←back to thread

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: 0.691s | source | bottom
Show context
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.

replies(13): >>45900417 #>>45900487 #>>45900707 #>>45900818 #>>45900981 #>>45901051 #>>45901059 #>>45901071 #>>45901279 #>>45902069 #>>45902135 #>>45903125 #>>45903505 #
Aurornis ◴[12 Nov 25 14:59 UTC] No.45901051[source]▶
> 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.

The video experience for typical video files is great these days compared to the past. I think you may be viewing the past through rose colored glasses. For years it was a pain to deal with video because you had to navigate third party players (remember Real Player?), Flash plugins, and sketchy codec pack installs from adware infested download sites. If you were tech support for friends and family during that era, it was common to have to remove adware, spyware, and other unwanted programs after someone went down the rabbit home of trying to install software to watch some video they found.

The modern situation where your OS comes with software to play common files or you can install VLC and play anything is infinitely better than the past experience with local video.

replies(6): >>45901175 #>>45901242 #>>45901259 #>>45901566 #>>45901712 #>>45902619 #
Tabular-Iceberg ◴[12 Nov 25 15:11 UTC] No.45901175[source]▶
I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.

I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

replies(3): >>45901319 #>>45901327 #>>45902319 #
1. j1elo ◴[12 Nov 25 15:23 UTC] No.45901319[source]▶
You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.

There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

replies(2): >>45901611 #>>45902846 #
2. Tabular-Iceberg ◴[12 Nov 25 15:48 UTC] No.45901611[source]▶
Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.

What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.

3. CharlesW ◴[12 Nov 25 17:21 UTC] No.45902846[source]▶
> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.

That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.

> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…

Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.

replies(1): >>45903107 #
4. kalleboo ◴[12 Nov 25 17:39 UTC] No.45903107[source]▶
It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.

replies(2): >>45903537 #>>45907262 #
5. darkwater ◴[12 Nov 25 18:09 UTC] No.45903537{3}[source]▶
> It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?

6. morshu9001 ◴[12 Nov 25 21:50 UTC] No.45907262{3}[source]▶
QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.