Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.

Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.

> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days

Agreed. Shorts about half the time don't display comments, the back button breaks in mysterious ways. And I use Chrome on both Intel and M macOS machines, so the best in class there is, but my Windows Chrome doesn't fare much better. And Adblock ain't at fault, I pay for premium.

And that's just the technical side. The content side is even worse, comments sections are overrun by bots, not to mention the countless AI slop and content thieves, and for fucks sake I get that high class youtubers have a lot of effort to do to make videos, but why youtube doesn't step in and put clear regulations on sponsorship blocks is beyond me. Betterhelp, AG1, airup, NordVPN (and VPNs in general) should be outright banned.

And the ads, for those who aren't paying for premium, are also just fucked up. Fake game ads (Kingshot who stole sound effects from the original indie Thronefall ...) galore.

Google makes money here, they could go and actually hire a few people to vet ads and police the large youtubers with their sponsors.

How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely working"?

I personally use Youtube almost exclusively for my entertainment. I am using Chromium on Raspberry Pi 5. I am running some flavor of uBlock, SponsorBlock, and some Shorts remover extension. It just works.

I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did

I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.

I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.

> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code

Nothing specific, just tend to run tools in restricted VMs where things are whitelisted and it's pretty much as locked down as it can be. It can run whatever I want it to run, including JS, and as the logs in my previous comment shows, it is in fact running both Python and JS, and has access to YouTube, otherwise it wouldn't have worked :)

I tend to have the rule of "least possible privileges" so most stuff I run like that has to be "prepped" basically, especially things that does network requests sometimes (updating the solver in this case), just a matter of packaging it before I run it, so it's not the end of the world.

No weird OS or architecture here, just good ol' Linux.

> IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain

The JS script being downloaded is from the yt-dlp GitHub organization (https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.sol...), not from Google or any websites, FWIW.

This works for me:

    FROM python:3-slim
    RUN python3 -m pip --no-cache-dir install 'yt-dlp[default]'
    RUN apt-get update \
     && DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get install --no-install-recommends -q -y ffmpeg curl unzip \
     && curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh -o /tmp/deno.sh \
     && sh /tmp/deno.sh -y \
     && mv /root/.deno/bin/deno /usr/local/bin/ \
     && rm --force --recursive /var/lib/apt/lists/* /tmp/* /var/tmp/*
    ENTRYPOINT ["yt-dlp"]

> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code

They didn't say “can't run JS code”, but that from that location the solver could not be downloaded currently. It could be that it is an IPv6-only environment (IIRC youtube supports IPv6 but github does not), or just that all external sites must be assessed before whitelisted (I'm not sure why youtube would be but not github, but it is certainly possible).

> Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.

Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).

I've been recently benchmarking a lot of different engines: https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/

I've found having yt-dlp available on my iPhone useful, and used Pythonista to achieve that, but haven't figured out how to get the new requirements to work yet. Would love any ideas people have!

Can QuickJS be compiled to WASM and executed in WASM sandbox?

No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it without the flag:

    WARNING: [youtube] [jsc] Remote components challenge solver script (deno) and NPM package (deno) were skipped. These may be required to solve JS challenges. You can enable these downloads with  --remote-components ejs:github  (recommended) or  --remote-components ejs:npm , respectively. For more information and alternatives, refer to  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

Edit: Maybe I misunderstood, now when I re-read your post. You meant it'll prevent the automatic download at runtime perhaps? That sounds about right if so.

yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)

In killing the cable company, YouTube has become the cable company themselves.

I look at my pictures regularly. They are on my phone, mostly I scroll back 1-3 months to refresh my memory, and I often go further back to check on how living things were around me, and to what my general surrounding looked like. I also like to look at game screenshots from time to time. Funny to see how I lived life back then.

The Memories feature sounds cool. I have something a bit similar on my Nextcloud, "On this day", that shows an image dated on the same day in previous years, and clicking it brings up more pictures from its general time. I love it! So many memories.

I'm an amateur photographer. Lately, I've taken to making curated collections from my "slush feeds". Meaning, going through a particular trip, time period, moment and grabbing the best photos, and parceling them out to a dedicated album. Makes for a much better experience and fun to share with friends/family.

I have an e-ink photo frame on the wall that switches picture once every 24h, picking one of my pictures of the last 10+ years by random. So every single one of my tens of thousands of pictures gets a real chance to be seen at least once during my lifetime :)

I've seen photography compared to archery recently, and that comparison stuck with me.

