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youtube-dl is dead. Interesting they’re still fighting over essentially a pointer to a dead GitHub repo. yt-dlp doesn’t have a standalone website so they’ll ha

by oefrha 4y ago

youtube-dl is dead. Interesting they’re still fighting over essentially a pointer to a dead GitHub repo. yt-dlp doesn’t have a standalone website so they’ll have to deal with Microsoft directly. Edit: I wasn't aware development has resumed. The latest release is still stuck way back in the past though. Also typoed 'yt-dlp' as 'youtube-dlp' in the original comment; now fixed.

adminu 4y ago
Last activity in the repository shows today for me. Why do you think it is dead?
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  A while ago youtube-dl broke and wasn't fixed. yt-dlp fixed the problem. Granted, I haven't kept up on whether original youtube-dl eventually got around to getting its primary functionality to work. The several-month interregnum that definitely occurred seems like a good reason to consider it "dead".
  - bharathyes 4y ago
    Not sure which problem you refer to but it is an active repo that has worked well for the past few months atleast.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > Not sure which problem you refer to It stopped being able to download videos from youtube. That's not the only functionality, but -- given the name of the software -- I'd say it should have been fixed. All the repo activity in the world won't balance out the inability to do the only thing you advertise that you can do.
    - Larrikin 4y ago
      Have you tried yt-dlp? I remember what made me switch. YouTube downloading didn't break, but became extremely slow when compared to my actual network speeds. YouTube seems to do something to fuck with the speeds every so often. yt-dlp is quick to hop on those issues.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - noirscape 4y ago
    It's been fixed but the new maintainer refuses to release a new version until someone manages to help him figure out how to get automated builds running (which seems to have been the problem for the past year and he refuses to just do a manual build so that youtube-dl at least works with YouTube). yt-dlp is a better maintained fork.
- defrost 4y ago
  The last official release was 2021.12.17. The I can't believe it's not youtube-dl quasi unofficial fork yt-dlp has a most recent stable release 2023.03.04 (last month). Of the two one is keeping up with the month by month twists and turns of websites altering their video embed methodologies to defeat CLI rippers .. and the other one isn't.
  - bharathyes 4y ago
    both their release cycles and what they consider as stable might differ and not necessarily mean one is better. yt-dlp still claims to keep track with the parent project. Most would use it for the additional functionalities it provides over youtube-dl.
    - sli 4y ago
      ytp-dl is also many, many times faster than the original, in my experience. youtube-dl is almost unusable for mass downloading by comparison.
    - defrost 4y ago
      There is much much more to the code base than simply youtube ripping, both can (in theory) also rip from (say) ABC Australia's iView, from the Royal Institute Christmas Lecture series, from redtube, etc (hundreds and hundreds of variations of websites). That shim layer between the core ripping engine(s) and the manifold ways of embedding access to a stream is what is being kept current in yt-dlp releases (and -U updates). Original most recent official youtube-dl (December 2021 release) can no longer find its update service.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > both their release cycles and what they consider as stable might differ and not necessarily mean one is better. You're making it very difficult to take you seriously. Have you actually used youtube-dl?
- anenefan 4y ago
  youtube-dl only works for some people around the globe, as youtube is apparently running A/B testing. Yeah there's a sort of fix ... that's been tucked away at github by way of go nowhere link, but there's the given idea it's time to ditch the cheap computer or online server and try and get something else to run instead. I read that sort of sentiment as that yup it's probably dead and maybe time to move onto more expensive toys that programmers really give a fuck, well that year ... or just ignore youtube for the time being. It's sad because what I generally viewed on youtube was of no interest to the music industry.
