[SuperCuber]

Interesting. I ran the script to extract the json - that part was almost instant, then i used the first `url` field of `streamingData.adaptiveFormats`. I then ran

    curl 'https://...googlevideo.com...' --output video.mp4

for me the download is throttled to "768k", i assume thats in bits per second and not bytes which is very low: the random video i tried would take 8 minutes.

on the other hand,

    yt-dlp videoIdHere

does its processing then downloads the whole thing in about 5 seconds.

Does that curl command run much faster for you? Or do you do something else?

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Is 768k too slow to watch the video from the URL. If not, then I would not call that "throttled". Don't need 500 MB/s to watch a video. From what I've seen, when people discuss YouTube throttling online they are referring to max speeds of 60-70k. That's too slow to watch the video from the URL. Not too slow to download, though. And that's why this idea that YouTube is "preventing" downloads doesn't make any sense. There are download URLs in every /watch?v= YouTube page. Those are throttled. Max speed 60-70k.

Use this post-data and should get same speed as yt-dlp.

    {"context": {"client": {"clientName": "ANDROID", "clientVersion": "17.31.35", "androidSdkVersion": 30 }}, "videoId": "$x", "params": "CgIQBg==", "playbackContext": {"contentPlaybackContext": {"html5Preference": "HTML5_PREF_WANTS"}}, "contentCheckOk": true, "racyCheckOk": true}

I do not use curl, except in HN examples. I generally do not download from YouTube. I use the URLs in the JSON to watch the video.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

I should add that with respect to the download URLs in the HTML of every /watch?v= page some will not work at all, namely, in the case of heavily commercialised videos, videos using DASH and some other uncommon cases. But I always found this is minority of linked YouTube videos one encounters on the web.