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>What wasn't maintained for you? >In that I mean what feature was missing or broken for you? youtube-dl got throttled, it took ages to download videos from Yo

• hunterb123 5y ago
  Interesting. How did they identify youtube-dl to throttle it, and what was the workaround?
  • db48x 5y ago
    They didn’t. They added a challenge–response step to downloading the video, and throttled any request for the video that doesn’t include the correct response to the challenge. The webpage has some JS that computes the correct response, so you don’t get throttled if you view a video there. You can find the details in the bug tracker if you want.
  • thristian 5y ago
    YouTube throttles the download speed of videos to the real-time playback speed. It also provides (if I recall correctly) a random token and a JS blob; if the client executes the JS and passes in the token, it gets another random token as output that if passed along with a request will unthrottle the downloads speed. As a result, full-speed downloads are only available to clients that can safely execute untrusted JS, which is mostly web-browsers and not command-line tools. I believe the way yt-dlp works is that somebody manually ported the JS blob code to Python, which gets things working but leaves a lot of scope for arms-race escalation in future.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • mekster 5y ago
      With the current toolsets like Puppeteer or Playwright, doesn't seem like a tough matter to solve?