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Show HN: A personal YouTube frontend based on yt-dlp

(github.com)
319 points modmodmod | 7 comments | 15 Mar 25 15:45 UTC | HN request time: 0.553s | source | bottom
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tracerbulletx ◴[15 Mar 25 20:30 UTC] No.43374959[source]▶
I kind of wish people would stop making yt-dlp more accessible and increasing Google's desire to shut it down.
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Gigachad ◴[15 Mar 25 21:36 UTC] No.43375318[source]▶
Agreed. Youtube downloaders are essential for backup purposes and for getting clips to put in your own videos as fair use. But people turning them in to fully user facing ad free frontends are driving the crackdown on the tools so we will end up with no way at all to download videos..

Would be nice if Youtube just let premium users download the actual video files. What I find interesting is how so many of the Chinese social media platforms just let you download videos while western tech companies pretty much universally block it.

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1. nulld3v ◴[15 Mar 25 23:37 UTC] No.43375904[source]▶
YouTube downloaders have existed since the dawn of YouTube. And I really don't think they have jumped in popularity recently or anything.
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2. dijit ◴[16 Mar 25 00:15 UTC] No.43376056[source]▶
They get shut down constantly if they become popular though.

yt-dlp is itself a fork of the (very popular) youtube-dl

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3. soulofmischief ◴[16 Mar 25 00:19 UTC] No.43376063[source]▶
youtube-dl just went largely dormant. There was a fiasco involving a unit test specifically downloading copyrighted content, but it was corrected. yt-dlp just became the more active fork.
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4. dijit ◴[16 Mar 25 00:22 UTC] No.43376083{3}[source]▶
You've identified the reason for the fork, but not the reason the projects maintainers burned out in the first place.

youtube-dl were under the microscope and were even unlisted from github at one point[0].

And as recent as 1yr ago had their website taken offline[1].

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtube...

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/15wx4sl/youtubed...

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5. soulofmischief ◴[16 Mar 25 00:45 UTC] No.43376162{4}[source]▶
The unlisting from GitHub was precisely due to the reason I mentioned, and Nat Friedman himself, CEO of GitHub at the time, dropped into the youtube-dl development IRC, assured the team that he had their back, and that the moment the infringing test was fixed, he would personally restore access, which he did posthaste.

Regarding the website being taken down, it was hosted in Germany and it was a German court order. Germany is notorious for this stuff, and it should never have been hosted there. If they wanted, they could have found a more reasonable host.

I understand the burnout, but it comes with the territory, and powerful enough people made it clear that the team did have their support. With some effort, the project could have continued on at full pace at least as uninhibited as its forks.

Now the URL just redirects to the yt-dlp GitHub repository, anyway.

6. crtasm ◴[16 Mar 25 02:45 UTC] No.43376615{3}[source]▶
Specifically testing the extra code needed to download certain videos - they didn't pick them just for the hell of it. It seemed unwise to have that in the public repo but I wouldn't describe it as a fiasco.
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7. soulofmischief ◴[16 Mar 25 06:07 UTC] No.43377187{4}[source]▶
It was a fiasco because it led to the repo being DMCA'd