pytube VS youtube-dl-gui

Quicker explanation of how Youtube is doing it is at the source code of pytube: https://github.com/tfdahlin/pytube/blob/bb890af3b271a616bbe1...

This is linked from the description of PR 30184 of youtube-dl but @varenc linked to a specific comment (talking about patching Windows builds, AFAICT) which might confuse some people.

I'll even save you the click:

> YouTube's strategy to restrict downloading videos is to send a ciphered version

There are workarounds (detailed very nicely in dirkf’s pull request for youtube-dl):

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/30184

Pasting the content here for convenience:

Since summer 2021, YouTube has started serving media URLs with a query parameter such as …&n=SXiXBH-xzrjeioPN&…. This now appears to be the default behaviour. Unless the value of this parameter is transformed according to an algorithm delivered in the site player JS, the download speed for the URL is throttled to ~50kB/s.

Solutions for this include:

• implementing a more complete JS interpreter, eg based on PR [jsinterp] Actual JS interpreter¹ #11272;

• using an external JS interpreter (PhantomJS, now unmaintained, is used by some extractors);

• spoofing the Android or iOS client to acquire unthrottled links, as successfully implemented in yt-dlp².

This PR takes a different approach derived from the successful solution used in VLC's youtube.lua (also implemented differently in pytube³). The approach relies on the fact that the challenge algorithm is served in a mini-language within the minified player JS and therefore the specific algorithm can be extracted and executed by interpreting the mini-language without actually running the JS itself. [In parallel with this PR, a separate implementation of this approach was added to yt-dlp⁴.]

The implementation of the mini-language interpreter is directly translated from VLC's n_descramble() Lua function⁵. The result sufficiently resembles the original that it should be straightforward to share changes between the two implementations.

――――――

¹ — https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/11272

² — https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/commit/c888ffb95ab0ab4f4cd1...

³ — https://github.com/tfdahlin/pytube/blob/bb890af3b271a616bbe1...

⁴ — https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/commit/404f611f1c4aa516fbc4...

⁵ — https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/blob/4fb284e5af69aa...

Test yt-dlg using Wayland and check if fix the issue#137

If you prefer a GUI (Graphical User Interface), choose one from the youtube-dl subreddit's Wiki. For Windows yt-dlg is a good one. It uses yt-dlp under the hood.

download the latest version of yt-dlg (an updated fork): https://github.com/oleksis/youtube-dl-gui/releases

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (or use https://github.com/oleksis/youtube-dl-gui if you want a GUI)

Edit: here’s a link to the GitHub for the updated version - https://github.com/oleksis/youtube-dl-gui

If this program is the one they're talking about, which I think it is, then no. Installing through python is an option, but you can also download the setup.exe from the releases page which will install just like any other exe. It's even available through the Windows Store if that's your thing.

Second, use https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (or https://github.com/oleksis/youtube-dl-gui if you want a GUI), then download the latest n6.0 (non-shared) zip for your platform (e.g. win64) from https://github.com/yt-dlp/FFmpeg-Builds and extract the 3 executables from the bin folder to the same folder as your yt-dlp executable.