Posted by bertman 11/12/2025
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Solving JS challenges using deno
[youtube] [jsc:deno] Downloading challenge solver lib script from https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/releases/download/0.3.1/yt.solver.lib.min.js
YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
Discord has started to become absurdly aggressive with it too, to the point that they don't even let you load messages whilst logged in if you're on a VPN.
It really makes me feel like there will be an inflection point in a few years, where the internet is cleaved in two. You'll have the 'free' internet that is full of interesting stuff but also full of malware, spam and scams, and you'll have the squeaky clean corporate internet, basically a facsimile of WeChat's super-app, of which you'll only have access with a government ID. No VPNs or anti-fingerprinting allowed.
Hasn't it been like that for already many years?
arguably, already 90's AOL very much pushed its users to stay within its walled garden.
...of course, free speech and anonymity die with this, but why would that be a problem? You don't want to say anything the current or potential future government wouldn't like, do you?
There a bunch of bad actors doing mass scrape of all public server and history via all of those VPN
There are allegations going around that e.g. some platforms are lax on child protection because some high up executives are pedophiles. But I'd still place those platforms in the "heavily sanitised" bucket if they're heavily restricting everything else. Those platforms just have a slightly different definition of "clean" than most of us.
I wonder if being a YouTube Premium subscriber is also a factor here. I do pay for it so I don't see ads. But maybe the way ads are being served/injected has changed things for the worse for people that get them.
Not only do I get slowdowns and some videos don't load at all at times, but I also get a notification that explains that the reason is using adblockers.
Though it’s mostly good for my addiction since it makes me use youtube less.
It feels like something the FTC should be investigating, or perhaps a European equivalent, but I doubt it will.
I do not enjoy having to troubleshoot “Youtube isn’t working” calls where it’s because of this adblock ‘protection’ bullshit.
It’s just as bad as Ad-Shield’s bullshit “an error occured loading this page” — no, the page loaded just fine until your malware decided to dump the CSS and hijack my pageload to some “error-report.com” website to tell me my adblocker did it.
For example I have to scroll down a lot to get to the comment section, the suggestions are all over the place, and so forth. Annoying.
Also due to uBlock Origin, some videos do not start and I have to refresh. It is not much of an issue for me but the fact that apparently I need a huge monitor to see the "old layout" is a problem for me.
Something has really changed to the worse lately. I think it has to do with anti-ad programs as well as AI, like the UI also changed. It is important to point out that while you do not have any issues, other people do or may.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/1id4amh/youtube_ch... and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255931836
Also many times, the video won't play. If I reload the page, then it will play.
When Firefox dies, the last glimmer of hope will go out.
The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
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.
With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
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.
(This may be because I have a whole swathe of adblockers, etc., plus I do a lot of `yt-dlp`ing from the same IP which may have me on a naughty list.)
But eh either 5s of black screen or 60s of ads. I tried watching a 15 min yt video without adblock and it had 5 ad breaks with some unskippable ads.
Yeah - I watch most of my YouTubes on the Apple TV and the ads are a pestilence. Sometimes it'll be 50s pre-roll[1] with multiple 30-50s breaks for a 10m videos.
Luckily there exist[0] many fine technologies that let you view them without ads via something like Infuse with a DLNA server if you're that way inclined.
[0] Currently. YT-DLP is fighting the good fight but I don't know how much longer they'll be able to keep in front. But then I'll just stop watching YouTube, really, because it's a horror show without adblock/circumventions.
[1] The video doesn't appear in your history until the pre-roll has finished which means if you can't be arsed sitting through a 50s pre-roll just that second and - at least on the Apple TV - you've not clicked on the video from your homepage / subscriptions, good luck trying to find it again unless you remember the name + channel etc. (which it also won't properly show you until after the pre-roll!)[2]
[2] I hate YouTube corporate.
Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
What else does youtube music get you? I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced ( and I would never pay just for that feature, because I remember when it was free and they took it away )
there's a lot of iphone/ipad users out there.
> Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already
I don't use it but ui probably. ads maybe. plenty of people have money and don't want the inconvenience of trying to get around it.
Also, when playing music you won't be hit with ads.
Your setup can move with you wherever you are, home, travel, in the vehicle. This can be helpful for engaging the audible sensors of small aliens sans screen.
