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Comment by defen

1 day ago

Would this hypothetically be able to download arbitrary videos from youtube without the constant yt-dlp arms race?

11 comments

defen

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dawnerd  1 day ago

Don’t know how this could be more stable than ytdlp. When issues come up they’re fixed really quickly.

  • varenc  1 day ago

    yt-dlp was very recently broken for ~2 days for any Youtube videos that required cookies: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/16212

    Here is what actually fixed it: https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/pull/53/changes

    yt-dlp is relatively stable, but still occasionally breaks for long periods. I get the sense YouTube is becoming increasingly adversarial to yt-dlp as well.

    I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like yt-dlp is running the entire YouTube JS+DOM environment. Something like a real headless browser seems like it would break less often, but be much heavier weight. And Youtube might have all sorts of other mitigations against this approach.

    • 22c  20 hours ago

      > yt-dlp is running the entire YouTube JS+DOM environment

      IIRC they maintain a minimal execution environment that is able to run just the JS needed to pass a few checks but this breaks too often enough that they're planning to make Node.js or another JS interpreter a hard requirement (possibly already happened).

      1 reply →

    • coro_1  21 hours ago

      > I get the sense YouTube is becoming increasingly adversarial to yt-dlp as well.

      I rarely use yt-dlp anymore.

      Before I just updated. Now when I do that, it usually becomes complex and full of questions.

    • toomuchtodo  1 day ago

      I think having a hook to an LLM endpoint to enable yt-dlp to attempt to self resolve until an official fix is available would be a useful enhancement.

dataviz1000  1 day ago

> yt-dlp arms race

I don't know anything about yt-dlp.

It would probably help people who want to go to a concert and have a chance to beat the scalpers cornering the market on an event in 30 seconds hitting the marketplace services with 20,000 requests.

I can try to see if can bypass yt-dlp. But that is always a cat and mouse game.

  • defen  1 day ago

    To clarify - yt-dlp is a command line tool for downloading youtube videos, but it's in a constant arms race with the youtube website because they are constantly changing things in a way that blocks yt-dlp.

    • dexterdog  1 day ago

      I wouldn't call it an arms race. I don't update my client that often and I rarely have problems downloading any video with it.