With the first update of youtube-dl since June of this year, the December 17th release has a nice changelog, but also the Core Developer, Sergey M., AKA dstftw, steps down[1]. What will this mean for future releases, or is the project now dead?
Some have moved on to a fork of youtube-dl, known simply as, "yt-dlp."
Speculation: Considering the amount of controversial news the youtube-dl project has received in the past year or so, could someone with enough power/influence have "convinced" the developer to walk away?
[1] The correct message was that he marked himself as, "inactive", but IMO this may as well be called "stepping down." [Ed's Note: ... or his wife is having a baby, or he is going on holiday, or he is having an operation for a medical problem, or... ]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday December 19 2021, @03:47PM (3 children)
One link to the project's homapge, fine. Two links to Github. Meh, boring, but fine. Then a hint on controversy surrounding a piece of software I use often that I'm not aware of, that naturally piques my interests, and no link?
Why, thanks for nothing submitter...
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @06:27PM (1 child)
This is what i was thinking. I know of no controversial stuffs. Maybe the convos happened on some closed source messaging app all these windows/mac using fags use?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @10:09PM
No, it's that the software works really well and that's all they really care about.
Since they aren't trying to tell you that chicks with dicks need to be referred to as 'xem/xer' instead of 'metnally retarded/needs help', there's obviously 'controversy' with the project.
If you don't spew wokeness out of every bit of code you write, you're a problem.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @09:17PM
I assume they are alluding to the DMCA takedown request they were fighting. https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=20/10/24/0058203 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday December 19 2021, @04:07PM (1 child)
This project is so important it needs to become fragmented. I mean seriously, everyone capable enough should clone and fork it.
In past year, YouTube brutal policy pushing specific political agendas caused fragmentation of the "market", as a reaction dozens of new video portals emerged. And youtube-dl is not just about YouTube, it serves well for downloading from many other portals. But in future many more people will be needed to attend all the necessary fragmentation, to keep technology overpass superior to politics control.
The whole scene is changing, dstftw is not the only person going underground. Assange's fate is a reminder to everyone the threats are real.
And a reminder: use GNU MediaGoblin to build your own video site. Start with just a server for your family.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:56PM
thanks for the tip on MediaGoblin. I'm going to give it a shot. I've just been writing static HTML and using shell scripts to convert and extract thumbnails from raw video files. I wanted to move everything from apache to nginx anyway, and it looks like mediagoblin uses nginx by default.
(Score: 5, Informative) by drussell on Sunday December 19 2021, @04:12PM (7 children)
Hopefully that latest release includes the fix for the recent change to the Youtube API that made an increasingly large number of URLs un-downloadable. I just had to patch an installation manually the other day (on the 16th) to download a friend's grandmother's funeral stream from Trinidad so he could make a few copies onto USB sticks for other relatives to keep before they take the YT video down...
The fix is to replace this section of youtube.py (this is the corrected code, backported from yt-dlp) to fix the increasingly common "youtube_dl.utils.ExtractorError: Could not find JS function 'na'" error, bug #30363:
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Sunday December 19 2021, @04:26PM (2 children)
There's another build that bypasses the throttling but the name escapes me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by drussell on Sunday December 19 2021, @04:36PM (1 child)
Perhaps you're thinking of lanegramling/youtube-dl?
Yes, the throttling issue has been corrected in various maintainer-specific-repos and ports, including yt-dlp, and could be fixed in the main youtube-dl branch with info from bug PR #30366 [github.com], hopefully that has been incorporated as well (the code from that update resolves PRs #30363, #30364, #30367, #30369, #30370 and #30372.)
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Sunday December 19 2021, @04:58PM
Ah yes yt-dlp is what worked.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:08PM
If I was Google, I'd add just one character to the URL to break youtube-dl: with that regex from the wrong side of the tracks, it'll take 3 weeks to figure it out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by crafoo on Sunday December 19 2021, @06:10PM (1 child)
do people still use sites like Invidous to watch youtube videos? I wonder if they are affected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @05:23AM
I always try HookTube.com first, then YouTube if that fails.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Monday December 20 2021, @03:06PM
wondering: I have some spare time - should I study ancient greek or maybe regex syntax?
lets try greek. probably an easier task.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: -1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:01PM (26 children)
Maybe you should just pay for content? I know, socialism.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:07PM
There are many uses for youtube-dl which have nothing to do with whether or not content is "pay" content or not.