Youtube without ads on every device, anywhere, is quite a different experience.
The company voluntarily decided to serve the content at no charge to consumers, at the company's own expense, to the internet at large, with no reasonable expectation of any obligations from the people they're freely offering the content to.
They're welcome to stop freely offering it the moment they decide they don't want to be the world's most popular video sharing and viewing platform anymore.
Until then, neither I nor anyone else has any obligation to pay them, run any part of their front-end code (includig the ad-serving parts), or view any of their ads.
FWIW, when I use Chromium (logged out/in) on Linux, everything works fine. If I use Firefox (logged in), it works worse. If I change the user-agent to Chromium in Firefox, I get faster buffering than when I use the default user-agent. Make of that what you will.
No. Because even if it might be complicated, any website developer can test their website against a wide array of browsers, in a more or less automated way.
Notably, YouTube these days prioritize AV1 codec even if you don’t have gpu acceleration for it, making lots of systems fall back to CPU decoding and making it completely unusable. Install the h264ify extension to force h264 during content negotiation and get your gpu decoding back.
Even if you can make a matrix of all those combinations, it’s even more complex than that to test in practice. Take my laptop for example, it starts off good and manages the cpu decoding for a while, a few minutes into a video it overheats and throttles, causing stutter.
What YouTube should do on the other hand, and I’m sure they already do, is to collect metrics from all playbacks. That should show black on white how many users struggle with each codec.
I don’t think I’m in any minority here given how many million installations the h264ify extension has. Google simply care more about their bandwidth cost than the user experience.
No, Firefox always been a second-rate guest at Google properties, and I'm not expecting it to change soon either. Why would they make it better when status quo means more Chrome users (in their mind)?
I would expect YouTube managers to pressure the Chrome managers, because YouTube brings in billions of dollars every month. Likewise I would expect the trend to move in favor of YouTube, because the browser loses money at an increasing amount and YouTube generates money at an increasing amount. 70% of YouTube happens on Mobile, and in the US more people are now watching on TVs than phones. Source: Nielsen, the old-school company that has huge influence over ads.
The site pops a literal warning saying "having problems? turn off your ad blocker" so I'm not sure where the mysteries lie here.
They're testing on thousands of devices. And they're probably even testing against ad-blockers on your bro-browser. But they're certainly not motivated to optimize that experience, so you get what you get.
On mobile (Firefox) I frequently have issues with videos freezing or videos crashing when I try to replay a section.
I freely admit to holding google software to a higher standard than e.g. random FOSS tools I use or saas from startups, however I also believe google has the talent, time, and money to where their software should basically be the best on Earth, and it's kinda shocking how often it's not and in what ways it's not. And YouTube is how old now?
The fact alone that I still can't toggle off Google maps "we found a faster route, tap ok to not change the route you change" thing...
If the concern is security, it sounds like the team went to great lengths to ensure the JS was sandboxed (as long as you’re using Deno).
If you’re using some sort of weird OS or architecture that Deno/Node doesn’t support, you might consider QuickJS, which is written in pure C and should work on anything. (Although it will be a lot slower, I’m not clear just how slow.) Admittedly, you then loose the sandboxing, although IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain. (You don’t have to trust Google in general to trust that they won’t serve you actual malware.)
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.
I meant the challenge that is the reason they need the Javascript in the first place.
You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.
> > IMO it seems like it should safe to trust code being served by Google on the official Youtube domain
Which came from a misunderstanding about where the downloadable solver script comes from, as it doesn't come from youtube.com, it comes from github.com (yt-dlp org), I was just correcting that misunderstanding.
> You can’t very well run yt-dlp without trusting yt-dlp code.
That makes a ton of sense and I agree! I'm not sure how that is related to anything though? I download yt-dlp from Arch repositories, so yes I'm trusting Arch maintainers and of course yt-dlp developers. Then I'm adding a manifest which controls what this application can actually access, which is basically a VM config, where I define that it can access youtube.com (and a bunch of other sites I mirror/archive). This is the part that shouldn't have github.com/* access.
Again as mentioned, not a big issue, plenty of workarounds, so not the end of the world.
But that script is ultimately running a JS challenge from Youtube, right? That’s why we actually needed a JS runtime in the first place.
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"]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).
