So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.
This reeks of DRM.
UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.
UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.
Yep, yt-dlp has already been fixed. Those devs are really awesome.
I mean, if you can display it on your screen, there must be a way to also save it.
Slightly over dramatized. This happens basically every month or so. They break it, we fix it. For me newpipe and yt-dlp havent even stopped working despite not updating anything.
I’m relieved because I saw this post and assumed it meant in a more serious way than normal.
invidious, yt-dlp, and freetube have broken so many times for me over the last 6 months, I’ve fallen out of the habit of using YT lately anyway.
It sucks because there is content there that I want but I’m not going to whore myself for it.
Thank you! Ffs, I was just sitting here thinking, I am not paying ticketmaster a damn dime, even if I have to miss my childhood heroes before they die. People whore themselves out and it fucks all of society constantly. Can’t watch videos because of content monopoly, can’t see a concert without getting fucked on exorbitant fees, can’t go to the hospital because holy fuck, can’t go to school without crippling debt, can’t watch TV without supporting terrorists, etc. Like bloody hell the corpos have monopolized and ruined everything. They can go to hell. I’ll play my shitty guitar, sing to myself, do home surgery, and go outside or stare at a wall. Fuck this shit!
You still have alternative platforms to Big Tech though, PeerTube and Odysee like have been mentioned umpteen times in this thread and on Lemmy at large, and not to mention Lemmy itself, and Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bsky among others.
Bsky is just another VC financed grift though.
You’re probably right, but I’m not sure what the grift IS. Presumably they’ll start rolling out ads at some point?
They’re still running on VC money so it’ll be a while. My guess: ads, selling user data, AI training on user behaviours, limiting what content is suitable (getting rid of NSFW), promoting corporate brands (so algorithmic advertising) and adding crypto in one way or another. And all the other tricks that older platforms have been doing.
And probably burying the thought of distributed protocol, hoping people will stop talking about it.
ATProto’s dual-licensed under MIT and Apache so it’s not like it’ll be easy to get rid of.
Sure but they don’t have the content and don’t have staying power. If peertube became popular who is going to pay for the bandwidth.
Its users, in part because it uses web torrent which means the traffic of videos is shared peer-to-peer, thus the host doesn’t have to pay for a lot of bandwidth.
Also, just like mastodon servers are paid by its users for service I’m sure admins that build up a good reputation with their users or make them aware that they need more to pay for it will pay, or not and they’ll just disappear which is really how the web should work, not all these tech oligarchs who have lots of money from exploiting their users and workers.
Edit: Was incorrect, it uses HLS with P2P support:
At the beginning of PeerTube, we only supported Web Video (previously known as “WebTorrent”) streaming. Due to several limitations of the Web Video system, we had to add HLS with P2P support.
I’m not an expert on these things but I just don’t like the idea of web torrent.
I do however, whole heartedly agree that video producers should pay for their own bandwidth, and be supported by users.
I’m not an expert on these things but I just don’t like the idea of web torrent.
How come?
IDK really.
I don’t dislike it in a “this is terrible technology and no one should be doing it” kind of a way. Just in a “I feel a bit icky about this” kind of way.
There must be privacy considerations right? Do I really want everyone to know what videos I’m watching?
Also, do I really want my client to be providing n upstream connections grinding away at my battery?
They’ve probably long since solved this I guess but in the early days firefox wasn’t supported ?
I just… don’t feel like this is the solution to the cost of delivering content.
I thought PeerTube ditched WebTorrent and switched full-time to WebRTC a while back.
Seems you are correct, I thought webtorent was the only way to have peer-to-peer video, but seems not:
At the beginning of PeerTube, we only supported Web Video (previously known as “WebTorrent”) streaming. Due to several limitations of the Web Video system, we had to add HLS with P2P support.
That’s pretty cool, thanks for the information!
God damn it Google. Moves like this are such an insult to the free and open net that made YouTube popular in the first place
I applaud your belief that Google isn’t 100% against a free and open internet these days. They know exactly what they are doing.
I don’t know about the OP, but Google admitted recently to breaking the open web. By their own admission, and their own words, Google is against an open web. https://lemmy.org/post/1689081
Oh I know they are! Trying to de-google as much as possible. I was alluding to before their acquisition of the site which, even at the time, we all knew was not going to end well.
This is literally the company that tried to implement WEI
May this be the hoped-for token of enshittification that will spring Peertube and other platforms upwards!
I doubt it. Bandwidth and storage costs for distributed video on the scale of YouTube isn’t going to happen without some kind of monetisation beyond stray donations.
Places like Nebula have better operating models but they’re also very niche.
on the scale of YouTube
That’s precisely the trick. Don’t try to copy Youtube. You’re gonna lose. And it’s not the Peertube intended use case anyway.
Instead, Peertube and other such platforms should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries. A retro videogame video archive does not need 4K 120fps Dobly 14.3 audio; they can just encode most of everything in 480i 30fps and their storage costs will go down significantly. A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice.
