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Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Honest question. Why do you need hundreds of people to maintain a simple software that downloads videos from YouTube? Is it that complicated to assemble the query string? I haven't done any work on YT per se, but in my experience from other social sites like Facebook all it takes is to fire a headless browser and do a couple hours of research at tops. Does YT changes on a daily basis?

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It covers almost every video streaming platform, not just YT.

> Is it that complicated to assemble the query string?

> all it takes is to ... do a couple hours of research at tops.

is this not answering your own question

How is this answering my question? A couple hours of research every two to three weeks doesn't require a legion of maintainers. I was expecting a more elaborate answer to justify the amount mentioned in the parent comment.

> Why do you need hundreds of people to maintain a simple software that downloads videos from YouTube?

There's more than one video site that doesn't simply offer the browser a link to an .mp4 or other media file, but uses Javascript to download storage blobs, which aren't referenced by filenames, and then stream them using complex Javascript code. I know for YouTube the Javascript code is important and has to be reverse engineered. The YouTube mobile app probably does the same in native code.

The 'hundreds of people' also comes in because youtube-dl supports much, much more than just YouTube (almost want to say 'hundreds of sites' but I think it's more like 50 or so).

> Is it that complicated to assemble the query string?

Again there's much more going on with some video sites than the query string.

Not daily, but frequently. In my experience ytdl breaks every 2-3 weeks and needs to be updated.

youtube-dl 'just works' on almost every video streaming site I've tested it on.

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