I think in this case, my own laziness is what makes it worse than it has to, currently I'm doing whitelisting by domains, so youtube.com for the yt-dlp runner is obviously OK, and I'd want to avoid whitelisting github.com for that, since it's just downloading one JS file.
For now manually copying the config file into my SCM or just whitelisting GitHub for initial download does the trick. I guess I just had to squeeze in one complaint in my previous comment so I could get the HN stamp of approval, can't be too positive.
Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've found helpful to do this.
Actually I think this is kind of a yt-dlp bug, since it doesn't need to use IPv6 for the github download.
Around 30-50x slower than V8 (node/deno).
I've been recently benchmarking a lot of different engines: https://ivankra.github.io/javascript-zoo/
A solver running at 50ms instead of 1ms I would say is practically imperceptible to most users, but I don't know what time span you are measuring with those numbers.
$ time ./v8 /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m0.252s
user 0m0.386s
sys 0m0.074s
$ time ./quickjs /bench/yt-dlp.js | md5sum -
a730e32029941bf1f60f9587a6d9554f -
real 0m2.280s
user 0m2.507s
sys 0m0.031s
A few more results on same input:
spidermonkey 0.334s
v8_jitless 1.096s => about the limit for JIT-less interpreters like quickjs
graaljs 2.396s
escargot 3.344s
libjs 4.501s
brimstone 6.328s
modernc-quickjs 12.767s (pure Go port of quickjs)
fastschema-qjs 1m22.801s (Wasm port of quickjs)
boa 1m28.070s
quickjs-ng 2m49.202sLooks like quickjs is the next best option after the big three engines (V8/JSC/SM).
I tried it on my slower laptop. I get:
node(v8) : 1.25s user 0.12s system 154% cpu 0.892 total
quickjs : 6.54s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 6.671 total
quickjs-ng: 545.55s user 202.67s system 99% cpu 12:32.28 total
Download a random video and then copy ejs from yt-dlp’s cache directory (I think it’s in /home/username/.cache)
> being able to package it up together with the solver
`make yt-dlp-extra`
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.
...Can they not just bundle a solver? For that matter, deno is available as a PyPI package.
> as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment
...An environment that doesn't allow you to install Deno, but does allow you to install yt-dlp?
A third party is packaging it for PyPI (although yt-dlp doesn't support this, nobody has properly verified it etc.) and the wheel looks to be just a monolithic executable and a "tell me the executable path" wrapper (much like the official PyPI package for uv), so I would assume it can.
Since when are public-facing error codes just lies?
"Oh Error 15 something went wrong, tee hee." "Oh Error 153 better try again, (got em, guys!)"
They operated for a while, before finally updating their FAQ stating this is intentional.[1]
[1] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en#zippy... " Provide a HTTP Referer header to enable video playback
Our Terms of Service require embedders to provide a HTTP Referer. If this information is missing, viewers attempting to watch embedded YouTube videos will encounter blocked playback and an error screen (“error 153”). These viewers will still be able to click “Watch on YouTube” to view the video on YouTube. Note that directly accessing the embedded player without an enclosing webpage or context (such as accessing it from your web browser's address bar) will typically not have a HTTP Referer and users will encounter the error screen; the embedded player is only intended to be used within an embedded context."
I also save temporary videos removed after a time for example NHK honbasho sumo highlights which are only available for a month or so then they permanently remove them.
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.
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.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=.30&year1=1980...
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.
It didn't sound negative to me. I immediately associated it with people who obsessively recorded TV on VHS and their collections are now treasure troves of historic media not available from any other source. You do you.
It did not sound particularly negative to me either, but if it was, I wonder why.
We have AI to sort them so it will payoff, or already does.
Cody's lab removed a few of them and many others.
Generations of talent & creativity just gone.
I used to be an MP3 and movie hoarder, then somehow I realized it was not worth my time.
Now I only hoard my photos and I keep them all on my phone (slash cloud) for me to actually scroll through regularly.
I made another script that adds the video thumbnail as album art and somehow tries to put the proper ID3 tags, it works like 90% of the time which is good enough for me.
Then I made another script that syncs it to my phone when I connect it.
So now I have unlimited music in my phone and I only have to click on "Like" to add more.
And yet, none of Google's 900k TOC genius engineers have thought of this as a feature ...
artist = llm_call("return the name of the artist based on this title", title)
I wrote all of this stuff pre-LLMs, never occurred to me until now, thanks!
