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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.

This reeks of DRM.

UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.

UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.

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[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 81 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Slightly over dramatized. This happens basically every month or so. They break it, we fix it. For me newpipe and yt-dlp havent even stopped working despite not updating anything.

[-] christian@lemmy.ml 8 points 10 months ago

I'm relieved because I saw this post and assumed it meant in a more serious way than normal.

[-] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 69 points 10 months ago

invidious, yt-dlp, and freetube have broken so many times for me over the last 6 months, I've fallen out of the habit of using YT lately anyway.

It sucks because there is content there that I want but I'm not going to whore myself for it.

[-] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 39 points 10 months ago

Thank you! Ffs, I was just sitting here thinking, I am not paying ticketmaster a damn dime, even if I have to miss my childhood heroes before they die. People whore themselves out and it fucks all of society constantly. Can't watch videos because of content monopoly, can't see a concert without getting fucked on exorbitant fees, can't go to the hospital because holy fuck, can't go to school without crippling debt, can't watch TV without supporting terrorists, etc. Like bloody hell the corpos have monopolized and ruined everything. They can go to hell. I'll play my shitty guitar, sing to myself, do home surgery, and go outside or stare at a wall. Fuck this shit!

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 20 points 10 months ago

You still have alternative platforms to Big Tech though, PeerTube and Odysee like have been mentioned umpteen times in this thread and on Lemmy at large, and not to mention Lemmy itself, and Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bsky among others.

[-] 0xtero@beehaw.org 24 points 10 months ago

Bsky is just another VC financed grift though.

[-] NKBTN@feddit.uk 1 points 10 months ago

You're probably right, but I'm not sure what the grift IS. Presumably they'll start rolling out ads at some point?

[-] 0xtero@beehaw.org 4 points 10 months ago

They’re still running on VC money so it’ll be a while. My guess: ads, selling user data, AI training on user behaviours, limiting what content is suitable (getting rid of NSFW), promoting corporate brands (so algorithmic advertising) and adding crypto in one way or another. And all the other tricks that older platforms have been doing.

And probably burying the thought of distributed protocol, hoping people will stop talking about it.

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[-] 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works 3 points 10 months ago

I whore myself out and pay for the family plan, but I have a good reason.

My dad watches YT almost exclusively so I told him if he shared his password with me I can add him to my plan so he doesn’t see any ads. He fell for it. Now I login into his account ever so often and mark “not interested” on any red pill bullshit I see. It seems to be working.

[-] thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

I’m on iOS so my options are rather limited, but I’ve had decent luck using Brave. Is there anything that the others do that a browser wouldn’t?

[-] princessnorah 3 points 10 months ago

Vinegar works really well, and hasn't been affected by this change: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229

[-] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago

I don't think Brave has any special magic that other browsers don't.

My understanding is, all the workarounds in use recently work or fail depending on the IP address you have.

I don't know anything about this change but it seems to simply require a JS engine in your client. Any browser has that, so the browser addons probably aren't effected by this change.

However, it's clear that YT is waging an incremental campaign here. Today it's yt-dlp, next week... who knows.

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[-] fedislug@lemmy.ml 66 points 10 months ago

God damn it Google. Moves like this are such an insult to the free and open net that made YouTube popular in the first place

[-] tuff_wizard@aussie.zone 56 points 10 months ago

I applaud your belief that Google isn't 100% against a free and open internet these days. They know exactly what they are doing.

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 47 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I don't know about the OP, but Google admitted recently to breaking the open web. By their own admission, and their own words, Google is against an open web. https://lemmy.org/post/1689081

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[-] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 10 months ago

This is literally the company that tried to implement WEI

[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 25 points 10 months ago

May this be the hoped-for token of enshittification that will spring Peertube and other platforms upwards!

[-] 0xtero@beehaw.org 25 points 10 months ago

I doubt it. Bandwidth and storage costs for distributed video on the scale of YouTube isn’t going to happen without some kind of monetisation beyond stray donations.

Places like Nebula have better operating models but they’re also very niche.

[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 10 months ago

on the scale of YouTube

That's precisely the trick. Don't try to copy Youtube. You're gonna lose. And it's not the Peertube intended use case anyway.

Instead, Peertube and other such platforms should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries. A retro videogame video archive does not need 4K 120fps Dobly 14.3 audio; they can just encode most of everything in 480i 30fps and their storage costs will go down significantly. A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice.

Play to your advantages. Trying to break into a monopoly game where the rules are broken, the only other player is broken, and the entry fees are broken is self-defeating.

[-] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago

Exactly.

When the game is rigged, literally, the only winning move is not to play that exact game.

Adapt. ~~Imprevise~~ Innovate. Overcome.

[-] 0xtero@beehaw.org 3 points 10 months ago

should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries

Yes indeed - this is great idea and probably the only way a "web scale" distributed video service can work - unfortunately this doesn't quite exist yet. Even mature implementations like Mastodon have hard time dealing with "global" free text searching (or any kind of taxonomy). But maybe that's the idea that starts a truly free web!

