youtube-dl VS yt-dlp

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

Are you referring to issues like this?

Yes, yt-dlp is the way, for now. YouTube actively changes over time in ways that require a downloader to have active development to remain functional.

yt-dlp/youtube-dl go brrrrr

youtube-dl have not been updated since this summer, and youtube have introduced a throttling which youtube-dl devs have not released a workaround for, but yt-dlp exists and works full speed.

Basically, the title - I want to download highest quality audio files from a YT playlist, keep the metadata, crop the album art to square with the filename like so: Artist - Track I know that vanilla YTDL can't embed artwork in OPUS but YTDLP can. About cropping I found some info here but it did not work.

The most useful one for me is Sponskrub which uses Sponsor Block to mark or cut the sponsored sections/reminders from a video. Their Github will give you a better idea.