Isn’t that the YouTube Music app?
* Native integration with my phone music player, allowing for things like seamless playback, etc.
* Things I like on YouTube automatically go to my device.
* If a track is removed from YouTube, it stays on my device.
(Did you take 10 seconds to read my comment above?)
* There is a liked videos playlist
Yes, I read your comment above.
Regarding the other two points, it is of course understandable why you'd want to download and have your own solution. But that is also obviously not an issue with Google engineers/PMs neglecting to think of a feature.
yt-dlp -o '%(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s - %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s' --cookies-from-browser chrome https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=LL- Subscribe to your favorite YouTube channels - Index and make videos searchable - Play videos - Keep track of viewed and unviewed videos
Not to mention having to ssh and copy paste URLs around, instead of visiting a page in my browser.
If you don't want the indexing and the pretty frontend that's fine, but there's a reason software like Plex is popular.
Your command is nice for downloading a single video (I also provide a url from clipboard via xclip), but archiving videos daily from a list of favorite channels would require a bit more scripting. Didn't manage to find anything both minimal and popular to link instead.
Put your favorite channels' and playlists' URLs into a text file and use the "-a file.txt" flag to batch download. Use "--dateafter {date of 3 days ago}" to download only the latest videos. Adapt as needed.
> What about Selenium or a headless browser solution?
>
> The yt-dlp maintainers have no interest in doing this except as a measure of last resort. A headless browser solution would be an admission of defeat and would go against the spirit of this project.
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. It's not even the YT premium customers. Google is and always has been an ad service company and their primary customers have always been the big advertisers. And they do care about their experience. For example, they go overboard to identity the unique views of each ad.
Meanwhile the rest of us - those of us who don't pay, those who subscribe and even the content creators - are their captive resources whose creativity and attention they sell to the advertisers. Accordingly, they treat us like cattle, with poor quality support that they can't be bothered about. This is visible across their product lineup from YouTube and gmail to workspace. You can expect to be demonetized or locked out of your account and hung out to dry without any recourse if your account gets flagged by mistake or falsely suspected of politics that they don't like. Even in the best case, you can only hope to raise a stink on social media and pray that it catches the attention of someone over there.
Their advantage is that the vast majority of us choose to be their slaves, despite this abuse. Without our work and attention, they wouldn't have anything to offer their customers. To be fair to ourselves, they did pull off the bait and switch tactic on us in the beginning by offering YouTube for free and killing off all their competition in the process. Now it's really hard to match their hosting resources. But this is not sustainable anymore. We need other solutions, not complaints. Even paid ones are fine as long as they don't pull these sort of corporate shenanigans.
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.
I was talking about us. It's not sustainable for us. All these big companies keep driving up our cost of living, while stifling our incomes at the same time. There is also a cost to not participating, so that's not an option either. But we cannot keep giving. There must be a point where we say enough is enough and cut off and replace their influence on our lives.
> 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.
I completely agree. I too hate the direction that the internet has taken. That's what I was talking about in the next sentence. We need solutions out of this hell created by industrialized greed and corruption. But the problem now isn't the absence of hackers, it's that money rules over merit, more so than ever before. That's visible in everything from toxic hashtag campaigns and stupid internet trends to adoption of really crappy technology. I don't know how we'll overcome that.
The scale of data storage, transcoding compute, and bandwidth to run YouTube is staggering. I'm open to the idea that adblocking doesn't have much effect on a server just providing HTML and a few images, but YouTube's operating costs are (presumably, I haven't looked into it) staggering and absolutely incompatible with adblocking.
Businesses (in particular the literal biggest ad agency in the world) should know who they are partnering with. Not vetting the people they're allowing to place ads is at best negligent. The fact that the FBI warns people to use ad blockers to protect themselves from fraud (instead of anyone doing anything about it) is shameful. Someone either approved the scams or the system which allows these unvetted partners to operate. There should be a criminal investigation into how this came to be. Especially considering people have anecdotally said online that they've reported scam ads and received a reply that the ad was reviewed and determined to not violate policy (that may be Facebook, or both. In any case this applies to anyone). At that point they unambiguously have actual knowledge of and are a participant in the fraud. People at these ad companies should be looking at prison time if that is indeed happening.
