9 ms·

Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just add another flag to the invocation: yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --remote-compon

Seems its already in Arch's repositories, and seems to work, just add another flag to the invocation: 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' It is downloading a solver at runtime, took maybe half a second in total, downloads are starting way faster than before it seems to me. [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 It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command, as I'm probably not alone in running yt-dlp in a restricted environment, and being able to package it up together with the solver before runtime would let me avoid lessening the restrictions for that environment. Not a huge issue though, happy in general the start of downloads seems much faster now.

gamer191 1y ago
> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command 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`
WD-42 1y ago
Glad to hear it’s faster now! YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!
- gilfoy 1y ago
  I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
  - phplovesong 1y ago
    Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in recent years.
    - ConceptJunkie 1y ago
      I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music). Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
      - cons0le 1y ago
        I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already. 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 )
        weaksauce 1y ago
        > I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced 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.
        j45 1y ago
        You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any chromecast device including chromecast homes with the microphone turned off. 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.
        charcircuit 1y ago
        No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.
        1y ago
  - komali2 1y ago
    I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab. 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...
  - zimpenfish 1y ago
    As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc. (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.)
    - sebra 1y ago
      I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly. 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.
      - zimpenfish 1y ago
        > 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.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not. 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.
    - darkwater 1y ago
      > That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. 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.
      - embedding-shape 1y ago
        So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds more work for them, when the same company is also developing a competing browser? 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)?
        badlibrarian 1y ago
        It's not 2003, the browser isn't the battle. 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.
- ElijahLynn 1y ago
  I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.
  - qwerpy 1y ago
    Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - cons0le 1y ago
    you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
  - a96 1y ago
    Brave is a series scam company.
- recursive 1y ago
  I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
  - latexr 1y ago
    Are you using Chrome or a Chromium browser? From experience and reports I’ve seen, that seems to make a huge difference.
    - recursive 1y ago
      Firefox
      - taneq 1y ago
        There are dozens of us!
  - NooneAtAll3 1y ago
    do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab only for video itself to load, while rest of the page doesn't?
    - mikkupikku 1y ago
      That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.
      - mavamaarten 1y ago
        Hah. I always assume it's them actively trying to make the experience worse on anything that is not Chrome.
    - kiwijamo 1y ago
      That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.
    - 1y ago
- tux1968 1y ago
  Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
    - do_not_redeem 1y ago
      yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]` The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
  - xmcp123 1y ago
    This absolutely screams graphics card drivers problems to me.
    - tux1968 1y ago
      Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being downloaded?
      - xmcp123 1y ago
        On Linux? One can dream But if the correct drivers are installed and work, I think it will solve the issue.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days 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.
  - ranger_danger 1y ago
    I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when watching videos in a (different) language that I understand. With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
- WorldPeas 1y ago
  I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did
- nextlevelwizard 1y ago
  How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely working"? 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.
khannn 1y ago
I manually installed Deno via Chocolately, but I also installed yt-dlp from choco so it's on v2025.10.22
Wowfunhappy 1y ago
What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code 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.)
- dspillett 1y ago
  > What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code 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).
  - embedding-shape 1y ago
    It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another. 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.
    - j45 1y ago
      It's not paranoid, it's more attack surfaces that don't need to be. Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've found helpful to do this.
Jogo_Alex 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'
ranger_danger 1y ago
It was just updated again today, and at least for me, when you install it using the package name "yt-dlp[default]", it already downloads both deno and the solver automatically.
mnmalst 1y ago
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs looks like what you need?
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it without the flag: 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 Providing one of the flags automatically lets it automatically get what it needs. No need for AUR packages :) 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.
  - mnmalst 1y ago
    Yes exactly, if you install the package you don't need the download the solver on the fly. AT least that's my understanding of what the package is supposed to do. Personally I have no need for it.
zahlman 1y ago
> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command ...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?
- rmunn 1y ago
  yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)
  - zahlman 1y ago
    > Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing. 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.

