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Comment by DarthGhandi | Hacker News Reader

To nitpick: It's not scraping, the youtube.com undocumented api changes all the time, in my tinfoil view probably to mess with things like youtube-dl and 3rd party apps.

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YouTube supports Smart TVs, games consoles and other platforms where updating is slow or nearly impossible. Its API is stable for that reason.

Why do third party apps that utilize it constantly break then?

Please explain.

pure speculation: youtube app on those platforms is just an embedded webview (or otherwise allows arbitrary code execution).

yes - they don't generally access the underlying meta & media directly; they use the well established, stable and YT-prefered method of embeding a video. This doesn't work if you want direct file access to a specific resolution, or format, or audio only for example.

these platforms don't support youtube via a programmatic interface like this (and other libraries). They basically embed videos so the "API" is an http request for the traget url.

YT constantly changes how it masks access to the underlying resources with JS updates that break these libraries. The most frequent updates are to fix this.

youtube-dl works for thousands of sites, most of them with web scraping. What are you nitpicking about?

> What are you nitpicking about?

Verbatim from my comment: "the youtube.com undocumented api"

Thanks for reading.

The top level comment you are replying to and nitpicked the "scraping" verb doesn't say anything about YouTube or the YouTube API.

Yes, thanks, I was using "scraping" in a more generic way, since I'm sure it does actually use scraping for most video providers.

In fact I'm pretty sure I've seen youtube-dl mention downloading the HTML page when using it with YouTube, so maybe it does even scrape YouTube.

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