Do you even know what it actually is and does, what it is usually typically used for?
I assume that it is much more likely that you're just trolling...
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:09PM
Paying for easy to pirate content is dumb enough. Paying for free content? You do you, I guess.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:13PM (4 children)
You know what? I *would* pay for Youtube. I would gladly pay for such a service, on two conditions:
- NO MORE ADS EVER - that ain't happening, anymore that ads disappeared off television that people definitely paid for as well.
- No privacy invasion, no usage tracking - it's Google, so that ain't happening neither.
So I'm not paying, because there's nothing worth paying for.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @12:02AM (2 children)
YouTube Premium is ad-free for $12 CAD per month. That seems like a lot of money, and I don't doubt at some point it will change to reduced ads, then eventually just as many ads as without.
But all of the FAANGs (MANAMAs? Facebook->Meta, Google->Alphabet, plus Microsoft) invade privacy and track. The better regarded ones just do it less, or are better at not getting caught. All tech companies anywhere close to their size invade privacy and track. It's just too profitable not to. Because invading privacy and tracking are not sufficiently penalized by the markets, not regulated, and not fined. Fine Google a few trillion in a way that can't be negated by bankruptcy or reorganization or restructuring or other accounting tricks and we'll see how much tracking continues.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday December 21 2021, @01:49AM (1 child)
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if there was ever any known reasoning publicly disclosed for why they rebranded it "YouTube Premium" instead of the former "YouTube Red" ??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 22 2021, @07:32AM
I could see the real reason being that they wanted to get a bit farther away from "RedTube" in the name. However, they claimed the reasons was that they did market surveys and other research that showed that "YouTube Red" was a horrible name because it doesn't really describe or connect to what the service is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @01:36PM
WOW! this motherfucker +100000 b illion
(Score: 4, Insightful) by helel on Sunday December 19 2021, @07:45PM (15 children)
I know of exactly one YouTuber who offers an RSS feed of their channel for those who support them on Patreon and that is something I am willing to pay for. For the rest the only way to watch their content in a manner I find acceptable is Youtube-dl.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 20 2021, @04:34AM (1 child)
Is that not something that somebody who paid for it could easily share? I thought RSS feeds were basically just a URL you needed to know, then it was all completely open. Or at least, until they changed the URL and you'd need to change the share.
Or do you mean that the RSS feed is a bunk of links to paywalled Patreon URLs?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday December 20 2021, @04:41AM
RSS can have a login associated. That said the feed in question is simply security through obscurity. Certainly if it was shared around too much they'd notice but we're talking about a group of people willing to pay for something they can watch free on YouTube. I don't think anyone taking that deal is going to break the agreement.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @07:24AM (10 children)
Talk about paying for what is free. All channels support RSS feeds.
For example, Sesame Street's is:
While Technology Connections' is:
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @02:09PM (1 child)
Isn't that exactly what Patreon is? The primary reason you're paying is not to get access to the RSS URL.
Many years ago I mentioned to my friend that I sent $60 to my public television station during one of their fundraising drives and I got an umbrella (or mug, or whatever: it was 20 years ago and I don't remember). His response was "I wouldn't pay $60 for an umbrella" and I had to remind him that I wasn't trying to purchase an umbrella and paid $60 for one, but that there was an entirely different reason for giving them my money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @11:37PM
The way they constructed their sentence made it sound to me, and apparently other people, that the point of subscribing was the RSS feed. As much as your friend wouldn't pay $60 for a branded umbrella, some people will. At a minimum, some will pay some margin for the brand or item alone, which is why they have donation tiers at all.
(Score: 2) by helel on Monday December 20 2021, @05:44PM (7 children)
There is a world of difference between a feed of ten links back to youtube and readable RSS articles with attached media. Have you (or any of the other AC's suggesting this) even used this feature? As an input to youtube-dl it's
perfectlymostly* functional, as a direct source of media it is garbage.And that's setting aside that primary patreon is a way to support the artist directly, regardless of whatever minor perks they offer.
* Now with every livestream appearing in real time and "premiere" videos showing up when they are listed and not when they are available I need to sanitize the input to remove the former and save the later for when I actually can download them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @11:32PM (6 children)
I do use it and it works just fine for its purpose. Premieres and live streams aren't an issue either if you know how to use it. A helpful tip for RSS feeds is to not expect items from the future to work and for scripts is to always check your subprocess error codes regardless of whether you think they will succeed or not.
