Move myself to inactive

[LeoPanthera]

For those unaware, there is an active fork called yt-dlp, that is (mostly) a drop-in replacement:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

[kaetemi]

Also bypasses throttling. Much faster, most of the time.

[codetrotter]

yt-dlp works great. Worth to note that for macOS you don’t need their tap to install it, even though the yt-dlp readme says to use the tap.

yt-dlp is in the main package repository of homebrew, and the version in the main repo of homebrew is kept close to just as up to date as the tap.

So to install yt-dlp on a Mac that has homebrew installed, just run:

    brew install yt-dlp

[walrus01]

switched to it a couple of weeks back, working flawlessly for my needs.

[amelius]

Do you run it inside a sandbox?

[gurchik]

Not only have the yt-dl maintainers had to deal with the legal issues and the stress that comes with it, it appears they have a massive spam problem on GitHub which must make it difficult to efficiently deal with bugs. I was looking through the reported Issues recently due to a bug that caused yt-dl to stop working for a few days; a PR was quickly written to address the issue but it wasn't merged for several days. That's when I saw Issues like this: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29809

[cookiengineer]

When 4/8chan came to raid the audacity fork I created, we also had huge problems getting rid of spammy issues.

There's only a feature in github to forbid issues being created by "new accounts" which means if the account is older than 48 hours, it can still spam the shit out of your organization. And good luck trying to keep up with hundreds of accounts simultaneously spamming comments with racist and harrassment content. And this feature only exists for organizations, not for public repos owned by a person.

The only alternative is to make the github orga only accessible to triage members or maintainers, which would kind of defeat the point of issue tracking and bug reports.

Things would be so much easier if GitHub/GitLab/BitBucket had an automoderation bot that does this for you, even a simple blocklist of words or syllables would decrease most of the spam.

As most of the chans/spammers use lurking accounts that they reactivate for that purpose, they're very easy to identify. Their email addresses used in git are always from the same providers, and they always use the same kind of language, same kind of avatars, same kind of grammar and questions avoiding the main topic. So it's easy to spot them via a simple ML trained model (bert or tacotron models could easily classify this). Probably even a seq2seq model would be enough.

But yeah, guess this was just my two cents that GitHub has a moderation problem.

[shp0ngle]

Wow, I thought you are exaggerating and that it cannot be that bad... but the issue tracker is really, really bad.

[sergiotapia]

I think a good solution would be to make the bar higher to submit an issue. Disable Github Issues entirely and only allow true mailing list type issues that are significantly "uglier" and less "normie" friendly.

[boomboomsubban]

The main problem with their issues seems to be that nobody has the ability to close anything. Sure, there are the likely accidental reports and the tutorial requests like the one you posted, but any large enough project is bound to get those.

Even that one you linked had someone from the community likely solve their problem and could be closed both for being irrelevant and for being solved. Several of the issues I checked were similar, probably bad reports but solved anyway.

[b0ner_t0ner]

We're relying way too much on YouTube.

[minusf]

not just the viewers... many creators are concerned about yt shutting them down, demonetizing their videos, etc. thats why adam neely is trying to bootstrap an alternative platform called nebula.

[motoxpro]

You can just use the other site that has millions and millions of videos. Oh wait... Well at least you can start another site aggregates millions and millions of videos. Dang it, then that site will run into the same problems.

Joking aside, I think the "competition is just a click away" applies here it's just that the competition isnt as good.

[tux2bsd]

There are some content creators making stuff on other platforms but it goes from free to watch (youtube+ads) over to paid subscription and there is very little middle ground. From the youtubers I see doing alternate platforms they use the alternate as the "you'll find me here when I'm banned".

[seaman1921]

How to get upvotes and look cool : We're relying way too much on <insert something that works really well>.

[xchip]

I think we should thank this maintainer for his great job, he made the internet a better place. I really hope he will now be working on some other project that he finds exciting, either that is painting or writing the next cool app :)

Thank you!

[themusicgod1]

This development should not be going on in github anyway.

[OptionX]

Doesn't matter. Repos can be cloned and easily moved to another git service. The attempt to take down yt-dl itself showed that. A misguided attempt at it shutting spawned countless forks across multiple git hosting services that cannot possible all be taken down. A techy Streisand-effect if you will.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That's rather a separate issue. Also, why? I'd certainly have a backup after the last takedown, but I doubt that any commercial host will be much better.

[mikotodomo]

Oh well, Youtube blocks Tor now so you need to use Invidious anyway.

[gpvos]

Why did you previously need to use Tor?

[Jabbles]

What do people use YTDL for? Is it to maintain personal records of videos you like?

[dijit]

It’s useful to download talks before jumping on a flight.

It’s also useful to pipe the output to mpv and have a native video playback experience.

This is especially useful on Linux where there is no hardware acceleration for video in the web browser.

[xdfgh1112]

A lot of stuff will disappear from YouTube even after 12 months, let alone 5-10 years. If you want to archive your favourite videos then downloading is the only option.

