[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.