-dlp -6
| to cycle through my (basically infinite) set of IPv6
| addresses. However when you do this, it tries the github
| EJS download over IPv6, which fails as github doesn't
| support IPv6 (because it's still the year 2000 over there).
|
| Actually I think this is kind of a yt-dlp bug, since it
| doesn't need to use IPv6 for the github download.
| immibis wrote:
| You can set up a 'socat' process to listen on a certain
| IPv6 address and relay traffic to GitHub, and add it to
| your hosts file, and you don't even need to break TLS
| since it's forwarding traffic unchanged
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > What environment are you using that: - Has access to
| Youtube - Can run Python code - Can't run JS code
|
| Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs
| where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked
| down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run,
| including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows,
| it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to
| YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)
|
| I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so
| most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically,
| especially things that does network requests _sometimes_
| (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of
| packaging it before I run it, so it 's not the end of the
| world.
|
| No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.
|
| > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served
| by Google on the official Youtube domain
|
| The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub
| organization (https://github.com/yt-
| dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.sol...), not from Google
| or any websites, FWIW.
| j45 wrote:
| This is the way. Leaving so many packages with unfettered
| access to your system is only so secure.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub
| organization
|
| I meant the challenge that is the reason they need the
| Javascript in the first place.
|
| You can't very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp
| code.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| The original point was this:
|
| > > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being
| served by Google on the official Youtube domain
|
| Which came from a misunderstanding about where the
| downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come
| from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org),
| I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
|
| > You can't very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp
| code.
|
| That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how
| that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp
| from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch
| maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm
| adding a manifest which controls what this application
| can actually access, which is basically a VM config,
| where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a
| bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part
| that _shouldn 't_ have github.com/* access.
|
| Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of
| workarounds, so not the end of the world.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Which came from a misunderstanding about where the
| downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come
| from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org),
| I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
|
| But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from
| Youtube, right? That's why we actually needed a JS
| runtime in the first place.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Correct, the data needed to solve the challenge comes
| from YouTube.
| imnewton wrote:
| Restricting or sandboxing software is something I've been
| looking into recently. Would you mind sharing what you
| use and possibly an example as well? Perhaps an example
| for yt-dlp?
| ivankra wrote:
| > Although it will be a lot slower, I'm not clear just how
| slow.
|
| Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).
|
| I've been recently benchmarking a lot of different engines:
| https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).
|
| A solver running at 50ms instead of 1ms I would say is
| practically imperceptible to most users, but I don't know
| what time span you are measuring with those numbers.
| ivankra wrote:
| My page is about generic JS benchmarks. Just did a quick
| run with a sample javascript challenge I got via yt-dlp
| (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ivankra/javascript-
| zoo/ref...): $ time ./v8 /bench/yt-dlp.js
| | md5sum - a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
| real 0m0.252s user 0m0.386s sys 0m0.074s
| $ time ./quickjs /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
| a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f - real 0m2.280s
| user 0m2.507s sys 0m0.031s
|
| So about 10x slower for the current flavor of YouTube
| challenges: 0.2s -> 2.2s.
|
| A few more results on same input:
| spidermonkey 0.334s v8_jitless 1.096s => about the
| limit for JIT-less interpreters like quickjs
| graaljs 2.396s escargot 3.344s libjs 4.501s
| brimstone 6.328s modernc-quickjs 12.767s (pure Go
| port of quickjs) fastschema-qjs 1m22.801s (Wasm
| port of quickjs) boa 1m28.070s quickjs-ng
| 2m49.202s
| rdtsc wrote:
| Thanks for the benchmark!
|
| I tried it on my slower laptop. I get:
| node(v8) : 1.25s user 0.12s system 154% cpu 0.892 total
| quickjs : 6.54s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 6.671 total
| quickjs-ng: 545.55s user 202.67s system 99% cpu 12:32.28
| total
|
| A 5x slowdown for an interpreted C JS engine is pretty
| good I think, compared to all the time, code and effort
| put into v8 over the years!
| ivankra wrote:
| Tidied up benchmark and results: https://gist.github.com/
| ivankra/a950b2c37db48c66fe5dceb0acd8...
|
| Looks like quickjs is the next best option after the big
| three engines (V8/JSC/SM).
