Comment by petcat
9 hours ago
I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)
9 hours ago
I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)
yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.
I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...
I ended up trying to look it up and found this:
> Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b...
So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.