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Comment by hnarn | Hacker News Reader

I guess that's when you double down and just scrape Invidious[1] for the audio files.

edit: The Firefox extension "Privacy Redirect"[2] also uses Invidious to automatically redirect all youtube links, and does similar things for pages like reddit and twitter to their respective "mirrors".

[1]: https://docs.invidious.io/Invidious-Instances.md

[2]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/privacy-redir...

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For anyone else wondering "what the heck is invidious?", from their github[1]: "Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube." Cool!

But man, classic open source: the front page of those docs says nothing about what the heck the project is, just a list of URLs to visit, and the main website[2] is just an under-construction page with a link to the github repo.

1 - https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

2 - https://invidious.io/

Check https://redirect.invidious.io/ and try another Invidious instance.

Remaining somewhat illegible probably helps the project survive for the benefit of the cognoscenti.

... and they say security by obscurity doesn't work! /s

Wow, I had no idea about Invidious. This perfectly solves my use case of needing a REST API to get MP3 urls for YouTube videos. I was looking into building or finding a REST API for youtube-dl, but this seems a lot easier.

The mirrors frequently go offline from being blocked though, so it may be easier to rely on youtube-dl depending on how likely it is that you will be rate-limited.

You could of course also try and set up your own, private Invidious instance and see what mileage you get from that.

Yep! I do that and just hand the URL to friends.

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