youtube-dl has been my primary way of getting videos since I learned about it. If the RIAA manages to kill it, my ability to partake in culture will be severely limited.
It seems likely that some YouTube content does not fall under that category.
Also, they would either have to completely neuter their Extensions, or else constantly battle people submitting new adblockers in the same spirit as uBlock.
But if every browser slowly adopts Chromium engine (the worrying trend), then they can make a move against adblockers and competing browsers would have to scramble to remake a competing browser engine to do anything about it.
Trying it now results in:
ERROR: can't find the current version. Please try again later.
$ rg 'UPDATE_URL|VERSION_URL'
youtube_dl/update.py
35: UPDATE_URL = 'https://yt-dl.org/update/'
36: VERSION_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'LATEST_VERSION'
37: JSON_URL = UPDATE_URL + 'versions.json'
46: newversion = opener.open(VERSION_URL).read().decode('utf-8').strip()
$ curl -IL https://yt-dl.org/update/LATEST_VERSION
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
Location: https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/update/LATEST_VERSION
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
HTTP/2 404
content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8
server: GitHub.com
etag: "5f777b31-239b"
content-security-policy: default-src 'none'; style-src 'unsafe-inline'; img-src data:; connect-src 'self'
x-github-request-id: 170E:2B71:1A0B5DC:1B8177E:5F933973
accept-ranges: bytes
date: Fri, 23 Oct 2020 20:15:04 GMT
via: 1.1 varnish
age: 85
x-served-by: cache-hnd18722-HND
x-cache: HIT
x-cache-hits: 1
x-timer: S1603484104.479172,VS0,VE0
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-fastly-request-id: a7128dab84232184052e51f07eb6263f5c88ab7e
content-length: 9115Well at least if they can hold onto their domain, and then host development somewhere, they'll maintain the ability to redirect updates to a new location without people having to manually reinstall.
https://beyondgrep.com/feature-comparison/
If you're looking for other alternative shell tools, take a look at https://altbox.dev/
It is universal and can download from almost any media site.
It's open source but they use SVN so you need an SVN client to actually see the code because they have no browsable repo tool.
You can find some mirrors of the code on GitHub, for example: https://github.com/mirror/jdownloader
If nothing happens to replace or reinstate youtube-dl, a lot of people like you and me are simply cut off from video content. This is pretty much terrible.
Useful things that I can't do on through youtube's web interface:
1 - archive videos (so many videos have been taken down and would be lost forever to me had I not had an offline archive of them)
2 - quickly play through a ton of videos on demand, offline, without waiting to load the video (and the ads) -- skimming through dozens of offline videos takes seconds, but I'd have to stare at my browser loading forever to accomplish the same thing through a web browser
3 - make use of many useful features of powerful media players like mpv... just yesterday I needed to invert the colors on a screencast because I was watching it at night and the video's white window background was blinding me.. I could do this instantly in mpv, but absolutely impossible on youtube
4 - remix the video or otherwise alter it to my needs using powerful offline video editors.. youtube's offerings here are again a sad joke in comparison (as are most web tools compared to offline tools)
5 - not have to sit through a single stinking ad
If youtube could have just offered simple download links for their videos this would not be a problem.
But, no, they need you to be glued to their website and bound hand and foot to their service for as many hours of the day as they can bleed out of you.
6 - listen to public talks, presentations and soundscapes while doing something else with my mobile device, or letting the screen sleep in my pocket. YouTube requires the video to be on-screen or it stops playing, which makes it completely useless for listening to things. Other video sites are much better for this.
(I don't need advice on how to get around this thanks, I already know how to. But that's another of YouTube's crappy standard behaviours.)
YouTube's web interface is basically useless for me on a slow link, not to mention it's incredibly obnoxious with all its recommendations and other unmanagable propaganda delivery.
Youtube-dl's ability to retrieve titles and descriptions without showing me anything else and before retrieving any video content alone make youtube's opaque hashed URLs usable for me.
I've never used youtube-dl. How do you find the videos to download?
I also have a small collection of youtube channels bookmarked at their /videos URL, which at least doesn't try play any video and just gives a grid of thumbnails. Occasionally I'll visit those to discover new videos from the creators I'm interested in.
This already consumes more time watching youtube content than I care to admit.
Youtube's website changes all the time, too, so you'll have to constantly re-read the source and adapt your downloader to it (essentially what youtube-dl does).
It may not be rocket science, but it's not trivial either, and not every developer on HN is a web developer or has any interest (or time) to become one.