As long as you enjoy the act of shooting, that is enough. Archers doesnt have to keep and look at old scoreboards/targets for the archery to have been enjoyable and worthwhile, it's the same with modern photography.

Often when I am bored I pick a random day in the past and look at where I was on that day and which pictures I took. Refreshing memories is a great idea but the low tech way is enough for me.

I compulsively take pictures of the sky, same never to be looked at

I routinely review my pics and vigorously delete all duplicates or poor quality images. It helps if you do this for 10-15 minutes every day. At least I'm able to find most of the pictures I remember I took, and I don't have to scroll through 1000 snaps of some particular sunset to do that.

Might sound stupid, but: differences between Google memories vs. Snapchat memories?

Also my issue is that I would NEVER upload the photos I have on my hard drive due to privacy issues, but if I had a local model that could categorize photos and whatnot, that would be cool. I have over 10k screenshots / images. Many of them have text on it, so probably need OCR.

> You are a digital hoarder.

Is this meant to be negative? Many videos I have watched on YouTube are now unavailable. I wish I had saved them, too, i.e. I wish I was a digital hoarder, too, but eh, no space for me.

> do we ever?

We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.

Or because someone else made them take them off. Or because they were deemed 'too dangerous'. Or worse.

Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.

There was one instance where a prominent "doujin" musical artist got fingered as a thief. Away went all of their videos, except... he'd packaged them as something completely different from wherever he'd taken them from. One song in particular sucked to lose, because its sibling still exists as an "extended" upload. So, I can listen to the one any time, but the other, I simply know that it once existed, and that it might still exist somewhere else, just under a different title. I can't even remember how it went.

Some of the old YTPs were fantastic. They don't exist now.

Generations of talent & creativity just gone.

The problem then becomes organizing and resurfacing content, especially when it'll likely be outside the context you originally found it.

Archive.org has it at least, everything from 2009 until 2023. But that's also need to be mirrored because can be taken down https://archive.org/download/jasons-all-sumo-channel-archive...

I have the same with journals, but the video archiving has actually come up a few times, still fairly rare though. I think the difference is that you control the journal (and so rarely feel like you need it's content) while the videos you're archiving are by default outside of your control and can be more easily lost.

I actually do! I have a perpetual VLC playlist which plays those videos randomly if I need some background noise.

I don’t think journaling is the same thing though as hoarding pics/videos. Even if you never go back and read through old hand written journals, just the physical process of writing has mental effects that pics/videos do not. There’s also a bit of therapeutic results from slowing down and putting thought to paper. So to me the only similarity is that you might not ever look at it again, that does not make them the same at all

I would be interested in knowing as well. I've been watching YouTube since it first came out and can't remember any times where I saw something I thought I needed to actually download and save in case I wanted it in 10 years. 10,000+ videos is a lot of videos to just seemingly save.

I have a script that calls out to a small llm

  artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on this title", title)

I doubt that it’s a nobody else situation, and it’s more of a management doesn’t want it as it takes away the need for their own streaming offerings. Music industry also doesn’t want it, as there’s no more royalties coming in. Can’t release an app that pisses of the industry.

> And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...

Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?

Popular self-hosted solution: https://github.com/tubearchivist/tubearchivist

No! It would be easier but I burned myself so many times with removed videos that I do it on my own basically asap manually. Not a big deal once you have yt-dlp properly

> This is my personal opinion. They're still affected by customer satisfaction and they're still driven by market forces. It's just that you and I are not their customers.

Fair opinion and I agree. Is it sustainable, you think not but I believe it doesn't matter.. Line must go up.. when you're a tech company with a finance team larger than Enron, only the number today matters. Add to that the patent worth.

The internet I loved and helped grow is something I don't recognise anymore. Maybe there's a new generation of hackers who make the new system.

That’s fine, but YouTube has an obligation to make sure the ads they serve aren’t scams. They are falling short of that obligation.

YouTube had a $10B Q3. I cannot imagine them spending $10B on servers and staff in three months.

> (presumably, I haven't looked into it)

YouTube broke even sometime around 2010 and has been profitable ever since. The ad revenue has always been more than enough to sustain operating costs. It's just more growthism = more ads. If you want the YouTube of 2010--you know, the product we all liked and got used to--you can't have it. Welcome to enshittification.

Personally I find YouTube unusable without an adblocker. On my devices that don't have an ad blocker, it's infuriating.