(Score: 2) by helel on Tuesday December 21 2021, @12:28AM (5 children)
I just double checked and premiers definite list as being from the day/time they are made public, not the day/time they become available. That is to say they don't show up as "from the future" in RSS. The video just isn't available until a later date.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @05:58AM (4 children)
And yet it works here just fine even without the logic to retry on errors.
(Score: 2) by helel on Tuesday December 21 2021, @02:12PM (3 children)
I've gone ahead and created a premier video. Here's the RSS: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCNt3FVBxk2IasMPxGWDRWjw [youtube.com]
I'd very much appreciate it if you could a) tell me what my video is and then b) tell me how the hell you get youtube to server up the data now instead of waiting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 22 2021, @07:48AM
Hmm. I'll have to look at this. It obviously doesn't download but it doesn't log an error from any except clause. It just sits there waiting for the video to become available. I'll try to remember to profile it when I have some more time to see where exactly the program flows and set it to trace calls on another channel that has a premier happening soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30 2021, @03:54AM (1 child)
I just caught one through the whole cycle. Apparently they changed the date behavior so it isn't in the future anymore but the downloader still worked. The publication date is originally when it published. The downloader sees that change and then attempts to download it. However, I have it set to not do live streams. This causes it ignore it without erroring out because the downloaded metadata says it is a live stream. Later on it premieres and the publication date changes to the start of the premiere. This triggers the downloader again because it doesn't show as downloaded but it again ignores the live stream without error. Then when the premier is over, the publication date in the feed changes for a third time. Triggered again because it wasn't downloaded, the downloader downloads the metadata. No longer a live video, it downloads as any other non-live video. Nowhere in the process is an error and the old code to ignore the premieres' future dates is never triggered. It just waits until after the premiere is no longer live because YouTube ends up changing the publication date.
(Score: 2) by helel on Thursday December 30 2021, @04:00AM
That's certainly cleaver and should work well on any reasonable premier that's only cast a few days in the future. Thank you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @03:24PM
All youtube feeds/playlists/channels ARE RSS feeds...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @04:38PM
You can get an RSS feed for any? youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=THE_CHANNEL_ID_HERE [youtube.com]
Of course, it links back to the web player, so pair that with a little script to call youtube-dl :-)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @08:05PM (1 child)
They're putting these videos up on a publicly accessible server. If someone decides to download it without going through all the ads and crap that their web page throws at them, so what?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @04:40AM
Socialism?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @04:32AM
why do I get the feeling this is something you don't practice what your preach
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:08PM (3 children)
This war will never end.
Imagine a downloader that only grabs the content.
The commercials are one thing...but the begging that content providers vomit on every watch is equally annoying.
At the video beginning, middle, end and randomly, we get ALL of these at once:
"Click the [Like Button] and don't forget to [Subscribe] and click the [Bell] to recieve notifications and [Share] on social media and share with your [Friends] and leave a [Comment] below and [GoTo] our Web Site and head on over to [Patreon] and support my [Sponsors] and suck my dick as much as you can while I graphicate all over your face with banners and buttons."
Ya, we get it, we need to support you for the service...but there is a line being crossed. Especially for the poor souls who watch without a Premium service and need to pay to avoid even MORE molestation.
Sign In PopUps, Commercials forced and skippable.
YouTube is to Users what OurToilet is to Advertisers and so the cat and mouse game continues.
Sad to loose a warrior in this fight.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @09:26PM (1 child)
You should check out SponsorBlock addon. I don't personally use it but it does exactly solve the issue you are annoyed with. It relies on a user database where people submit timecodes that represent ads or other annoying things. Then you can specifically block those annoying bits. Just looking at the app options some of the different types of segments you can specifically block: "Sponsor, Intermission/Intro Animation, Endcards/Credits, Interaction Reminder (Subscribe), Unpaid/Self Promotion, Music: Non-Music Section, Preview/Recap. It probably won't help much for new videos on less popular channels since it relies on an aggregation of user submissions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @07:26AM
So instead of YouTube tracking me, I can volunteer to have YouTube and whomever is behind the SponsorBlock API track me. Sounds truly wonderful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @04:43AM
When it gets bad enough, maybe you'll get the message. It's bad, go do something better.
(Score: 0, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 19 2021, @05:42PM
It's the body snatching anal probing aliens. The zombies from Omicron. We're being invaded, and the invaders decided to get the youtube-dl maintainer early.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday December 19 2021, @07:00PM (2 children)
For the first time in my life, I had to download a YouTube channel for something (the content itself was free).
