• beatniak
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    1 year ago

    Just use newpipe. It’s youtube without the ads. Doesn’t have casting support, but it allows you to download the videos. You can also listen/download to the audio of videos, without fetching the video.

    • blank_sl8
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      1 year ago

      Newpipe will probably be blocked as well if youtube is doing this. Honestly not sure why youtube hasn’t blocked yt-dlp and others already.

      • KindnessInfinity
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        1 year ago

        It’s not easily block able as it scrapes the YouTube website. They’d have to stop having a website for that to happen.

        • dan@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          The problem with scraping is that while it’s difficult/impossible to block completely, it’s pretty easy to keep making changes to your site to disrupt scrapers. The work required by the scraper to adapt to those changes is usually way more than the work you put in to disrupt them.

          So if a commercial site wants to make scraping unreliable and impractical, they almost certainly can.

          • TWeaK
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            1 year ago

            It’s also easy for the NewPipe devs to update their app and make it work again. This has been going on for years already.

        • asexualchangeling
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          1 year ago

          Honestly curious if they’d ever consider that, considering how popular watching youtube on the phone is, so I could see them trying to get even desktop users to use an app to prevent 3rd party launchers

          If they did though, it would probably cause at least a decent number of people to try to find alternatives

          At the end of the day, the main way the fediverse gets new users is the big tech companies screwing up

            • asexualchangeling
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              1 year ago

              The only problem with YouTube alternatives like peertube is video is it’s a LOT harder to store/stream than just text with occasional images (especially if it’s higher res like is common these days)

              I would love for it to catch on, but honestly don’t see how it could for any real percentage of people

              That beeing said, if YouTube ever messes up to that extent, I’ll be one of the first out the door

      • nooneescapesthelaw
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        1 year ago

        I’m not a 100% sure but I think newpipe uses a scraping method instead, so its harder to block since it pretends its a regular user

        • dogmuffins
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          1 year ago

          this particular cat and mouse has been going on for a long time.

          Although I get the impression it’s not particularly aggressive.

          There was a while there about a year ago where newpipe seemed to break every week and you had to install the next patch version from github. It’s not like newpipe had to develop some new workaround or something, just changed class names or something.

      • SuspiciousUser
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        1 year ago

        I do wonder how much of an impact command line youtube downloaders have on them. I can’t imagine much since the typical user couldn’t operate it. A few years ago the RIAA tried to take yt-dl down, and did for a while, but it was deemed meritless so it’s back up.