YouTube itself is offered for free. The creators of content are not Google employees. Adblocking is a safety measure on my own physical machine.

Not YouTube's users? Maybe. But I am, so by that metric there's some doubt.

I paid for over 2 years for the premium, the cost increases and it's cheaper to pihole everything and support the usual suspects on patreon.

It's become a scenario of "I've given you so many adverts, you should pay me to get less."

I think being in a pitched battle with YT is kind of fun, if you enjoy that sort of challenge, and winning to boot.

I mean YT has perfect knowledge of its adversary's moves and a huge staff and they're still losing. It must at least be satisfying. Also its an important job.

> It's fine for this project since google is probably not in the business of triggering exploits in yt-dlp

yt-dlp supports a huge list of websites other than youtube

I would not put it past them. And I'm not sure I trust the yt-dlp team to implement sandboxing securely. The codebase is already full of shortcuts that lead to vulnerabilities like file extension injection.

I mean, this gives me pause:

> Both QuickJS and QuickJS-NG do not fully allow executing files from stdin, so yt-dlp will create temporary files for each EJS script execution. This can theoretically lead to time-of-check to time-of-use (TOCTOU) vulnerabilities.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS

TOCTOU from temporary files is a solved problem.

i wonder if it would be legal if they did, as an anti-circumvention counter-measure.

> Runtime-level sandboxing is always very weak. Relying on OS-level sandboxing or VMs (firecracker & co) is the right way for this.

... Isn't the web browser's sandboxing runtime-level?

As they put it, it was less of an interpreter, and more like 3 regexes in a trench coat.

Local video could be a nightmare in 90s. I remember those days. I remember when it was revolutionary that the Microsoft Media Player came out, and you could use one player for several formats, rather than each video format requiring its own (often buggy) player. Getting the right codecs was still a chore, though.

MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.

> For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites.

How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.

That's if you weren't using a Mac

You just reminded me of Perian. What a throwback!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perian

Real player was one of the first real video players, it wasn't a pain, it was a genuine addon.

Flash, also almost came built into every browser.

By the time both had gone away, HTML video built in was here. Of course, there were players like jwPlayer what played video fine.

Today, most browsers have most codecs.

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.

I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

The thing that stands out to me looking back over a few decades is how much of consumer/public computing is exploring the latest novel thing and companies trying to cash in on it. Multimedia was the buzzword aeons ago, but was a gradual thing with increasing color depth and resolution, video, 3D rendering, storage capabilities for local playback, sound going from basic built in speaker beeps to surround and spatial processing. Similar with the internet from modems to broadband to being almost ubiquitously available on mobile. Or stereoscopic 3D, or VR, or touchscreens, or various input devices.

Adolescence is a very good word to encompass it, lots of awkward experiments trying to make the latest thing stick along with some of them getting discarded along the way when we grow out of them, they turn out not to be (broadly) useful or fashion moves on. What I wonder about is if the personal computer has hit maturity now and we're past that experimental phase, for most people it's an appliance. Obviously you can still get PCs and treat them as a workstation to dive into whatever you're enthusiastic about but you need to specifically go out and pursue that, where the ecosystem might be lacking is a bridge between the device most have as their personal computer (phone/tablet) and something that'll introduce them to other areas.

"Fitting into my pocket so I can use it in line at the post office" is a capability that desktop PCs have yet to manage to achieve.

Depending on where personal/portable AI devices go, phones might be significantly different or not exist in 10 years as they do today.

There might be a resurgence of some kind of device like a PC.

Seeing iPadOS gain desktop features, and MacOS starting to adopt more and more iPadOS type features clearly shows the desktop, laptop and tablet experiences will be merged at some point by Apple at least.

> The concept of copy/paste/save for arbitrary data lives on for the non-tech masses only in the form of screenshots and screen recording features.

When it's not impeded by DRM, that is

long press -> save image/video is perfectly supported on a phone, it's just content diffusion platform that arbitrarily restrict it.

The real problem is that YouTube built a model where the platform, not the creators, controls the money flow. They could have charged creators directly for hosting and left monetisation up to them, but by inserting themselves as the middleman, they gained leverage and authority over content itself. The "cost of hosting" is just the technical excuse for such centralisation.

I think companies always prioritized their own interests.

A company can increase its profits (1) by improving their products and services, so that they'll get more customers or customers willing to pay more, or (2) by increasing how much of their revenue is profit by (e.g.) cutting corners on quality or raising prices or selling customers' personal information to third parties.