gamer191 1y ago

> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command 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`

WD-42 1y ago

Glad to hear it’s faster now! YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days, props to the team that keeps it accessible via a Python script!

gilfoy 1y ago
I use YouTube daily in safari and edge, this is complete hyperbole.
- phplovesong 1y ago
  Youtube is pretty unusable, as they throttle videos, and links sometimes dont work. It has gone downhill fast in recent years.
  - ConceptJunkie 1y ago
    I have no problems with YouTube at all. Perhaps it's because I pay for Premium (primarily to get YouTube music). Regardless, Google services getting worse over time is becoming a law rather than a tendency.
    - cons0le 1y ago
      I don't get the value ad of youtube music. Everything's already on youtube and they let you make playlists, and they have playlists of the top charts already. 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 )
      - weaksauce 1y ago
        > I can play on my phone with the screen off with yt vanced 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.
      - j45 1y ago
        You can play youtube videos (ad free) as music on any chromecast device including chromecast homes with the microphone turned off. 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.
      - charcircuit 1y ago
        No ads on music, no ads on shorts (shorts are allowed to freely use copyrighted music unlike long form video), background playback, downloading music to your device. These all are big value ads for me.
      - 1y ago
- komali2 1y ago
  I run it in firefox. Today a video kept freezing when I scrolled down to load the comments. Sometimes I bizarrely have to scroll super far down to get past recommended videos to see the comments, which sometimes crashes the tab. 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...
- zimpenfish 1y ago
  As a counter-anecdote, I use YouTube daily in Safari and it will not infrequently hang for tens of seconds when trying to load a video, occasionally play the sound without the video, reasonably frequently put the video over most of the page with no way to get to the controls, etc. (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.)
  - sebra 1y ago
    I have the same issue. I think it's because I'm adblocking because if I try in chrome with no adblocker it loads the ads instantly. 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.
    - zimpenfish 1y ago
      > 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.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. There are more browser engines out there than the ones you use, some in direct competition with Google themselves, maybe people using those engines are experiencing issues? Jumping to calling out "hyperbole!" sounds like hyperbole itself, since you don't actually have broad experience enough to say if that's true or not. 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.
  - darkwater 1y ago
    > That's a bit like complaining no cars have trouble because your Fiat doesn't have a problem. 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.
    - embedding-shape 1y ago
      So you're expecting Google engineers and managers to prioritize adding broad cross-browser support, which adds more work for them, when the same company is also developing a competing browser? 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)?
      - badlibrarian 1y ago
        It's not 2003, the browser isn't the battle. 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.
ElijahLynn 1y ago
I use YouTube in a browser (Brave) almost everyday. Works great for me.
- qwerpy 1y ago
  Also on Brave and uBlock Origin. Mostly works great but every video now has a 3-4 second pause before starting. Pretty sure it's an anti-ad-blocker measure. Because I'm not watching their ads, I have no room to complain, just throwing out the data point that it's not a flawless experience anymore.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- cons0le 1y ago
  you don't get the "are you still watching" popups? sometimes it buffers hard for me. They also removed dislikes and constantly push shitty clickbai AI thumbnails. They're also adding shitty ai translation, so if you like learning languages you're SOL. They also changed thier rec algo to be more "right wing\tech bro" leaning
- a96 1y ago
  Brave is a series scam company.
recursive 1y ago
I use YouTube on a daily basis. I haven't seen any of these problems.
- latexr 1y ago
  Are you using Chrome or a Chromium browser? From experience and reports I’ve seen, that seems to make a huge difference.
  - recursive 1y ago
    Firefox
    - taneq 1y ago
      There are dozens of us!
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  do you never encounter opening youtube video in a new tab only for video itself to load, while rest of the page doesn't?
  - mikkupikku 1y ago
    That happens to me about 50% of the time. I assume it's google engineers not testing on Firefox.
    - mavamaarten 1y ago
      Hah. I always assume it's them actively trying to make the experience worse on anything that is not Chrome.
  - kiwijamo 1y ago
    That's never happened for me and I normally watch 5-10+ YouTube videos daily. Firefox.
  - 1y ago
tux1968 1y ago
Do you use Firefox on Linux, too? 4K Videos freeze so often for me, I don't even try watching them online, and always just download them with yt-dlp. It doesn't bother me enough to give Chrome a try, but maybe that'd make a difference.
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  I do too use Firefox on Linux, 4K videos seems to work fine for me, but I've never been able to download higher than 1080p with yt-dlp, seems it's just not available without DRM as far as I can tell, so now I'm curious how exactly you've been downloading that?
  - do_not_redeem 1y ago
    yt-dlp + 4K works fine for me. The only special thing I remember doing is adding the impersonate feature (which it prompts you to do if it needs it). In other words, instead of `uv tool install yt-dlp`, run `uv tool install yt-dlp[default,curl-cffi]` The version in the Arch repos does not include the impersonate feature.
- xmcp123 1y ago
  This absolutely screams graphics card drivers problems to me.
  - tux1968 1y ago
    Does it? Why do they play perfectly fine after being downloaded?
    - xmcp123 1y ago
      On Linux? One can dream But if the correct drivers are installed and work, I think it will solve the issue.
mschuster91 1y ago
> YouTube barely works in a full-on browser these days 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.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  I use an extension that turns shorts back into regular videos, and another one that undoes the auto-dubbing when watching videos in a (different) language that I understand. With that, uBO and Sponsorblock, I never see any ads and have a great YT experience. (I don't have premium either)
WorldPeas 1y ago
I'm n=1 using chromium but the only problem I have is the video losing focus when maximizing, meaning l/r/space don't work for video controls anymore, happened about when the liquid glass styled interface did
nextlevelwizard 1y ago
How are you using Youtube if you feel like it is "barely working"? 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.