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| This works for me: FROM python:3-slim
| RUN python3 -m pip --no-cache-dir install 'yt-dlp[default]'
| RUN apt-get update \ &&
| DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --no-install-
| recommends -q -y ffmpeg curl unzip \ && curl -fsSL
| https://deno.land/install.sh -o /tmp/deno.sh \ && sh
| /tmp/deno.sh -y \ && mv /root/.deno/bin/deno
| /usr/local/bin/ \ && rm --force --recursive
| /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/* ENTRYPOINT
| ["yt-dlp"]
| Cogito wrote:
| I've found having yt-dlp available on my iPhone useful, and
| used Pythonista to achieve that, but haven't figured out how
| to get the new requirements to work yet. Would love any ideas
| people have!
| comonoid wrote:
| Can QuickJS be compiled to WASM and executed in WASM sandbox?
| Jogo_Alex wrote:
| yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components
| ejs:github -f
| "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best"
| 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
| ranger_danger wrote:
| It was just updated again today, and at least for me, when you
| install it using the package name "yt-dlp[default]", it already
| downloads both deno and the solver automatically.
| mnmalst wrote:
| https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs looks like what
| you need?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly
| fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it
| without the flag: WARNING: [youtube] [jsc]
| Remote components challenge solver script (deno) and NPM
| package (deno) were skipped. These may be required to solve
| JS challenges. You can enable these downloads with --remote-
| components ejs:github (recommended) or --remote-components
| ejs:npm , respectively. For more information and
| alternatives, refer to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-
| dlp/wiki/EJS
|
| Providing one of the flags automatically lets it
| automatically get what it needs. No need for AUR packages :)
|
| Edit: Maybe I misunderstood, now when I re-read your post.
| You meant it'll prevent the automatic download at runtime
| perhaps? That sounds about right if so.
| mnmalst wrote:
| Yes exactly, if you install the package you don't need the
| download the solver on the fly. AT least that's my
| understanding of what the package is supposed to do.
| Personally I have no need for it.
| zahlman wrote:
| > It would be great if we could download the solver manually
| with a separate command, before running the download command
|
| ...Can they not just bundle a solver? For that matter, deno is
| available as a PyPI package.
|
| > as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted
| environment
|
| ...An environment that doesn't allow you to install Deno, but
| _does allow you to install yt-dlp_?
| rmunn wrote:
| yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the
| binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might
| say that a restricted environment really really should
| prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet,
| and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's
| home folder without needing to request admin access), but
| some people think merely preventing admin access is enough.
| So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing
| environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's
| changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement.
| (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run
| without installing.)
| zahlman wrote:
| > Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run
| without installing.
|
| A third party is packaging it for PyPI (although yt-dlp
| doesn't support this, nobody has properly verified it etc.)
| and the wheel looks to be just a monolithic executable and
| a "tell me the executable path" wrapper (much like the
| official PyPI package for uv), so I would assume it can.
| creaktive wrote:
| Ah! So, that's why brew no longer updates yt-dlp on my iMac from
| 2017 -\\_(tsu)_/-
| goku12 wrote:
| Just one question. I see all these 3rd party clients solving the
| problem separately. Isn't it easier for everyone to build a
| unified decoder backend that exposes a stable and consistent
| interface for all the frontends? That way, it will get more
| attention and each modification will have to be done only once.
|
| Since JS is the big issue here, the backend itself could be
| written in JS, TS or something else that compiles to WASM. That
| way, the decoder doesn't have to be split between two separate
| codebase. Deno also allows the bundle to be optionally compiled
| into a native executable that can run without having to install
| Deno separately.
| tracker1 wrote:
| Alternatively, I'm not sure if this might be an impetus to move
| the bulk of the codebase itself to TS/JS and just use
| Deno/Node/Bun or otherwise to move to Rust with rusty_v8 or
| deno_core directly.
| zahlman wrote:
| You mean, like the yt-dlp-ejs package?
