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'Actively-maintained' is another way of saying 'We play Whack-a-Mole with YouTube every time they change how the ultimate .mp4 video file url is obtained via th
by ourcat 6y ago
'Actively-maintained' is another way of saying 'We play Whack-a-Mole with YouTube every time they change how the ultimate .mp4 video file url is obtained via the private API'.
ie: If you didn't update youtube-dl that often, you'd often find that it stopped working.
- atomi 6y agoGoogle and others are adding this obfuscation to commercialize everyone else's content. The web was originally designed as an open platform. I would guess most users uploading to Youtube would not want people deterred from watching their content.
- ourcat 6y agoWell, their main issue is serving ads with the content. They don't want applications having the final .mp4 url to embed without them.
- toyg 6y agoI always wondered why they didn't just fetch the necessary parsing-logic plugins from a remote repository at runtime, the first time a given site is requested. There are some security implications, but it seems easier to handle than requiring a full update every time a website rejiggles its pages.
- goodluckchuck 6y agoI appreciated it becausecause youtube-twitter didn't rejiggle their entire websites. They deployed obfuscation on a video-by-video basis depending on the content of the video. A new CNN video on wildfires wouldn't get it, but a slightly older video on [insert political topic] would get the newest version of obfuscation (and require an update). This allowed users to identify the particular topics that the tech giants where most interested in suppressing.
- lapinot 6y agoWell youtube-dl doesn't do that but there is invidious (currently also unmaintained afaik, it's hard being a scraper in 2020). I guess it would be really easy to add an extractor for invidious in youtube-dl.