khannn 1y ago

I manually installed Deno via Chocolately, but I also installed yt-dlp from choco so it's on v2025.10.22

Wowfunhappy 1y ago

What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code 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.)

dspillett 1y ago
> What environment are you using that: - Has access to Youtube - Can run Python code - Can’t run JS code 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).
- embedding-shape 1y ago
  It's just me being paranoid after seeing npm/pypi supply chain attacks, and since then I basically run most software touching the internet in a VM one way or another. 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.
  - j45 1y ago
    It's not paranoid, it's more attack surfaces that don't need to be. Happy to read and learn more about the setups you've found helpful to do this.

Jogo_Alex 1y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXX'

ranger_danger 1y ago

It was just updated again today, and at least for me, when you install it using the package name "yt-dlp[default]", it already downloads both deno and the solver automatically.

mnmalst 1y ago

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yt-dlp-ejs looks like what you need?

embedding-shape 1y ago
No, don't need anything extra, `extra/yt-dlp` works perfectly fine and is enough. You'll get a warning if you run it without the flag: 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 Providing one of the flags automatically lets it automatically get what it needs. No need for AUR packages :) 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.
- mnmalst 1y ago
  Yes exactly, if you install the package you don't need the download the solver on the fly. AT least that's my understanding of what the package is supposed to do. Personally I have no need for it.

zahlman 1y ago

> It would be great if we could download the solver manually with a separate command, before running the download command ...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?

rmunn 1y ago
yt-dlp doesn't need to be installed, you can download the binary from GitHub and run it without installing. You might say that a restricted environment really really should prevent running binaries just downloaded from the Internet, and I agree (malware could do many nasty things to a user's home folder without needing to request admin access), but some people think merely preventing admin access is enough. So for anyone under that kind of restricted computing environment, yt-dlp used to run just fine until Google's changes to Youtube forced them to add a Deno requirement. (Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing.)
- zahlman 1y ago
  > Though I haven't yet checked if Deno could also be run without installing. 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.