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice

  • Opus would have MP3 beat for speech at lower bitrates as per the HydrogenAudio KB, Opus is transparent for speech at 32kbit/s with stereo speech being transparent at 40kbit/s. Beyond that, a typical bitrate for Opus audio on YT is something like 150kbit/s and that codec is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s. Point being if one works in spoken word and they want to save as much space and bandwidth as possible while still sounding reasonable, 40-48kbit/s Opus would be the ideal audio codec for that as it would give transparent speech at half the bitrate of the 80kbit/s MP3 that's quoted here.
[-] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 months ago

...Huh, it seems I'm quite out of date with the advantages of opus then!

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

To directly quote the HydrogenAudio KB article on Opus:

  • 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent speech plus moderately good stereo music
  • 40kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, fairly good stereo music
  • 48kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, reasonable music

You're getting basically transparent speech at a bit over half the bitrate of 80kbit/s MP3 or less, and even with music, Opus like I said is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s according to the same KB article I'm quoting, while MP3 needs 320kbit/s CBR for transparency for music, although if I'm transcoding FLAC files to Opus, I normally just max out the codec at 510kbit/s where MP3's transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s is also the bitrate it maxes out at.

The only good reason IMO why one should use MP3 in 2025 when better codecs exist, both lossy and lossless, is when the device they're targeting is so old or crappy that it can't support anything better than MP3.

[-] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 months ago

Sell ads, pay for storage and transmission fees, pay a pittance to the creators.

Vs

Require a single person to finance everything and hope for enough donations to keep running, no incentivization for content creation.

Peertube is missing a couple of things to even be reasonably viable.

[-] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 20 points 10 months ago

Fucks sake.

[-] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 10 months ago

Needing a full JS engine to run on your user account for Youtube? What are the privacy and security implications here?

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's probably more about control than security. Mandate JS, force people to watch their shit on their proprietary front-end.

I bet ad blockers and even manually blocking related cookies in FF browsers are probably going to break the site and force Chromium browser use too.

[-] LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 points 10 months ago

Literally all of this is false.

[-] hobovision@mander.xyz 18 points 10 months ago

Smart Tube never broke. So not all clients.

[-] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 17 points 10 months ago

Newpipe works just fine (Germany)

[-] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Same here (USA). I haven't updated my newpipe in a month at least, so it simply never broke. Not a big fan of these unverified headlines.

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[-] pfr@piefed.social 14 points 10 months ago
[-] other_cat@lemmy.zip 3 points 10 months ago

Android only? Desktop client stopped working last night. Did you do anything special?

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[-] RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 10 months ago

I have a program for download yt stuff, will that also break being a full program or is it going to have the same flaw?

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 9 points 10 months ago

Yeah, the lockdown is a YT thing.

[-] RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 10 months ago

Rip my preferred downloader I guess, new version that would update is subscription based.

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Tartube uses yt-dlp, until Google implements real DRM ala Widevine on YT, which I fully expect them to if they're locking things down this drastically, I mentioned how you can get yt-dlp working again-for now.

[-] forrgott@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 months ago

I actually doubt it will go that far. They're far more concerned with those precious ad views, and the slowdown from encrypting/decrypting every feed everywhere would almost certainly cause a noticeable downward trend in those ad views.

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 8 points 10 months ago

It's Google, I wouldn't trust them any further than I can throw their Pixel phones. They straight-up admitted recently to breaking the open web, they'll do anything.

[-] Kernal64@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 months ago

I don't know, man. Pixel phones are pretty light, so I bet you could throw one pretty far.

[-] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 10 months ago

It's a figure of speech to mean you don't trust something or someone's products.

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[-] forrgott@lemmy.zip 1 points 10 months ago

Fair enough. I mean, they'll never not pay attention to whatever moves the money, of course. Brrr! Line most go up! But they're so far up their own asses who really knows why they do what they do. Cause I'm pretty sure the only thing they've figured out is what their own farts smell like!

[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 9 points 10 months ago

can't wait until we get webrips of heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa (10 hours)

[-] Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone 9 points 10 months ago

Pipepipe is still working, as long as you are not logged in, and obviously aren't trying to watch age verification gated content.

For how long though who knows.

[-] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago

I’ve been trying to maintain Invidious for months, eventually google blocks my IP or ASN which leaves me troubleshooting for hours until the realization settles in.

[-] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 10 months ago

I just downloaded MKBHD's iPhone Air review, and it played perfectly. 1920p whatever that means (somewhere north of 1440p but not quite 2160p... or 2160p/4K but slightly letterboxed). AV1 (Ay-Vee-Wun, not Ay-Vee-Eye), 30fps... looks and sounds great.

Glad to see the community fixed it fast.

I use jdownloader2 which probably uses yt-dl on the back end. But it also downloads from a metric fuckton of other sites, too. It's like the Swiss Army knife of downloaders. And it's Java, so it runs just as well on my Mac as it did on Windows back when I used that. (Wish they had an official dark theme that was easy to set up though. I know how to do it manually but can't be arsed.)

[-] Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 4 points 10 months ago

As of today at least, I can still download video/audio from YT on my android phone with NewPipe...

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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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