I'm curious as to what the scam ads you mention actually are. I use an adblocker most of the time, and most of the adverts that I do see are annoying but fairly innocuous. Furniture, insurance, charter schools, social media apps, shitty mobile games, et cetera. I've seen plenty of slightly scummy adverts, but I can't recall seeing many that are really harmful or blatantly fraudulent. I'm curious to hear what adverts other people are seeing that are so outrageous.
Additionally, Google has a well known policy of allowing people to take out ads (which look exactly like a search result) for someone else's trademark (defeating the entire purpose of a trademark), and the FBI has a frequently referenced notice[2] to US citizens to be aware of fraud where scammers take out impersonating ads on "Internet search results" to e.g. lead people to the wrong site for financial institutions. It absolutely blows my mind that no one is prosecuted for participating in this.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/18gjiqy/youtube_do...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Scams/comments/1h6rdtj/massive_incr...
Because I don't see how scam are less illegal than showing pornography to children, yet you wouldn't dare to tell me it's fine.
Walmart has profits of $157B in 2024, but their business model isn't compatible with people just walking in and grabbing stuff without paying - and doesn't make it ethical to do so even if "they'll be just fine even if I do that"
Tapping into your neighbor's cable TV for free channels may not physically deprive anyone of something but it's still wrong.
There are companies that make money by placing ("out of home") ads in the public space. Not looking at those would then also be unethical? Priests sermoning on "thou shalt not hide thy eyes from the fancy displays in the bus stop"? An ad-police, the Conscious Ethical Viewing Effort Force Edict? That's some low-key dystopian thought.
The reason newspaper do the delivery was the promise that you'll see the ads, and they get to make money from that ads.
If they notice that you do all of the work of providing you the newspaper almost instantly and you dont see the ads, they are either gonna have to a) politely refuse to serve you b) point you to an alternate way of accessing the newspaper ("Newspaper Premium" for $$)
Second once the paper's in my hands, I get to do what I want with it, and the expectations of the paper company has no bearing on it.
If they don't want to give me the paper for free, they should stop, but they haven't yet. Their expectation to make a certain amount of revenue from ads doesn't obligate the consumer. If their business model isn't making them the profit they need, it's on them to change their strategy.
Absolutely! I run an adblocker as well!
At the same time, you'd agree they have the right to refuse to serve you (access denied) or make you jump through hoops (solve a challenge etc)
We're right, and they're right as well.
It's also ethical to change browser tabs or leave the room while the ad plays, but blocking it and costing the provider money while not contributing back is not.
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.
*Bias disclaimer: I work for Alphabet. Not for YouTube. There's no employee discount, I pay full price for YTP.
I can open a private window, clear cookies, clear app data or advertising id and have fresh slate that is not tainted by previous videos.
PS: While at Alphabet, if you ever run into the person who made the call to enable automatic AI translations on YT videos with no way to change language on mobile, please whack them on the head on behalf of us countless frustrated users.
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."
That’s the best part.
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.
that's because these staff are just there for a pay cheque.
The yt-dlp maintainers are passionate. You will find that the passion wins.
Lets hope so, otherwise we're all fucked.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS
it looks like deno is recommended for these reasons:
> Notes
> * Code is run with restricted permissions (e.g, no file system or network access)
> * Supports downloading EJS script dependencies from npm (--remote-components ejs:npm).
yt-dlp supports a huge list of websites other than youtube
From the September announcement:
> The JavaScript runtime requirement will only apply to downloading from YouTube. yt-dlp can still be used without it on the other ~thousand sites it supports
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.
... Isn't the web browser's sandboxing runtime-level?
It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.
The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. 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. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.
The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.
MS Media Player eventually fell behind the curve, but eventually we got VLC and things got great.
And in-between those we had Media Player Classic together with the Combined Community Codec Pack, and once you had MPC + CCCP installed, you could finally view those glorious aXXo-branded 700MB files found on a random DC++ hub.
Never liked VLC, but that's just me.
Not just you, I never liked VLC as well. MPC-HC forever!
How is this any worse than what YouTube does now? Real Player and flash never made you watch ads.
> Past versions of RealPlayer have been criticized for containing adware and spyware such as Comet Cursor. ... PC World magazine named RealPlayer (1999 Version) as number 2 in its 2006 list "The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time", writing that RealPlayer "had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying 'messages' that were really just advertisements, and so on."
