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Comment by ourcat | Hacker News Reader

'Actively-maintained' is another way of saying 'We play Whack-a-Mole with YouTube every time they change how the ultimate .mp4 video file url is obtained via the private API'.

ie: If you didn't update youtube-dl that often, you'd often find that it stopped working.

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Google and others are adding this obfuscation to commercialize everyone else's content.

The web was originally designed as an open platform.

I would guess most users uploading to Youtube would not want people deterred from watching their content.

Well, their main issue is serving ads with the content.

They don't want applications having the final .mp4 url to embed without them.

I always wondered why they didn't just fetch the necessary parsing-logic plugins from a remote repository at runtime, the first time a given site is requested. There are some security implications, but it seems easier to handle than requiring a full update every time a website rejiggles its pages.

I appreciated it becausecause youtube-twitter didn't rejiggle their entire websites. They deployed obfuscation on a video-by-video basis depending on the content of the video. A new CNN video on wildfires wouldn't get it, but a slightly older video on [insert political topic] would get the newest version of obfuscation (and require an update). This allowed users to identify the particular topics that the tech giants where most interested in suppressing.

Well youtube-dl doesn't do that but there is invidious (currently also unmaintained afaik, it's hard being a scraper in 2020). I guess it would be really easy to add an extractor for invidious in youtube-dl.

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