YT-DLP will require additional JS interpreter to download from youtube

[Night457]

This post is copied wholesale from a post at TNT by rezapp (TNT Administrator). Thank you rezapp, I absolutely need to know this as I use yt-dlp all the time! https://the.nextthing.club/showthread.p ... #pid233346

There is an announcement on the yt-dlp github page
that it will be soon required to have an JS interpreter to download from youtube. [Code] they speak of Deno [Code] which, as i understand it correctly, has to be placed in the same folder as yt-dlp to work properly

[pillowbaker]

Thanks for the heads up. Them folk at youtube have been busy changing things up a bit. Even jd2 for me (on my side) is not working with youtube links.

[DreamScape]

Them folk at youtube have been busy changing things up a bit.

Yes, and will probably continue to be the case. My guess is that youtube and vimeo are trying to prevent their videos from being harvested for AI training.

[Night457]

Don't the AI harvesting bots have more powerful tools than yt-dlp and JD2? Or is it simply that the methods that fight AI also obliterate our measly little video downloaders? And erm waitaminute, YouTube and Google Search are owned by Google which also developed Google AI / Gemini, just as any online entity is invested in AI. Is it then the case of one hand dirtying the other? AI in one form fighting AI in another, simply because it CAN? We should not assume AI is a monolith cooperating in Legion of Doom harmony for the destruction of humankind, but rather different petty bot units competing for their own interests. People just happen to be the incidental damage no more important than rats under tank treads.

[David32441]

youtube downloaders dont place ads inbetween the downloads, so the more % served by downloaders the less income their advertisers will see - so that would be another reason they dont want people downloading.

[ttulog]

youtube downloaders dont place ads inbetween the downloads, so the more % served by downloaders the less income their advertisers will see - so that would be another reason they dont want people downloading.

Yeah, but I'm not sure if it's really technologically possible for them to let us view their videos and, at the same time, reliably prevent us from downloading their videos. I mean, in order for us to view their videos, the bits and bytes in those videos have to travel to our computers or phones or whatever. And once we have those bits and bytes, they can't really reliably keeping us from saving those bits and bytes.

[Night457]

I do not understand this ads with videos thing because I never see the ads. My browser adblocker eliminates them. They really ought to be fighting THAT if advertising revenue is so important to them! Maybe they figure that people who do not know how to install an adblocker are also most susceptible to the influence of advertising anyway, and the obsessive blockers are a lost cause?

Of course I would not want the ads to sneak themselves into a download so I appreciate that yt-dlp is also essentially an adblocker.

[DreamScape]

Yeah, but I'm not sure if it's really technologically possible for them to let us view their videos and, at the same time, reliably prevent us from downloading their videos. I mean, in order for us to view their videos, the bits and bytes in those videos have to travel to our computers or phones or whatever. And once we have those bits and bytes, they can't really reliably keeping us from saving those bits and bytes.

Right. Google is trying to challenge the user agent to ensure that it is a browser and not a bot/downloader. But these challenges will need to be increasingly sophisticated because downloaders are getting better at impersonating browsers. In the future our downloaders might include AI that can go even further in impersonating a browser with a human behind it. It's a never ending arms race.

[DreamScape]

Looks like this has started
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14680

But the PR for yt-dlp to actually use deno has not been merged yet.

It is still possible to download from youtube, but you might need to give it 10 tries or so.