Regardless, from what I remember it was never as annoying as being screamed at to buy a minivan.
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 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.
Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.
And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.
Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.
The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.
But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste are basic OS-level features. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.
Some of the people who produce videos for a living require vastly different tools than someone who needs to trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't be able to effectively do their job.
For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way. You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are professional tools for people who write stories for a living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters, environments and so on, and many professionals do use them.
So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are still professionals who need tools specifically for "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in other areas :)
I think Word and other text documents are the exception not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always been viewed in different programs than the ones used for editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway view in something different than the editor. Nobody listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.
In fact I can't even think about any other format except for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs was printing)
This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported standards whenever possible, but you must know that QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the blueprint (sometimes literally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format) for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"
There's a reason that once alternatives became available, users left QT as quickly as they could.
QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia, and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player (from the Win98 era)?
But I'll always miss VirtualDub.
Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)
This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.
There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.
That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.
> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…
Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.
Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.
I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?
What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.
And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.
Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability. 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.
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.
If it were a powerful, useful device that I could load my own software onto and make programmable without jumping through a bunch of hoops, instead of the ad-laden crapware that resulted from primarily two megacorps duking it out over how to best extort billions from app developers and users for their own benefit, then sure, I'd agree.
But phones aren't awesome little PCs, they're zombifying the majority of the public. They also, incidentally, are insidious little snitches busy at work trying to monetize every single thing about our daily lives.
Yes, and corporations are doing all the same stuff to our PCs as well.
The general public doesn't know how to program. They don't know what variables are, that they have types, they think functions are what rich people call a dinner party or corporate event. On computers, where there are no such restrictions, the majority of the public haven't suddenly become hobbyist programmers in their spare time.
If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all, not even a little bit, simply on principle, I mean, you do you. Meanwhile, there are people who aren't the majority of the public, but that want to do things that able to get into tech learning to code despite the epic of Apple vs Google vs Gilgamesh flattening towns. It would be great if it were easier because the phones were more open, but at some point you gotta go with the serenity prayer.
> If you're so blinded by hate because there are hoops (which there absolutely are), and you refuse to jump at all
It's not necessary to bring that energy to HN and I'm going to nope right on at the point you accuse me of not being technical enough.
Because you're technical, the iOS restriction that code must be signed seems insurmountable, because it is. But if you know less about computers, you'd find bitrig or swift playgrounds or Pythonista. And knowing even less, you get into building web apps. For what people want to do and create; they don't know frontend from backend and are just getting their feet wet, a phone does alright.
Could it better at it? Absolutely, no question about that! But so could everything else in life. It depends on where on the spectrum you exist, A laptop is better than a phone for writing code for a lot of reasons, but when we're looking at the bigger picture, a phone is better than nothing.
Otherwise, I don’t think I get your point - maybe you could clarify?
> Phones are dominant now and have passed the PC generation by - in number, not capability.
And I'm saying phones have passed PCs in capabilities. Don't put words in my mouth, not all of them, obviously. I'm just pointing out that a desktop with a 5090 and 42" widescreen monitor doesn't fit in my pocket, and that fitting into my pocket is a capability that some people value.
There are also various handheld PCs.
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.
When it's not impeded by DRM, that is
I would love to be able, myself, decide if it's fine to capture a screen for an application but I'd also would love to protect me or my non-tech-savvy relatives from accidentally share sensitive info (e.g. banking) when screen casting.
In my opinion there should be a waiver buried deep in the settings that allows me to disable such protections with a grace period of a week or so. Grace period is crucial because scammers are able to make people do virtually anything under stress and hurrying.
gets me
https://imgur.com/a/bseFwX3 on iOS 18, and https://imgur.com/a/Ksbz3zW on iOS 26
Maybe you're holding it wrong?
- Get URLs from (shortcut input) - Get contents from (URLs from previous step) - Save (contents of URL) to Photos
Set to accept URLs and appear in share sheet.
Nemo auditur propriam turpitudinem allegans
Even then, there are a few competitors to YouTube like Nebula, PeerTube, and Odysee. But Nebula requires a subscription and PeerTube and Odysee have worse quality, because good video hosting and streaming is expensive.
A platform could do that today. I doubt such a platform would've beat YouTube even in the early 2000s. Creators can get almost the same experience by hosting their own site on a VPS.