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  For the sake of testing, I just downloaded youtube-dl from Github [1]. I then tried to run the program, but it failed with: /usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory Okay, the script can't deal with "python" vs "python3", whatever - I'll change the script's first line and move on. Next attempt: $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV8WFvSNYE [youtube] 5pV8WFvSNYE: Downloading webpage ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug. Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output. I knew I would get this error because I got it two weeks ago already. And considering that the version number is `2021.12.17` that looks suspiciously close to a dead project, or at least for a project whose very description is "download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms". Edit: I went through the repo and found that this bug has been reported two months ago [2]. I understand that the project is not dead in the sense that they are still looking at bugs, but if a major feature is not working for two months now then I think it's reasonable for people's faith in the project's future to be shaken. [1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#installation https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#installation [2] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530
  - blueflow 4y ago
    I think if you have python installed but no 'python' executable in PATH, your install is broken.
    - pasc1878 4y ago
      No the issue is that python on its own meant python2 for a long time and there are still distributions still using python2 I you need python3 the you need to put python3 in the shebang
    - noselasd 4y ago
      That depends on who "you" are. Linux distros these days tend to ship modern python package with a python3 executable, no python executable. Many distros still support a python2 package, some install that as a python exeutable, some as a python2 executable. iirc. homebrew on OSX installs python as a python3 executable, no python exeutable. Hopefully no-one should support python v2 in 2023 ?
kgwxd 4y ago
I just used it last week, latest dev build, worked better than I ever imagined it was going to.
PurpleRamen 4y ago
youtube-dl is not dead, it just had a longer pause for reasons. There is (again) active development for some while now, after some reorganization and new focus[1]. [1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/30568 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/30568
- josteink 4y ago
  They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant. These days yt-dlp covers my needs instead, and unlike youtube-dl, they the seem to be accepting patches, making yt-dlp work (and keep working) on more sites and services than youtube-dl does. There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
  - noirscape 4y ago
    To be precise, what seems to have gone wrong is that youtube-dl went down the "insane compatibility" road. The new maintainer has put demands in place to support python 2.6 and up, which is fucking bonkers. Nevermind the fact that 2.6 is even deader than 2.7 ever was (which was the version of python2 officially deprecated three years ago). A side effect of this is that the new maintainer also rejects any patches that introduce new dependencies (existing ones being used is fine though), which has killed support since nobody wants to reimplement certain things to work with a python version that is pretty much only used by one guy still running Windows XP (who began to whine on the issue tracker about being ignored even though XP hasn't even been enterprise supported by Microsoft since 2019 but I guess this one guy is a valuable user?) yt-dlp on the other hand follows the "reasonable" road of compatibility, which is "current python3 version + 5 minor versions going back" (which is also the standard used for deprecating things in the python stdlib and security patches). Much better and it seems to have healthier contributors as a result.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    >They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant. This sounds a lot like what happened to XFree86 when X.org forked it. >There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer. Yeah, I gave up on youtube-dl a while ago when I discovered yt-dlp. The latter actually works really, really well, while the former is broken. I'm not sure why anyone still bothers with youtube-dl, but then again there's still a few weirdos who won't give up on XFree86 after all these years, and a few other weirdos who still refuse to abandon OpenOffice.org.
luto 4y ago
youtube-dl isn't fighting anything here. Their hoster uberspace.de is defendant in this suit for hosting a business card website pointing ytdl-users to github.
- oefrha 4y ago
  > They're still fighting... They = RIAA.
yoyohello13 4y ago
Shhh... don't mention that program. Do you want them to take that one down too?