| goku12 wrote:
| Hmm! Close enough, I guess. I didn't notice that. But I hope
| that it has a flexible interface and that all projects adopt
| it.
| zahlman wrote:
| From what I can tell, it basically includes the JavaScript
| to run, and then the main program tells it which engine to
| feed it to. From some issue tracker discussion, it does the
| latter in the common way of "look up an executable on $PATH
| or use a user-provided path, and shell out to it". I didn't
| check where the logic is located for building the command
| line needed for each supported engine.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| It will also save Google time trying to fingerprint it!
| goku12 wrote:
| How so?
| ojosilva wrote:
| I wish @pg would just add "Replace YouTube" to his Frighteningly
| Ambitious Startup ideas.
|
| https://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I am impressed at their resourcefulness.
|
| Knock on wood not to jinx it, but I wonder why this manages to
| stay up on github when eg paywall-busting chrome extensions get
| banned from there (because of DMCA takedowns I guess?)
| shbooms wrote:
| there was already an attempt to take it down back in 2020/2021
| [0]. The DMCA claim's main argument was that ytdl was
| circumventing Techincal Protection Measures (TPMs) in order to
| access the content. Thanks to a letter from the EFF [1] which
| explains how ytdl accesses content in the same way that a
| browser does (i.e. it does circumvent anything such as DRM),
| github rejected the takedown.
|
| this is also why ytdl has stood firm in saying they will never
| attempt to be compatible with anything protected by DRM.
|
| [0] https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-
| insights/s...
|
| [1]
| https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Thanks for context with good links!
| zhengiszen wrote:
| Then someday it with require an entire llm installed locally
| adolph wrote:
| Is captcha solving on yt-dlp's roadmap? This seems to be a
| natural next step. Maybe there is an external library they could
| integrate?
| rob wrote:
| We use this for AI transcriptions internally on our Linode VPS
| server.
|
| It's been working great by itself for the most part since the
| beginning of the year, with only a couple of hiccups along the
| way.
|
| We do use a custom cookies.txt file generated on the server as
| well as generate a `po_token` every time, which seems to help.
|
| (I originally thought everything would just get blocked from a
| popular VPS provider, but surprisingly not?)
|
| Most recently though, we were getting tons of errors like 429
| until we switched to the `tv_embedded` client, which seems to
| have resolved things for the most part.
| karel-3d wrote:
| From https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404
|
| > What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
|
| >
|
| > The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as
| a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an
| admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this
| project.
| tekmaven wrote:
| In case anyone was wondering, use `--js-runtimes node` to use the
| (as stated as insecure) node option.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > if using QuickJS, version 2025-4-26 or later is strongly
| recommended for performance reasons
|
| Oh, I wonder if they got performance to a reasonable level then?
| When the external JS requirements were first announced, they said
| it took upwards of half an hour, and a QuickJS developer wrote in
| the ticket that they didn't see a path towards improving it
| significantly enough.
| rdtsc wrote:
| It wasn't a QuickJS developer but developer from a fork:
| https://github.com/bellard/quickjs/issues/445
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Oh, so with QuickJS it only takes a few seconds at worst.
| That's great news for portability!
| zoobab wrote:
| I don't mind, but it has to work out of the box after a pip
| install.
|
| Looks like the packaging will be a mess?
| simlevesque wrote:
| > it has to work out of the box after a pip install.
|
| What do you mean by it has to ?
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| If you specify "yt-dlp[default]" as the package for pip to
| install, it pulls in the dependency required to use deno for
| this.
| mellosouls wrote:
| Discussed here a few weeks ago:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358980
|
| _Yt-dlp: Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads - 1244
| points, 620 comments_
| api wrote:
| Someday it will have to launch a VM with a copy of Chrome
| installed and use an AI model to operate the VM to make it look
| like a human, then use frame capture inside the VM to record the
| video and transcode it.
| blissofbeing wrote:
| Why deno over bun?
