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Comment by paaloeye

10 hours ago

For better or worse, it's like `yt-dlp` — constant race against CF, so it's not reliable. It's probably for better.

11 comments

paaloeye

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bhouston  10 hours ago

yt-dlp works when ever I try it. I do not use it much but ever few weeks when I need to download a streamed youth ringette game, it works great. So while it may be in a constant race, it seems reliable to periodic end users like me.

  • dannyw  9 hours ago

    yt-dlp works fine for low-volume requests from high-reputation IPs.

    But if you try to download in significant volume, their systems know it's automated and probably have signatures specifically for yt-dlp.

    I think it's a bit of an escape hatch: they know they can't close the hole (after all, there is always the "analogue hole", or now AI doing browser control); and probably prefer leaving a small monitored and rate-limited door than trying to patch everything.

    See: Google changing their sponsored link DOM/CSS/classes matchers every (few weeks - few months) to break ad blocker lists, but they're certainly capable/smart enough to do it daily or hourly, etc.

    • adrian_b  26 minutes ago

      That is true.

      I use yt-dlp to download sporadically some YouTube clips and it works fine.

      However, once I attempted to download a complete YouTube list of clips, with a total size of several tens of GB. Towards the end of the list, after a couple of hours or so, the download was interrupted.

      Then my IP address was completely banned for YouTube, regardless of the browser used. The ban lasted for a couple of weeks.

      Now, used only for infrequently downloading single clips, yt-dlp works again fine.

    • varenc  9 hours ago

      Honestly, that's exactly how I want it to work. The people doing it en-masse are the ones Google really wants to stop. It would be sad if yt-dlp broke for casual users just because Google wants to stop a small subset of people downloading terabytes of video training data. This feels like the perfect arrangement and yt-dlp can keep working for 99% of users.

      3 replies →

    • raverbashing  2 hours ago

      > But if you try to download in significant volume, their systems know it's automated and probably have signatures specifically for yt-dlp.

      Well, the big G is not going to sit around and watch it being scraped

      1 reply →