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

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.

> It's absolutely insane to me how bad the user experience is with video nowadays

Has nothing to do with video per se. Normal embeddings, using the standard `<video>` element and no unnecessary JS nonsense, still work the same way they did in the 90s: Right click the video and download it, it's a media element like any other.

The reason why user experience is going to shite, is because turbocapitalism went to work on what was once The Internet, and is trying to turn it into a paywalled profit-machine.

Plain <video> elements are easy to download, but not great for streaming, which is what most people are doing nowadays. Much of the JS complexity that gets layered on top is to facilitate adaptive bitrate selection and efficient seeking, and the former is especially important for users on crappier internet connections.

I'm not a fan of how much JS is required to make all that work though, especially given the vast majority of sites are just using one of two standards, HLS or DASH. Ideally the browsers would have those standards built-in so plain <video> elements can handle them (I think Safari is the only one which does that, and they only do HLS).

I totally agree. And much of the JS complexity on smaller niche video sites aren’t even implemented properly. On some sites I just open developer console, find the m3u8 file URL and cookies in the request, and download it to view locally.

Browsers generally do allow native seeking if the video is properly encoded and the site supports such niceties as Accept-Range: bytes.