rusty-jsyc VS youtube-dl

Based on my previous research into this, the magic keywords to find this kind of thing on Google are "virtualization obfuscation" or "VM obfuscation".

rusty-jsyc is the main open source implementation I've found, though it hasn't been touched in a few years: https://jwillbold.com/posts/obfuscation/2019-06-16-the-secre... (GitHub: https://github.com/jwillbold/rusty-jsyc)

I think there are other implementations, but they're proprietary so I didn't look into them very much. There are lots of posts out there about reversing virtualization obfuscation, but not many about implementing it. Seems like most people who put the effort into implementing it tend to prefer selling it commercially (which I suppose makes sense).

I see. According to the Web Archive, this website stopped working all the way in November 2023, and http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/ now contains all the same content as the old one and is the new "official" website.

youtube-dl is still a thing, last commit was one week ago.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/commits/master

> Is there a service that actually gives MP3 downloads?

YouTube with youtube-dl [1] or NewPipe [2].

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

[2] https://newpipe.net/

See elsewhere in the thread for details, but youtube-dl was restored by Github and is generally not considered to be in violation of the DMCA. You can see it on Github here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

A copyright holder abused the DMCA process to take it down the first time.

The best way is to download the source from github, run `make`, and copy the the file to $HOME/bin . There hasn't been a release for about a year now and the files on the distro repos are even older (I think).

Also YouTube has been doing some changes lately on the the player and a lot of the tools fail to download audio or video.

For example, in the last couple of weeks there have been some issues with a redirect to a 'consent page' : https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/32499