this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.

This reeks of DRM.

UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.

UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.

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can't wait until we get webrips of heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa (10 hours)

[–] Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 137 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yep, yt-dlp has already been fixed. Those devs are really awesome.

[–] Scrollone@feddit.it 10 points 2 days ago

I mean, if you can display it on your screen, there must be a way to also save it.

[–] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 73 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Slightly over dramatized. This happens basically every month or so. They break it, we fix it. For me newpipe and yt-dlp havent even stopped working despite not updating anything.

[–] christian@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 days ago

I'm relieved because I saw this post and assumed it meant in a more serious way than normal.

[–] null_dot@lemmy.dbzer0.com 67 points 4 days ago (6 children)

invidious, yt-dlp, and freetube have broken so many times for me over the last 6 months, I've fallen out of the habit of using YT lately anyway.

It sucks because there is content there that I want but I'm not going to whore myself for it.

[–] kugmo@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Stop saying content and just say videos ffs

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 3 points 2 days ago

Reminds me of when people say "product" instead of "shampoo" or "conditioner" or whatever it is they're actually putting in their hair. Capitalism-coded language.

[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 38 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Thank you! Ffs, I was just sitting here thinking, I am not paying ticketmaster a damn dime, even if I have to miss my childhood heroes before they die. People whore themselves out and it fucks all of society constantly. Can't watch videos because of content monopoly, can't see a concert without getting fucked on exorbitant fees, can't go to the hospital because holy fuck, can't go to school without crippling debt, can't watch TV without supporting terrorists, etc. Like bloody hell the corpos have monopolized and ruined everything. They can go to hell. I'll play my shitty guitar, sing to myself, do home surgery, and go outside or stare at a wall. Fuck this shit!

I whore myself out and pay for the family plan, but I have a good reason.

My dad watches YT almost exclusively so I told him if he shared his password with me I can add him to my plan so he doesn’t see any ads. He fell for it. Now I login into his account ever so often and mark “not interested” on any red pill bullshit I see. It seems to be working.

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 20 points 4 days ago (9 children)

You still have alternative platforms to Big Tech though, PeerTube and Odysee like have been mentioned umpteen times in this thread and on Lemmy at large, and not to mention Lemmy itself, and Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bsky among others.

[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 23 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Bsky is just another VC financed grift though.

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[–] fedislug@lemmy.ml 66 points 4 days ago (2 children)

God damn it Google. Moves like this are such an insult to the free and open net that made YouTube popular in the first place

[–] tuff_wizard@aussie.zone 56 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I applaud your belief that Google isn't 100% against a free and open internet these days. They know exactly what they are doing.

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 48 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I don't know about the OP, but Google admitted recently to breaking the open web. By their own admission, and their own words, Google is against an open web. https://lemmy.org/post/1689081

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[–] fubbernuckin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 4 days ago

This is literally the company that tried to implement WEI

[–] hobovision@mander.xyz 17 points 3 days ago

Smart Tube never broke. So not all clients.

[–] cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Newpipe works just fine (Germany)

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Same here (USA). I haven't updated my newpipe in a month at least, so it simply never broke. Not a big fan of these unverified headlines.

[–] Teppichbrand@feddit.org 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

People love the drama. Our planet is basically a giant baboon rock floating through space. :)

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

May this be the hoped-for token of enshittification that will spring Peertube and other platforms upwards!

[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I doubt it. Bandwidth and storage costs for distributed video on the scale of YouTube isn’t going to happen without some kind of monetisation beyond stray donations.

Places like Nebula have better operating models but they’re also very niche.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 3 days ago (4 children)

on the scale of YouTube

That's precisely the trick. Don't try to copy Youtube. You're gonna lose. And it's not the Peertube intended use case anyway.

Instead, Peertube and other such platforms should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries. A retro videogame video archive does not need 4K 120fps Dobly 14.3 audio; they can just encode most of everything in 480i 30fps and their storage costs will go down significantly. A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice.

Play to your advantages. Trying to break into a monopoly game where the rules are broken, the only other player is broken, and the entry fees are broken is self-defeating.

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice

  • Opus would have MP3 beat for speech at lower bitrates as per the HydrogenAudio KB, Opus is transparent for speech at 32kbit/s with stereo speech being transparent at 40kbit/s. Beyond that, a typical bitrate for Opus audio on YT is something like 150kbit/s and that codec is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s. Point being if one works in spoken word and they want to save as much space and bandwidth as possible while still sounding reasonable, 40-48kbit/s Opus would be the ideal audio codec for that as it would give transparent speech at half the bitrate of the 80kbit/s MP3 that's quoted here.
[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

...Huh, it seems I'm quite out of date with the advantages of opus then!

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

To directly quote the HydrogenAudio KB article on Opus:

  • 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent speech plus moderately good stereo music
  • 40kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, fairly good stereo music
  • 48kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, reasonable music

You're getting basically transparent speech at a bit over half the bitrate of 80kbit/s MP3 or less, and even with music, Opus like I said is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s according to the same KB article I'm quoting, while MP3 needs 320kbit/s CBR for transparency for music, although if I'm transcoding FLAC files to Opus, I normally just max out the codec at 510kbit/s where MP3's transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s is also the bitrate it maxes out at.

The only good reason IMO why one should use MP3 in 2025 when better codecs exist, both lossy and lossless, is when the device they're targeting is so old or crappy that it can't support anything better than MP3.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago

Exactly.

When the game is rigged, literally, the only winning move is not to play that exact game.

Adapt. ~~Imprevise~~ Innovate. Overcome.

[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

Sell ads, pay for storage and transmission fees, pay a pittance to the creators.

Vs

Require a single person to finance everything and hope for enough donations to keep running, no incentivization for content creation.

Peertube is missing a couple of things to even be reasonably viable.

[–] 0xtero@beehaw.org 3 points 3 days ago

should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries

Yes indeed - this is great idea and probably the only way a "web scale" distributed video service can work - unfortunately this doesn't quite exist yet. Even mature implementations like Mastodon have hard time dealing with "global" free text searching (or any kind of taxonomy). But maybe that's the idea that starts a truly free web!

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 7 points 3 days ago

I’ve been trying to maintain Invidious for months, eventually google blocks my IP or ASN which leaves me troubleshooting for hours until the realization settles in.

[–] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Needing a full JS engine to run on your user account for Youtube? What are the privacy and security implications here?

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

It's probably more about control than security. Mandate JS, force people to watch their shit on their proprietary front-end.

I bet ad blockers and even manually blocking related cookies in FF browsers are probably going to break the site and force Chromium browser use too.

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[–] pfr@piefed.social 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)
[–] other_cat@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Android only? Desktop client stopped working last night. Did you do anything special?

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[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 16 points 4 days ago

Fucks sake.

[–] Longmactoppedup@aussie.zone 10 points 4 days ago

Pipepipe is still working, as long as you are not logged in, and obviously aren't trying to watch age verification gated content.

For how long though who knows.

[–] RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I have a program for download yt stuff, will that also break being a full program or is it going to have the same flaw?

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yeah, the lockdown is a YT thing.

[–] RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Rip my preferred downloader I guess, new version that would update is subscription based.

[–] DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

Tartube uses yt-dlp, until Google implements real DRM ala Widevine on YT, which I fully expect them to if they're locking things down this drastically, I mentioned how you can get yt-dlp working again-for now.

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