Play to your advantages. Trying to break into a monopoly game where the rules are broken, the only other player is broken, and the entry fees are broken is self-defeating.
Exactly.
When the game is rigged, literally, the only winning move is not to play that exact game.
Adapt.
ImpreviseInnovate. Overcome.should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries
Yes indeed - this is great idea and probably the only way a “web scale” distributed video service can work - unfortunately this doesn’t quite exist yet. Even mature implementations like Mastodon have hard time dealing with “global” free text searching (or any kind of taxonomy). But maybe that’s the idea that starts a truly free web!
A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice
- Opus would have MP3 beat for speech at lower bitrates as per the HydrogenAudio KB, Opus is transparent for speech at 32kbit/s with stereo speech being transparent at 40kbit/s. Beyond that, a typical bitrate for Opus audio on YT is something like 150kbit/s and that codec is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s. Point being if one works in spoken word and they want to save as much space and bandwidth as possible while still sounding reasonable, 40-48kbit/s Opus would be the ideal audio codec for that as it would give transparent speech at half the bitrate of the 80kbit/s MP3 that’s quoted here.
…Huh, it seems I’m quite out of date with the advantages of opus then!
To directly quote the HydrogenAudio KB article on Opus:
- 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you:
Essentially transparent speech plus moderately good stereo music - 40kbit/s CELT encoding gives you:
Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, fairly good stereo music - 48kbit/s CELT encoding gives you:
Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, reasonable music
You’re getting basically transparent speech at a bit over half the bitrate of 80kbit/s MP3 or less, and even with music, Opus like I said is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s according to the same KB article I’m quoting, while MP3 needs 320kbit/s CBR for transparency for music, although if I’m transcoding FLAC files to Opus, I normally just max out the codec at 510kbit/s where MP3’s transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s is also the bitrate it maxes out at.
The only good reason IMO why one should use MP3 in 2025 when better codecs exist, both lossy and lossless, is when the device they’re targeting is so old or crappy that it can’t support anything better than MP3.
- 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you:
Sell ads, pay for storage and transmission fees, pay a pittance to the creators.
Vs
Require a single person to finance everything and hope for enough donations to keep running, no incentivization for content creation.
Peertube is missing a couple of things to even be reasonably viable.
Smart Tube never broke. So not all clients.
Needing a full JS engine to run on your user account for Youtube? What are the privacy and security implications here?
It’s probably more about control than security. Mandate JS, force people to watch their shit on their proprietary front-end.
I bet ad blockers and even manually blocking related cookies in FF browsers are probably going to break the site and force Chromium browser use too.
Literally all of this is false.
Newpipe works just fine (Germany)
Same here (USA). I haven’t updated my newpipe in a month at least, so it simply never broke. Not a big fan of these unverified headlines.
People love the drama. Our planet is basically a giant baboon rock floating through space. :)
Fucks sake.
Grayjay still works
Android only? Desktop client stopped working last night. Did you do anything special?
Yeah Android. Desktop client (Linux flatpak) was working late into the night too. I haven’t checked again today though… will test when I get home from work
Not on my phone.
I have a program for download yt stuff, will that also break being a full program or is it going to have the same flaw?
Yeah, the lockdown is a YT thing.
Rip my preferred downloader I guess, new version that would update is subscription based.
Tartube uses yt-dlp, until Google implements real DRM ala Widevine on YT, which I fully expect them to if they’re locking things down this drastically, I mentioned how you can get yt-dlp working again-for now.
I actually doubt it will go that far. They’re far more concerned with those precious ad views, and the slowdown from encrypting/decrypting every feed everywhere would almost certainly cause a noticeable downward trend in those ad views.
It’s Google, I wouldn’t trust them any further than I can throw their Pixel phones. They straight-up admitted recently to breaking the open web, they’ll do anything.
Fair enough. I mean, they’ll never not pay attention to whatever moves the money, of course. Brrr! Line most go up! But they’re so far up their own asses who really knows why they do what they do. Cause I’m pretty sure the only thing they’ve figured out is what their own farts smell like!
Pipepipe is still working, as long as you are not logged in, and obviously aren’t trying to watch age verification gated content.
For how long though who knows.
can’t wait until we get webrips of heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa (10 hours)
I just downloaded MKBHD’s iPhone Air review, and it played perfectly. 1920p whatever that means (somewhere north of 1440p but not quite 2160p… or 2160p/4K but slightly letterboxed). AV1 (Ay-Vee-Wun, not Ay-Vee-Eye), 30fps… looks and sounds great.
Glad to see the community fixed it fast.
I use jdownloader2 which probably uses yt-dl on the back end. But it also downloads from a metric fuckton of other sites, too. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of downloaders. And it’s Java, so it runs just as well on my Mac as it did on Windows back when I used that. (Wish they had an official dark theme that was easy to set up though. I know how to do it manually but can’t be arsed.)
As of today at least, I can still download video/audio from YT on my android phone with NewPipe…