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Per their wiki [0], these are their notes on Bun:
|
| - No permission restrictions available. Scripts have full file
| system and network access.
|
| - Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm
| (--remote-components ejs:npm).
|
| - No support for SOCKS proxies when downloading EJS script
| dependencies from npm.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS#notes-2
| nsonha wrote:
| I'm suprised that corporate software has not picked up deno
| for these reasons.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Youtube obviously is making it harder to download videos
| because... it's training data
| gethly wrote:
| Is there an UI wrapper for this?
| Figs wrote:
| I do not understand why Google doesn't just _explicitly_ permit
| people who pay for premium to use yt-dlp or other tools to watch
| YouTube _however the fuck they want_. Put _that_ in your terms,
| Google -- so people aren 't afraid they'll lose their _GMail_
| because they wanted to watch a video -- and you 'll get more
| paying customers...
| s3graham wrote:
| Seriously, there's even that "Download" button but it goes to
| some weird janky browser-local storage instead of just giving
| me a damn file.
|
| (I don't think they'd realistically get more paying customers,
| but I would appreciate it anyway.)
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Youtube used to have working download buttons on any video
| that the uploader licenced as creative commons.
|
| The version of their app that used their V2 API also allowed
| downloading any video (local to the app, not easily copied)
| or even setting it to auto-download all of your subscription
| feed as videos came out.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Am I right in saying they need to be able to run JS code from
| YouTube to be able to get the download URL at this point?
| Deliberate obfuscation I'm guessing? I guess Deno makes the code
| _fairly_ safe to execute and I guess the chances of YouTube
| daring to download spyware onto your machine is minimal :-)
| jajuuka wrote:
| If corporations could stop being dicks, that would be great.
| Between this and the Reddit API change feels like they all get
| together and plan this. Thank god for FOSS.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Scraping sucks. Imagine a broken API with new breakages every few
| weeks. Now imagine the provider hates you. Shout out to the team
| for what they do.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| Exactly. I could never maintain yt-dlp. Must be exhausting.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| I think being in a pitched battle with YT is kind of fun, if
| you enjoy that sort of challenge, and winning to boot.
|
| I mean YT has perfect knowledge of its adversary's moves and
| a huge staff and they're still losing. It must at least be
| satisfying. Also its an important job.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > Now imagine the provider hates you.
|
| That's the best part.
| john01dav wrote:
| The day that YouTube makes itself unusable with properly free
| tools is the day that I use Nebula and such instead
| engeljohnb wrote:
| I'm glad there's a streaming service that pays independent
| creators for their hard work, but the player is glitchy almost
| to the point of being unusable.
|
| Actually, it's completely to the point of being unusable. For
| several videos now, I've watched halfway through and suddenly
| playback stops and the video is replaced with "Error." And
| every time this happens I have to just pray the videos on
| youtube because, without exaggeration, it will never work
| again. Even after checking a week later.
| rbbydotdev wrote:
| great tool for archiving ICE abuses posted on multiple platforms
| yupyupyups wrote:
| Even when the so called "ad-pocalypse" happened, this wasn't as
| big of an issue as it is today.
|
| What's going on with Google being extra stingy seems to correlate
| well with the AI boom (curse). I suspect there are companies
| running ruthless bots scraping TBs of videos from YouTube. Not
| just new popular videos that are on fast storage, but old obscure
| ones that probably require more resources to fetch. This is
| unnatural, and goes contrary to the behaviour pattern of normal
| users that YT is optimized for.
|
| I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are
| getting more constrained in general. If I'm right, they deserve
| the bulk of the blame imo.
| narrator wrote:
| This will happen in the real world when the robot mass
| production gets going. We'll climb the exponential till we run
| into the resource limits of the planet at meteoric speed.
|
| Yes, the regulators will try and manage it, but eventually
| every decision about who can use the robot/AI genie for what
| will go through them because of the robot/AI genie's enormous
| strain on natural resources, and you'll be back to a planned
| economy where the central planners are the environmental
| regulators.
|
| There are hard decisions to make as well. Who gets to open a
| rare earth processing plant and have a tailing pond that
| completely ecologically destroys that area? Someone has to do
| it to enable the modern economy. It's kind of like we won't
| have a good AI video generator and will always be behind China
| if some Youtube creators refuse to license their content for AI
| training. Same goes for the rare earth processing tailing pond.