I gave up with youtube-dl after only a few minutes. It just didn't work.
I ended up on the stated fork yt-dlp and it just worked.
It looks like youtube-dl has been developmentally dead for a while and all the patches I see (including one in these comments!) to make things work seem to come from yt-dlp.
So I don't think this is news at all.
Hopefully, I'll never have to download things from YouTube ever again, but if I do, I think my first port of call will be yt-dlp.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @01:16AM (1 child)
There is a difference, however, between being developmentally dead and to have the main maintainer formally state they are inactive. It also gives one of the fork maintainers the opportunity to take over youtube-dl proper, and all of the benefits that go with it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @02:14PM
There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, the only thing you can do is to go through its code and look for loose subroutines.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @07:25PM (15 children)
i don't know what's to "controversy" about.
youtube (and all browsers that play it) is an abomination!
thank god for youtube-dl for doing the right thing and letting us keep a "hardcopy" of the data our modem, our computers, our electrcity rendered in our homes.
it's a bloody shame firefox doesn't let the user just right-click the media and "save as..." BY DEFAULT!
it's nothing short of a disgrace!
thank you very very much for hard work and energy to give us users back control over data residing and rendered by our computers and also not giving up on re-factoring weekly new shenigans by youtube to remove our rights from our computers and thus our data!
go go youtube-dl! we love you!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday December 19 2021, @07:55PM (10 children)
"Hard copy"? OK, if you say so. The term seems to be misused almost every time I hear it. The most accurate use I've heard in recent years means "print out a copy on Xerox computer paper", in which case you actually get a physical copy of some data represented by ones and ohs.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @08:32PM
compared to the copy you getfrom streaming, hard copy seems apprpriate usage here.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday December 19 2021, @08:33PM (1 child)
I think the OP meant local copy, rather than hard copy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 19 2021, @10:28PM
free or liberated copy would be more descriptive.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday December 20 2021, @04:28AM (2 children)
"Technically correct--the best kind of correct."
We old farts keep physical copies of data, i.e. burnable discs, flash drives, hard drives, etc., that we could choose to unplug, and there's not a lot people can do to take them away from us (other than legal means).
Considering this article is about YouTube, how exactly would you preserve a video in your definition of "hard copy"? Record it to a film reel/tape/cassette? Do they still sell those? But isn't that more or less analogous to saving it to disk as well?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday December 20 2021, @04:44AM (1 child)
I guess a hard copy of music would mean printing to sheet music.
Videos, I'm not sure about. Print each frame onto paper?
I just wouldn't ever refer to that sort of media as hard copy.
“Take me to the Brig. I want to see the “real Marines”. – Major General Chesty Puller, USMC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @08:40AM
Too young to remember vinyl huh? Well it's the hip new thing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @05:16AM (2 children)
okay, so i put "hardcopy" in "QUOTES" eh? so sorry the "suck-and-swallow-mobile-phone-generation" didn't get it.
obviously storing a youtube-dl download on a harddisk is data that survives a power-off / power-out more "hard" then in "soft" RAM space of a android (or iPhone).
but forgive me for not making a NFT out of it ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @07:30AM (1 child)
NFT by definition not a copy, or supposed to be.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 21 2021, @08:43AM
NFTs are on public ledgers (blockchains). Those ledgers are rather broadly copied.
Or maybe you mean the thing the NFT points to, since most right now are links to images?
Um, bad news... lots of people have been copying the imagesets...
(Score: 2) by Rich on Monday December 20 2021, @10:31AM
He already put it in quotes. But 'Secured Copy' would be an appropriate term.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday December 20 2021, @04:24AM (3 children)
While it would be nice if YouTube let you freely locally save a copy of their content, keep in mind the wide variety of content that they host in one place, that you can rip through other means. Without them doing it it might be even harder.
It's not likely that any U.S. company would make this easy--they're in it for profit, not for the ethical rights of the Internet. Shit, RMS is all about that, and he gets a lot of crap from users here, let alone the muggles/proprietary world.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @04:48AM (2 children)
I don't know that there are many users here. We're mostly abusers, aren't we? We abuse youtube, google, microsoft, the left, the right, the center, young, old, basically anyone who draws our attention.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @05:31AM (1 child)
But most of all we abuse each other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 20 2021, @03:11PM
And some of us delight in self-abuse.