Either of those can work. Yes, a noble idealistic company might choose #1 over #2 out of virtue, but I think that if most companies picked #1 in the past it's because they thought they'd get richer that way.

I think what's happened is that for some reason #2 has become easier or more profitable, relative to #1, over time. Or maybe it used not to be so clearly understood that #2 was a live option, and #1 seemed safer, but now everyone knows that you can get away with #2 so they do that.

We even have a name for this now…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification?wprov=sfti1

Indeed, the good old days when "optimizing for the user" got us... Windows 3.1 (release date April 6, 1992 , ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...) or the first version of Linux - which I did not have the honor to use but I can imagine how user friendly it was considering what I ended up using couple of years later (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux)

/s

You can plug a USB drive with videos on into a lot of TVs I've encountered over the years. Due to limited container/codec support I rarely made use of it though.

DRM being forced into freeview TV seems like a contradiction in terms, and yet here we are.

Also, I'm not sure what the actual numbers are, but my impression is that a significant portion of OTA enthusiasts are feeding their OTA signals into a network connected tuner (HDHomeRun, Tablo, AirTV, etc.) and DRM kills all of these.

It took quite far into the 90's before things like truecolour displays and hardware accelerated video scaling appeared as well. Computers would struggle to view anything bigger than a postage stamp. Hard drive space was also really expensive. It started to change fast towards the end of the decade, though.

Didn't work because asymmetric upload/download speeds (which now are a thing of the past; however, it gave youtube an early advantage).

It’s not just you. My Firefox, with no extensions, have struggled on YouTube the past weeks.

Sometimes I can’t even click on the front page, sometimes when I open a video it refuses to play.

I don’t know what’s up, but it works in chrome.

Well, the corporate policy in GOOG now is to only test everything on Chrome. Engineers are not even allowed to install Firefox. This is the result.

I've got a fresh install of endeavouros/arch and yt is horribly slow now. The upside is I've reduced my usage of the site.

Oh and it's not working at all on my desktop with the same setup, it's telling me to disable ad block. I'd rather give up yt.

I've always found it insane how much software development web sites are willing to undertake, just to avoid using the standard video, audio, and img HTML elements. It's almost hilarious how over engineered everything is, just so they can 'protect' things they are ultimately publishing on the open web.

Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.

I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).

The standard video element is really nice:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...

I have used it on a couple of client sites, and it works really well.

You can even add a thumbnail that shows before the video starts downloading/playing (the poster attribute). :-)

> still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.

I’m so confused reading these comments. Did everyone forget RealPlayer? Flash videos? All of the other nonsense we had to deal with to watch video on the internet?

Technically, you can profit off of ad revenue and subscriptions without exploiting the labour of your workers, so in this particular case it has nothing to do with the economic regime. Enshittification is its own thing.

The problem with a standard video element is that while it's mostly nice for the user, it tends to be pretty bad for the server operator. There's a ton of problems with browser video, beginning pretty much entirely with "what's the codec you're using". It sounds easy, but the unfortunate reality is that there's a billion different video codecs (and a heavy use of Hyrum's law/spec abuse on the codecs) and a browser only supports a tiny subset of them. Hosting video already at a basis requires transcoding the video to a different storage format; unlike a normal video file you can't just feed it to VLC and get playback, you're dealing with the terrible browser ecosystem.

Then once you've found a codec, the other problem immediately rears its head: video compression is pretty bad if you want to use a widely supported codec, even if for no other reason than the fact that people use non-mainstream browsers that can be years out of date. So you are now dealing with massive amounts of storage space and bandwidth that are effectively being eaten up by duplicated files, and that isn't cheap either. To give an estimate, under most VPS providers that aren't hyperscalers, a plain text document can be served to a couple million users without having to think about your bandwidth fees. Images are bigger, but not by enough to worry about it. 20 minutes of 1080p video is about 500mb under a well made codec that doesn't mangle the video beyond belief. That video is going to reach at most 40000 people before you burn through 20 terabytes of bandwidth (the Hetzner default amount) and in reality, probably less because some people might rewatch the thing. Hosting video is the point where your bandwidth bill will overtake your storage bill.

And that's before we get into other expected niceties like scrolling through a video while it's playing. Modern video players (the "JS nonsense" ones) can both buffer a video and jump to any point in the video, even if it's outside the buffer. That's not a guarantee with the HTML video element; your browser is probably just going to keep quietly downloading the file while you're watching it (eating into server operator cost) and scrolling ahead in the video will just freeze the output until it's done downloading up until that point.