[hkt]

I cut chunks out of videos and put them into a home brewed speech therapy application for my son, to teach him to type.

(Bonus points is that my 5 year old appears to be getting the hang of bash)

[m-p-3]

Where I live for some reason YouTube Kids is not available, which means that YouTube is effectively not available on my kids device. A workaround for me is to grab the videos and put them on my Plex server, which at the same time allows me to curate what they can listen to. And since Plex allows me to locally sync content to the tablet, at works quite well for road trips too without requiring a data connection.

[fwn]

I use youtube-dl for my cloud backup routine.

The only YouTube account feature I really use is playlists. I threw all of those in a bat file and ytdl downloads them for me into different folders whenever I start it.

Many videos I've downloaded this way aren't available on YouTube anymore. It's definitely worth it.

[foxfluff]

I mostly use it to work around crappy youtube's buffering. Download a video and you can watch it without hiccups.

It's also handy for saving music that you want to listen to without being deliberately interrupted and paused by youtube.

I.e. it's all to work around youtube's crappiness.

[mdoms]

My personal use case is syncing my music to my Garmin watch. I'm a paid Youtube Premium member but Garmin only syncs with Spotify and some other small-fry services, not Youtube Music. So I use ytdl on a daily scheduled job to pull down every mp3 from my Workout playlist. These get automatically added to my watch when I plug it in for charging.

I don't believe anything I'm doing is illegal, or if it is I doubt anyone would care. It's just a way for me to listen to the music I already pay for that works for me.

[watwut]

so that you can use it as a podcast offline.

[NaN1352]

Although there is now Premium LITE for 7 eur (which I finally subscribed to), listening to music mixes on YT is now atrocious.

You just can’t listen to a music mix anymore on YT. They play "ads" except the ads are complete music videos that run for 2-5 mins easily. It’s so dumb. Whatever happened to "soandso new album out now!". You don’t get an excerpt, you get an entire track of some random band, often times quite different genre that the mix you wanted to listen to.

It’s so fucking bad, it’s literally like YT says "hey you want to listen to ABC, why dontcha listen to XYZ instead".

I wouldn’t mind a short ad for some random album or artist when I listen to music, but now YT as made it almost impossible to listen to a good mix, when you get some OTHER music that starts every 5-7 mins, and runs for 2-3mins average…

EDIT : forgot to mention on one music mix (just progressive house dj mix), I’d keep getting an "ad" which is some electricity mini doc in Turkish that runs for 25+ mins. WTF !?

Youtube is actually making people want to skip and block ads because their "ad" program is atrocious for users.

Thankfully they do have a Premium LITE now but it’s still a bit expensive imho it should be just 5 eur.

And wtf I had to Google to find it. Within the apss I was never told that it was available, and clicking through the premium engagement was always showing me the 16+ EUR sub with Google Music etc.

But anyway even saying all that I still want to save videos that are invaluable to me, and just disappear randomly or turn "private" after few months/years.

What is the point of making a playlist when they show you unavailable items as the months go by?

AND, also you have sometimes vdeos that get edited. Like there was a really nice cafe ambiance and because some losers complained about being in the video, the uploader replaced it with a audio-only version.

So tldr when you see a video you REALLY like, you should DL it asap. You never know when it gets deleted.

[darepublic]

Perhaps an aside but recently using Google assistant to play music tracks from YouTube has mostly stopped working for me. Commands that previously worked such as "play $title by $author" now get a response that YouTube premium is needed to search tracks. some specific song titles in particular still get played but most do not. I also used to be able to say "play $album_title full album" but whereas it would previously start playing a video or playlist of the full album now I get a message advertising YouTube premium and then directing me to a mix based on the album title but not a playlist. Of course someone could pretty easily roll their own bot to provide this lost functionality but I think one day this too will be locked down via various means. Maybe the post scarcity era of YouTube and internet was never realistic to begin with. Was spoiled by the days of free Coursera, youtube, cheap Uber rides etc. I feel like in the future I'll be that old guy (or "boomer") telling the young people about the good old days of the internet and they'll just be rolling their eyes and dismissing such talk with some meme, incidentally to the benefit of Google/Alphabet

[lazzlazzlazz]

Why isn't the canonical fork of YouTube-DL hosted on a decentralized, anonymous system like Radicle[1]?

[1]: https://radicle.xyz/

[alpaca128]

I gotta say, this is the first website I've seen that shows less the larger the browser window is. When I maximize it one line says "code collab" and when the window is smaller it says "code collaborati". I think it wants to say collaboration, but it never actually shows up completely. Then there's "No more wall" and "explore the codela", whatever that's supposed to mean.

Whether this is on purpose or not, please try to decide whether you want to build a program or an art project.

[jrwr]

That website is something else for sure. It really needs some help on explaining what it even does... (And it throws around the fancy buzzwords like Web3)

[thebiblelover7]

yeah, that would be fantastic!

[astrange]

All git repositories are decentralized and pseudonymous.

[cerved]

probably because that looks like it's not good