by oefrha 4y ago

adminu 4y ago

Last activity in the repository shows today for me. Why do you think it is dead?

thaumasiotes 4y ago
A while ago youtube-dl broke and wasn't fixed. yt-dlp fixed the problem. Granted, I haven't kept up on whether original youtube-dl eventually got around to getting its primary functionality to work. The several-month interregnum that definitely occurred seems like a good reason to consider it "dead".
- bharathyes 4y ago
  Not sure which problem you refer to but it is an active repo that has worked well for the past few months atleast.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > Not sure which problem you refer to It stopped being able to download videos from youtube. That's not the only functionality, but -- given the name of the software -- I'd say it should have been fixed. All the repo activity in the world won't balance out the inability to do the only thing you advertise that you can do.
  - Larrikin 4y ago
    Have you tried yt-dlp? I remember what made me switch. YouTube downloading didn't break, but became extremely slow when compared to my actual network speeds. YouTube seems to do something to fuck with the speeds every so often. yt-dlp is quick to hop on those issues.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- noirscape 4y ago
  It's been fixed but the new maintainer refuses to release a new version until someone manages to help him figure out how to get automated builds running (which seems to have been the problem for the past year and he refuses to just do a manual build so that youtube-dl at least works with YouTube). yt-dlp is a better maintained fork.
defrost 4y ago
The last official release was 2021.12.17. The I can't believe it's not youtube-dl quasi unofficial fork yt-dlp has a most recent stable release 2023.03.04 (last month). Of the two one is keeping up with the month by month twists and turns of websites altering their video embed methodologies to defeat CLI rippers .. and the other one isn't.
- bharathyes 4y ago
  both their release cycles and what they consider as stable might differ and not necessarily mean one is better. yt-dlp still claims to keep track with the parent project. Most would use it for the additional functionalities it provides over youtube-dl.
  - sli 4y ago
    ytp-dl is also many, many times faster than the original, in my experience. youtube-dl is almost unusable for mass downloading by comparison.
  - defrost 4y ago
    There is much much more to the code base than simply youtube ripping, both can (in theory) also rip from (say) ABC Australia's iView, from the Royal Institute Christmas Lecture series, from redtube, etc (hundreds and hundreds of variations of websites). That shim layer between the core ripping engine(s) and the manifold ways of embedding access to a stream is what is being kept current in yt-dlp releases (and -U updates). Original most recent official youtube-dl (December 2021 release) can no longer find its update service.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > both their release cycles and what they consider as stable might differ and not necessarily mean one is better. You're making it very difficult to take you seriously. Have you actually used youtube-dl?
anenefan 4y ago
youtube-dl only works for some people around the globe, as youtube is apparently running A/B testing. Yeah there's a sort of fix ... that's been tucked away at github by way of go nowhere link, but there's the given idea it's time to ditch the cheap computer or online server and try and get something else to run instead. I read that sort of sentiment as that yup it's probably dead and maybe time to move onto more expensive toys that programmers really give a fuck, well that year ... or just ignore youtube for the time being. It's sad because what I generally viewed on youtube was of no interest to the music industry.
probably_wrong 4y ago
For the sake of testing, I just downloaded youtube-dl from Github [1]. I then tried to run the program, but it failed with: /usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory Okay, the script can't deal with "python" vs "python3", whatever - I'll change the script's first line and move on. Next attempt: $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pV8WFvSNYE [youtube] 5pV8WFvSNYE: Downloading webpage ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug. Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output. I knew I would get this error because I got it two weeks ago already. And considering that the version number is `2021.12.17` that looks suspiciously close to a dead project, or at least for a project whose very description is "download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms". Edit: I went through the repo and found that this bug has been reported two months ago [2]. I understand that the project is not dead in the sense that they are still looking at bugs, but if a major feature is not working for two months now then I think it's reasonable for people's faith in the project's future to be shaken. [1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#installation https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#installation [2] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/31530
- blueflow 4y ago
  I think if you have python installed but no 'python' executable in PATH, your install is broken.
  - pasc1878 4y ago
    No the issue is that python on its own meant python2 for a long time and there are still distributions still using python2 I you need python3 the you need to put python3 in the shebang
  - noselasd 4y ago
    That depends on who "you" are. Linux distros these days tend to ship modern python package with a python3 executable, no python executable. Many distros still support a python2 package, some install that as a python exeutable, some as a python2 executable. iirc. homebrew on OSX installs python as a python3 executable, no python exeutable. Hopefully no-one should support python v2 in 2023 ?

kgwxd 4y ago

I just used it last week, latest dev build, worked better than I ever imagined it was going to.

PurpleRamen 4y ago

youtube-dl is not dead, it just had a longer pause for reasons. There is (again) active development for some while now, after some reorganization and new focus[1]. [1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/30568 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/30568

josteink 4y ago
They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant. These days yt-dlp covers my needs instead, and unlike youtube-dl, they the seem to be accepting patches, making yt-dlp work (and keep working) on more sites and services than youtube-dl does. There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer.
- noirscape 4y ago
  To be precise, what seems to have gone wrong is that youtube-dl went down the "insane compatibility" road. The new maintainer has put demands in place to support python 2.6 and up, which is fucking bonkers. Nevermind the fact that 2.6 is even deader than 2.7 ever was (which was the version of python2 officially deprecated three years ago). A side effect of this is that the new maintainer also rejects any patches that introduce new dependencies (existing ones being used is fine though), which has killed support since nobody wants to reimplement certain things to work with a python version that is pretty much only used by one guy still running Windows XP (who began to whine on the issue tracker about being ignored even though XP hasn't even been enterprise supported by Microsoft since 2019 but I guess this one guy is a valuable user?) yt-dlp on the other hand follows the "reasonable" road of compatibility, which is "current python3 version + 5 minor versions going back" (which is also the standard used for deprecating things in the python stdlib and security patches). Much better and it seems to have healthier contributors as a result.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >They've alienated contributors, had toxic feedback to community patches and have in general done everything they can to become irrelevant. This sounds a lot like what happened to XFree86 when X.org forked it. >There's no (technical) reason for anyone to rely on youtube-dl any longer. Yeah, I gave up on youtube-dl a while ago when I discovered yt-dlp. The latter actually works really, really well, while the former is broken. I'm not sure why anyone still bothers with youtube-dl, but then again there's still a few weirdos who won't give up on XFree86 after all these years, and a few other weirdos who still refuse to abandon OpenOffice.org.

luto 4y ago

youtube-dl isn't fighting anything here. Their hoster uberspace.de is defendant in this suit for hosting a business card website pointing ytdl-users to github.

oefrha 4y ago
> They're still fighting... They = RIAA.

yoyohello13 4y ago

Shhh... don't mention that program. Do you want them to take that one down too?