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

(github.com)
798 points bertman | 6 comments | 12 Nov 25 10:12 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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Tabular-Iceberg ◴[12 Nov 25 13:36 UTC] No.45899963[source]▶
I remember when QuickTime came out in 1991 and it was obvious to everyone that video should be copied, pasted and saved like any arbitrary data.

It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays, even video that's not encumbered by DRM or complex JavaScript clients.

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1. physicsguy ◴[12 Nov 25 14:54 UTC] No.45900981[source]▶
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!
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2. reaperducer ◴[12 Nov 25 15:03 UTC] No.45901098[source]▶
Remember RealPlayer? Grainy 128 x 128 streamed videos in 1998!

I remember when someone slapped a big "Buffering" sign over the Real Networks logo on the company's building in Seattle.

3. weberer ◴[12 Nov 25 15:40 UTC] No.45901511[source]▶
I never bothered trying to stream anything, but I do remember downloading 20mb episodes of Naruto in surprisingly good quality due to the .rmvb format.
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4. deltoidmaximus ◴[12 Nov 25 16:49 UTC] No.45902411[source]▶
Was RealPlayer really that horrible or was it just trying to do streaming media on an extremely low bandwidth connection without hardware accelerated and sophisticated codecs? I only really used it with a 28.8K modem netscape and Windows 95. The experience was poor but the experience viewing moderately sized images wasn't great either. I remember at the time encountering MPEG decoder add-in cards (that nobody used), although I suspect video cards started to add these features during the 1990s at some point.
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5. physicsguy ◴[12 Nov 25 17:51 UTC] No.45903277[source]▶
The BBC here used to put a ton of news content on it, it was pretty forward thinking really!
6. kalleboo ◴[12 Nov 25 17:53 UTC] No.45903314[source]▶
I've gotten to experience using RealPlayer again this year[0] and... a lot of it was just it being really early but a lot of it was just the software being really bloated with adware and terrible design decisions. It asks for your home address when you install it, there are a bunch of ad panes you have to manually disable etc

[0] https://kalleboo.com/linked/realplayer2025.png