It's easy to claim hosting video is simple, when in practice it's probably the single worst thing on the internet (well that and running your own mailserver, but that's not only because of technical difficulties). Part of YouTube being bad is just hyper capitalism, sure, but the more complicated techniques like HLS/DASH pretty much entirely exist because hosting video is so expensive and "preventing your bandwidth bill from exploding" is really important. That's also why there's no real competition to YouTube; the metrics of hosting video only make sense if you have a Google amount of money and datacenters to throw at the problem, or don't care about your finances in the first place.

Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.

Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.

I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.

>every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare

Lol, that's so true.

>Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content,

Yeah, data is money. Reddit are doing the same thing, but even more aggressively. You want API access? Pay an astronomical amount of money for it, that is other people's content. Reddit also hosts a much small amount of media relative to YT.

For YT, I'm not so sure the increase in traffic is a drop in the bucket for them. It can depend a lot on which videos are being fetched. Cheap storage is cheap only for storing a large amount of data, not doing an unusual amount of (random) access.

Who knows.

How so?

Hmm! Close enough, I guess. I didn't notice that. But I hope that it has a flexible interface and that all projects adopt it.

So is much of relevant culture, it's not like there is a magic preservation wand that sorts by relevance before removal

> Do you think YT ought to be government-funded

Benn Jordan made a pretty compelling video on this topic, arguing that the existing copyright system and artifacts of it are actually not that great and a potential government system might actually be better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJSTFzhs1O4

I will say that is something I would not have considered reasonable prior to watching his video.

That's the point, they don't have the fund but still give the sense of fight and power of an army.

If it's free, can you even talk about underfunding?

They are distinguished by volume. No ordinary user downloads millions of videos.

Oh, so with QuickJS it only takes a few seconds at worst. That's great news for portability!

You can get ad-free, fullscreen video on mobile right away by opening it from a chat message preview. You also just get the full-screen video, no way to minimise it and see Youtube UI, no ads visible. I was just wondering how it works and can you simulate that on the desktop.

[Fullscreen icon in YouTube is double arrow, not broken rectangle.]

>They’d need dedicated hardware to enforce any kind of effective DRM.

That's already here. Even random aliexpress tablets support widevine L1 (ie. highest security level)

maybe to stop the .01%. switching to app only, sign in only would get them pretty much all the way there.

They own the os, with sign-in, integrity checks, and the inability to install anything on it Google doesn't want you to install they could make it pretty much impossible to view the videos on a device capable of capturing them for the vast majority of people. Combine that with a generation raised in sandboxes and their content would be safe.

I guess at that point we could do it the old fashioned way by pointing a camera at the screen. Or, I guess, a more professional approach based on external recording.

Netflix is already there for 4k streams

Can you explain in simple terms what would prevent one from running the decryption programmatically posing as the end client?

Which is why Windows 11 requires TPM.

iOS can already attest to websites that they are running in unmodified Safari. https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k

I guess that isn't quite enough to prevent screen recording but these devices also support DRM which does this.

I can only navigate to a video by long-pressing, copying the URL and pasting it into the URL bar, otherwise I get a meaningless "something went wrong" type error message. Mobile Safari, no content blockers, not logged into a Google account. After almost two decades of making the website worse they finally succeeded in breaking "clicking a video". I wonder what the hotshots at Alphabet manage to break next :o)

I only use the web app on my phone (via Firefox). It works well enough and I can play videos in the background and block ads.

Do you also get looping search results? I've also had it happen to the simple "videos" tab of a channel.

Google is having a hard time conforming to their own javascript standards.

> Comments also disappear regularly on all platforms...

I don't believe that that's a bug. The disappearance depends a lot on the topic of those comments. It's very much deliberate censorship.

And the YouTube web interface is full of issues too. For example, livestreams had transient memory leaks for months already, thought to be related to their chat implementation.

In the meanwhile, YouTube spends its effort on measures against yt-dlp, which don't actually stop yt-dlp.

What the fuck is wrong with Google corporate as of late.

> Because this will mean major shift to open-source and community solution, where creators will be paid directly by their viewers.

That’s an unrealistic nerd dream. People haven’t moved off of closed social networks such as Facebook and Instagram, and haven’t flocked to creator-owned platforms such as Nebula. The general public, i.e. the majority of people, will eat whatever Google, Meta, et al feed them. No matter how bad things get, too few people abandon those platforms in favour of something more open.

