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The best YouTube downloaders, and how Google silenced the press

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579 points Leftium | 1 comments | 19 Sep 25 12:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.216s | source
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rahimnathwani ◴[19 Sep 25 21:00 UTC] No.45306524[source]▶
Is Stacher open source?

Last time I searched 'stacher open source' on Google, I found a Reddit thread discussing when it might become open source.

EDIT: The reason I ask is that the article says Stacher is open source, and that is news to me.

replies(4): >>45308694 #>>45314519 #>>45314601 #>>45326303 #
1. 1gn15 ◴[20 Sep 25 16:06 UTC] No.45314519[source]▶
I couldn't find any source code either. Cobalt also isn't really libre; their backend is AGPL, which is great, but their frontend is CC BY-NC-SA, which is not so great (and definitely not open-source).

I'd advise against downloading via someone else's servers anyway, as can be seen by their instance being blocked by Google. Hopefully some day someone manages to port yt-dlp to WASM, then it can be run locally in the browser without needing a download.

Fun fact: yt-dlp is public domain! That's really generous of them and I'm really thankful for their work.