| Nobody can agree on where it's going to go, so China wins.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Hopefully most of what the bots are ruthlessly scraping is all
| the AI slop that is filling YT. Hopefully garbage in - garbage
| out will kill off all the AI nonsense _.
|
| _ yes, "AI" can be useful, but nonsense and slop are not.
| Alex2037 wrote:
| >I suspect there are companies running ruthless bots scraping
| TBs of videos from YouTube.
|
| certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop
| in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were
| a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to
| store _exabytes_ of data), those wouldn 't even register on the
| radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google
| wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their
| catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their
| motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was
| ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.
|
| enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is
| its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.
|
| >I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are
| getting more constrained in general.
|
| even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5
| daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those
| fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks -
| there's nowt so queer as webshits.
| yupyupyups wrote:
| >every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind
| Cloudflare
|
| Lol, that's so true.
|
| >Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access
| to their catalog of other people's content,
|
| Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but
| even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an
| astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's
| content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media
| relative to YT.
|
| For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in
| the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are
| being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a
| large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random)
| access.
|
| Who knows.
| dekhn wrote:
| Frankly I think this is inevitable- it's practically one of the
| laws of computing: any sufficiently complex system will
| ultimately require a turing-complete language regardless of its
| actual necessity.
|
| See also: """Zawinski's Law states: "Every program attempts to
| expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so
| expand are replaced by ones which can."""" and """Greenspun's
| tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming
| and especially programming language circles that states:[1][2]
|
| Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad
| hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of
| half of Common Lisp."""
|
| (from the above I conclude that if you want to take over the
| computer world, implementing a mail reader with an embedded
| Lisp).
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Support for YouTube without a JavaScript runtime is now
| considered "deprecated." It does still work somewhat; however,
| format availability will be limited, and severely so in some
| cases (e.g. for logged-in users). "
|
| The devil is in the details
|
| There are some formats, perhaps the one(s) the user wants, that
| do not require a JS runtime
|
| Interesting that "signing up" for a website publishing public
| infomation and "logging in" may not always work in the user's
| favor. For example, here they claim it limits format availability
|
| "Format availability without a JS runtime is expected to worsen
| as time goes on, and this will not be considered a "bug" but
| rather an inevitability for which there is no solution. It's also
| expected that, eventually, support for YouTube will not be
| possible at all without a JS runtime."
|
| It is speculated that this format availability might change in
| the future
| jdewerd wrote:
| How long until it comes with a DRM AI and then my anti-DRM AI
| will have to fight it in a virtual arena (with neon lights and
| killer soundtrack, of course)?
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| s/infomation//information/
| gloosx wrote:
| I wonder how the whole thing works when I open a youtube video
| from a preview inside a chat application on my mobile phone.
|
| It looks like the video loads and starts playing in some kind of
| in-app browser, but there is just full-screen video and nothing
| else. I also never faced any ads in this "mode" of playing a
| video, yet recently some strange things started happening where
| the playback would start together with an audio-track from the
| advertisement. The video itself would start playing but the sound
| would be replaced with the sound from ad which seemed very odd
| and much like a bug, only when advertisement audio track ends it
| will be replaced with audio track from the video itself.
|
| I'm genuinely curious how is the whole playback process different
| when I watch a video from the Telegram preview, can I somehow
| achieve the same "just fullscreen video" kind of playback on the
| desktop as well? Does anyone have any insight?
| jasomill wrote:
| Not sure what you're asking.
|
| You can get fullscreen video in a desktop browser by pressing F
| or clicking the fullscreen icon (broken rectangle) below the
| video.
|
| You can get ad-free playback by paying for Premium or sometimes
| with an ad blocker.
|
| Outside the browser, you can get both with yt-dlp, which also
| integrates into video players like mpv.
| jasomill wrote:
| _[Fullscreen icon in YouTube is double arrow, not broken
| rectangle.]_
| gloosx wrote:
| You can get ad-free, fullscreen video on mobile right away by
| opening it from a chat message preview. You also just get the
| full-screen video, no way to minimise it and see Youtube UI,
| no ads visible. I was just wondering how it works and can you
| simulate that on the desktop.