The main problem is that smaller creators couldn't afford the true cost of hosting and indexing to the level that YT provides.
As someone who's spent many years building streaming platforms, the lack of understanding of the economics and this kind of massive over simplification is really sad.
There's no conspiracy with YT, they've built a 'wonder of the world' which has a very low barrier to entry and which has paid out billions to creators.
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.
/s
As the old joke went "Unix is user friendly, it's particular about who its friends are".
My first accounts were on Linux 1.x. It was glorious. Simple, sensible, and with manuals one command away. And it allowed you to just get things done. And there were tools. So many tools. 80's home computers and DOS crap and Macs that couldn't even open a file if it hadn't been tagged as the property of some application... Hells I would never have to be a part of any more. Except for work and school. But for personal computing, a brighter future was coming. In 30+ years since I've never had to step away.
I remember when VCR's came out and everyone would take TV shows and share them with their friends.
By now we should be able to share video on SD Cards that just pop into a slot on the top of the TV, but the electronics companies are now also the content companies, so they don't want to.
I think what breaks computer peoples' brains a bit is the idea that the bytes flying around networks aren't just bytes, they represent information that society has granted individuals or businesses the right to control and the fact technology doesn't treat any bytes special is a problem when society wants to regulate the rights over that information.
I have worked on computer systems for media organizations and they have a very different view of intellectual property than the average programmer or technologist. The people I find the most militant about protecting their rights are the small guys, because they can't afford to sue a pediatrician for an Elsa mural or something.
Piracy did pretty well, but that's because the legal experience was so terrible. But even then, you had to download obscure players and codec packs, and sourcing wasn't as easy as it is now. For reference VLC and BitTorrent released in 2001.
I'd say the user experience steadily improved and peaked in the mid-2010s. I think it is worse now, but if it is worse now, back then, it was terrible, for different reasons.
Wasn't dialup largely asymmetric too? I don't think p2p streaming was even on the radar back then.
Actually at this point the only thing that makes the good old aMule a bit less inconvenient to my own expectations are
- it's missing snippet previews
- it doesn't have as many resources on every topic out there.
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.
If they want the "Google has no browser monopoly!" claim, then they should be obligated to make their services work perfectly with the alternative, instead of subtly scheming and manipulating people.
One thing you can do is to use an invidious instance. Those don't support live streams and shorts, but at least you don't have to deal with the atrocious normal YouTube frontend.
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.
Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, 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.
The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.
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).
Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.
I'm not sure what the rollout status actually is at the moment.
Is that an internal Google wiki or something? I can't find whatever they're referring to.
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). :-)
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?
That does mean we go, essentially:
Step 1: We barely have video at all.
Step 2: Everything is terrible.
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.
My understanding is that Chrome for Android has supported it for some time by way of delegating to android's native media support which included HLS.
Desktop and mobile Safari has had it enabled for a long time, and thus so has Chrome for iOS.
So this should eventually help things.
I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.
Is it because it would break compatibility with some devices? Is it too expensive?
(not that I'd like that; I always download videos from YouTube for my personal archive, and I only use 3rd party or modified clients)
Sooner or later, in the next couple of years, it will happen.
This is a significant part of it. There are many smart devices that would not be capable of running that sort of software. As those cycle out of the support windows agreed way-back-when then this sort of limitation will be removed.
I'm sure this is not the only consideration, but it is certainly part of the equation.
Major platform like Netflix etc. don't implement that DRM since they care, it's because they content they distribute requires that they employ that measures, otherwise who produces the content doesn't give it to them. Content on YouTube does not have this requirement.
Also: implementing a strict DRM on all videos is probably bad for their reputation. That would restrict the devices that are able to play YouTube, and probably move a lot of content creators on other platforms that does not implement these requirements.
People underestimate how much engineering Netflix have put in over the years to get it to work seamlessly and without much playback start latency, and replicating that over literally millions of existing videos is pretty non-trivial, as is re-transcoding.
It's not because of older devices - any TV that has got a YouTube app for a decade was required to support Widevine as part of the agreement to get the app, so the tail end of devices you'd cut off would be tiny, and even if they wanted to keep them in use you could probably use the client certificate to authenticate them and disallow general web access. It wouldn't be 100% fullproof but if any open source project used an extracted key you could revoke it quickly.
