[gotostatement]

could google interfere w/ the API's that are used to make this work?

[c0balt]

Anytime a breaking API change happens in the API used by YouTubes frontend apps like piped[0] (the YouTube interface for this project) or NewPipe[1] tend to break too. This is mostly due the majority of these players not employing the Google YouTube API but instead accessing and/ or scraping the publicly available routes exposed for/ by the YouTube fronted. (You may also find most of the streaming aspect is similiar/ the same as youtube-dl)

[0]: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped [1]: https://newpipe.net/

[moron4hire]

Note that the YouTube API does not provide access to the media streams for videos. And while Google does provide a number of black-box-style widgets for embedding in apps or webpages, they are not suitable for all use cases. For example: every VR app that wants to include support for YouTube playback has to use a scraping tool of some kind because none of the embedding options can be rendered in 3D.

EDIT: I'd love to be proven wrong here. But I've dug into the code of several open source VR apps that include YouTube playback and they all end in including youtube-dl or yt-dlp.

[Anunayj]

Though any breaking API changes would also break past versions of youtube's own apps?

[rektide]

sure, absolutely. ultimately though their clients generally are pretty reversible & we can keep doing whatever they do, but better and improved.

which is what makes humanity & society great- iteration & refinement & self-determinism. try as the sad pathetic squalid soulless ghouls might, the attempts to suppress soul & dignity are themselves usually temporary & brief regainings of control/destructions of human will.