I'm sorry but this sounds hollow. Creators are specifically choosing to upload their content to YouTube. They have elected "big corpos" to handle payment for them.

You are not standing up for them by pirating their stuff from YouTube.

If you have a problem with it, it is on you to stop using YouTube to view their content. You did not gain a moral right to pirate their stuff just because you don't like the deal.

Until the profits tells them not to.

Ooh thanks. If the 21st century is going to belong to China, then BiliBili, along with v2ex.com, is gonna need to get added to my doomscrolling itinerary.

Think of iOS. You can basically use just 1 programming stack on iOS devices: Swift/Objective-C. You can't have JIT except for the JIT approved by the Apple Gods.

The biggest hack to this is React Native, which barged just in due to sheer Javascript and web dominance elsewhere, and even that has a ton of problems. Plus I'm fairly sure that the React Native JS only runs in the JIT approved by the Apple Gods, anyway.

Otherwise, we're stuck in the old days of compiled languages: C/C++ (they can't really get rid of these due to games, and they have tried... Apple generally hates/tolerates games but money is money). Rust works decently from what I hear. Microsoft bought Mono/Xamarin and that also sort of works.

But basically nothing else is at the level of quality and polish - especially in terms of deployment - as desktops, if you want to build an app in say, Python. Or Java. Or Ruby. Or whatever other language in which people write desktop apps.

And we're at a point where mobile computing power is probably 20x that of desktops available in 2007. The only factor that is holding us back is battery life, and that's only because phone manufacturers manufacture demand by pushing for ever slimmer phones. Plus we have tons of very promising battery techs very close to increasing battery capacities by 20-50%.

> No more interoperability

> no more leverage against corpos

> just glorious proprietary enclaves where local tyrant can do anything they want!

These are all literally consequences of the web btw, as are things like attestation in consumer hardware.

I don’t think it’s such a wild possibility that more and more jobs will be able to be done with locked down tablets and smart phone while fewer will be done on laptops and desktops. We are already seeing it at the personal level - people are entirely forgoing personal computers and using mobile devices exclusively. The amount isn’t huge (like 10 or 15% in the US IIRC?) but 10 years ago that was unthinkable IMO.

I was reading a study recently that claimed Gen Z is the first generation where tech literacy has actually dropped. And I don’t blame them! When you don’t have to troubleshoot things and most of your technology “just works“ out the box compared to 20 or even 10 years ago, then you just don’t need to know how to work under the hood as much and you don’t need a fully fledged PC. You can simply download an app and generally it will just take care of whatever it is you need with a few more taps. Similar to how I am pretty worthless when it comes to working on a car vs my parents generation could all change their own oil and work on a carburetor (part of this is also technology has gotten more complicated and locked down, including cars, but you get my point).

The point of all this is I could definitely see a world where using a desktop/laptop computer starts becoming a more fringe choice or specific to certain industries. Or perhaps they become strictly “work” tools for heavy lifting while mobile devices are for everything else. In that world many companies will simply go “well over 90% of our users are only using the app and the desktop has become a pain in the ass to support as it continues to trend downwards so…why bother?”

Who knows the future? Some new piece of hardware could come out in 10 years and all of this becomes irrelevant. But I could see a world where devices in our hands are the norm and the large device on the desk becomes more of a thing of the past for a larger percentage of the population.

They can't shut off browser access, but they surely can kill all non-Chromium browsers.

Not to mention all of the iframe embeds. I’d argue it’d helped YouTube become the defacto go to platform for corporate videos. Yeah there’s other solutions but the number of corp sites that just toss videos on YouTube is insane.

>Watching YT at work is a major thing.

Where are these jobs where I can get paid to watch YouTube?

[dead]

I guess the point was that yt-dlp is only possible, because of the mandatory protocols you need in the browser. Moving to native app makes it much easier to prevent downloading and denying access to the unencrypted content.

Doesn't matter, yt-dlp looks like a browser to youtube. They can put authorization/encryption in an app that can't be done in a webpage. By killing browsers they gain control.

They know that. yt-dlp uses browser-like access to download.

Understood and agreed. I mostly don't even care about keeping videos from Youtube, but some of the most amazing music performances in the world are trapped on Youtube, and in many cases there is no obvious way to purchase or download them elsewhere.

eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAi1pn3kBqE

I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...

Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...