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Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

(github.com)
798 points bertman | 1 comments | 12 Nov 25 10:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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everdrive ◴[12 Nov 25 13:31 UTC] No.45899905[source]▶
Perhaps a stupid question, but is there some reason I can't potentially fall back to recording my screen / audio in realtime and saving videos that way? yt-dlp is obviously far superior to this, but just thinking about what my fallback points are.
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crazygringo ◴[12 Nov 25 13:34 UTC] No.45899931[source]▶
You definitely can, it's just 1) vastly slower, and 2) you have to recompress the decompressed video, which loses quality. It's therefore an option of last resort.

Most people want to be able to download 5 hours of video in the background in 5 minutes. Not wait 5 hours while their computer is unusable.

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netsharc ◴[12 Nov 25 13:40 UTC] No.45900031[source]▶
I wonder if it has to be a real computer, display, and camera, or if doing it with a "headless display" that is nonetheless being fed to a "video recorder" would work...

Funny how it'd be like The Matrix...

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1. npteljes ◴[12 Nov 25 14:38 UTC] No.45900766[source]▶
I have written software to do this kind of recording on a laptop, running 4 of the stream itself (different episodes of the same show).

It opened DRM enabled browsers side by side, ffmpeg captured the video from the respective parts of the screen, and each browser's audio was piped into a different dummy output, which ffmpeg also captured of course.

The tech stack was linux, bash, PHP, php-webdriver, Selenium, Firefox, ffmpeg. So yes, this idea absolutely works! That is, until they crank up the DRM so that software screen capture doesn't work.