Comment by varenc
10 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.
They kind of want a small amount of downloading to work because legitimate YouTubers use clips from other videos to make their own fair use reactions and responses.
They likely want to block alt clients that strip adverts while allowing the small amount of downloading to still work.
There is a massive "clipping" universe. Not a golden goose but I'm sure a significant revenue driver (like in Shorts)
i sometimes use it when i give it an LLM to crosscheck yt videos. like give it a link and do a crosscheck especially on history and financial videos