youtube-dl VS pytube

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

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...