| thangalin wrote:
| For Firefox + uBlock origin users having troubles viewing
| YouTube, please see my previous comment for filters that may help
| with playback issues:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44332976
| nofunsir wrote:
| Tangentially related. Youtube web is now, as of the last month,
| strictly enforcing "referrer header" for embedded videos. Even if
| you spoof it, it doesn't always work. You can't navigate directly
| to "youtube.com/embed/<videoid>" to watch something without
| giving google some direct information.
|
| Since when are public-facing error codes just lies?
|
| "Oh Error 15 something went wrong, tee hee." "Oh Error 153 better
| try again, (got em, guys!)"
|
| They operated for a while, before finally updating their FAQ
| stating this is intentional.[1]
|
| [1]
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy... "
| Provide a HTTP Referer header to enable video playback
|
| Our Terms of Service require embedders to provide a HTTP Referer.
| If this information is missing, viewers attempting to watch
| embedded YouTube videos will encounter blocked playback and an
| error screen ("error 153"). These viewers will still be able to
| click "Watch on YouTube" to view the video on YouTube. Note that
| directly accessing the embedded player without an enclosing
| webpage or context (such as accessing it from your web browser's
| address bar) will typically not have a HTTP Referer and users
| will encounter the error screen; the embedded player is only
| intended to be used within an embedded context."
| Neywiny wrote:
| Pretty much all embeds have done this, increasing over the
| years. Forget discord embeds. They want the tracking. Sometimes
| they even make me login "to know I'm not a bot"
| hollow-moe wrote:
| Damn that's crazy, nothing a simple static redirector in a
| single js line can't fix. Overall cost to implement this shit :
| likely thousands hundred k Bypass cost : literally 0 It really
| is just a way for them to say "we can fuck with you as much as
| we want and you won't do shit cause what you gonna do ? go
| somewhere else ?"
| xeonmc wrote:
| In killing the cable company, YouTube has become the cable
| company themselves.
| immibis wrote:
| Exactly like cable companies did when they killed whatever
| was before. Every corporation always acts to maximize
| revenue.
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Does a Referer of "http://127.0.0.1" work?
| anabis wrote:
| This is where I would guess the world destroing AGI/ASI will come
| about. The neverending cat-and-mouse game of ads/blockers driven
| by profit motive. LLMs will used by both sides in a escalating
| game, with humans with its attention and wallet stuck in the
| middle.
| anvuong wrote:
| This explains why it suddenly failed for me yesterday and the
| downloads were limited to 360p only. `dnf install deno` and it
| was back to normal.
| userbinator wrote:
| I still remember when it was as simple as a request to
| /get_video?video_id=XXXXXXXX with possibly a &fmt=YY parameter.
|
| Great fuckings to those at YT, I wonder if they ever feel bad for
| what they're doing or they are just happy to get $$$.
| alex1138 wrote:
| For me the principal issue with Youtube (for many years was
| copyright overreach, yeah ok safe harbor, but you can't tell me
| that they couldn't have done a better job) has been
| censorship/demonetization which is effectively censorship
|
| Everything from that follows, the entire philosophy of the
| product
|
| It makes me wonder if all of Google is like this
| docmars wrote:
| Couldn't this be compiled to a single-file executable using Bun
| or Deno, to avoid the need for a runtime install?
|
| https://bun.com/docs/bundler/executables
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| What is the reason for this new requirement? I didn't see it
| explained anywhere.
| Mr_Minderbinder wrote:
| YouTube has gotten so bad that even normal people are complaining
| about it now. A middle-aged woman who volunteers with me was
| saying how she did not feel comfortable using YouTube due to the
| number of inappropriate ads. I ended up giving her links to a few
| Invidious instances and she loves them even if they are slower
| and not entirely reliable. She also understood the concept of a
| front-end without much explaining on my part.
| niutech wrote:
| Easy solution: use YT in a web browser with an ad blocker (like
| uBlock Origin or AdGuard on iOS).
| tobyhinloopen wrote:
| Is this why Youtube stopped working for me on Safari? I'm sure it
| is one of my adblockers, but I pay for YT Premium.
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