youtube-dl VS NewPipeExtractor

Notes: I'm not using vpns. I'm using a special version of ytdl designed for niconico. It has not been updated in over a year: https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl

You might get more consistent results with a fork, most of which have already fixed this issue. Some popular ones are yt-dlp/yt-dlp, blackjack4494/youtube-dlc and animelover1984/youtube-dl. Please note though these might not be drop-in replacements

Months before the lawsuit, there were plenty of people complaining that youtube-dl's maintainers closed issues without any reason given. Here is one illuminating example:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860

And there is also an entire fork that fixes the support for just a single provider, Niconico, because the maintainers ignored its issues.

https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl

A quote from its README:

All code in this project is licensed solely with the condition that any portion of it is not permitted to be used in the main youtube-dl fork, either directly or indirectly. It is also not permitted to be used in any project that contains contributions from either remitamine or dstftw.

It seems that youtube-dl was a dysfunctionally managed project at the time of the lawsuit, and happened to ride out on the good PR for a couple of months, before returning to stagnation once again.

To me it sounds like a plugin system would have prevented centralization and the need for forks, but would have made distribution harder for average users.

It does, I wrote the tool. I started https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl to add features for Horahora.

animelover1984's fork have a unique niconico extractor, supports livestreams

In addition to animelover1984/youtube-dl, non-live videos work with yt-dlp as well

Hello. I'm currently trying to download some Niconico videos that will be deleted at the end of this month, using this fork of youtube-dl. However, when I try to run a command, I get this error:

Bilibili doesn't have playlists afaik. Do you mean channels/anthologies? If so, both animelover1984/youtube-dl and yt-dlp can download them

Other than animelover1984/youtube-dl, yt-dlp also works

Also, if you already have git installed, the easiest way is py -m pip install git+https://github.com/animelover1984/youtube-dl

There's this thing called NewPipeExtractor, which scrapes a lot of details from YouTube like videos, comments, and channels. But using it is a bit of a hassle since it requires implementing some abstract class, and its documentation is hard to understand.

For example there is https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor which allows downloading videos. there is https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts which activates Windows, I have tried and it works.

As for native support, it seems the issue for it exists but is pretty quiet so you may want to subscribe to it or lobby for some progress: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/issues/690

See https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipe/pull/8837 and https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/pull/904 for pull requests with this feature. The extractor PR is also needed for LibreTube (as LibreTube depends on Piped which depends on our extractor).

For an example the youtube/streaming front-end android client NewPipe and its associated "backend" NewPipeExtractor has a lot of machinary to emulate what javascript does in your browser when you ask it to play a video/stream from various websites (most notably youtube). It does take a lot of effort, which is why it often goes into periods of quiet development as the previous maintainers burn-out and new ones take over. But it isnt impossible, but modern websites do not let go of thier content easily. Also note that even this is only read-only, there isnt a mechanism to allow you to post.

NewPipe Team's commits were crucially helpful in resolving the issue. TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor#960 (https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/pull/960) THANKS SO MUCH, NEWPIPE TEAM!

You should indeed see them, that's a bug. I opened a new issue for this with some technical details: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor/issues/1017.