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by branon 798 days ago
How do they plan on doing this exactly? NewPipe only parses the website and yt-dlp pretends to be Android/iOS. They can't break these in a way that wouldn't be fixable. yt-dlp already ignores the "not available on this app" video ID bait-and-switch trick.
3 comments

They aren't going after the app but the user: "rather than going after the projects, Google says it's going to start disrupting users who are using these apps. The post writes, "Viewers who are using these third-party apps may experience buffering issues or see the error 'The following content is not available on this app' when trying to watch a video." "
Pretty easy actually.

All video is streamed in blocks currently (HLS streaming mostly). So if they really want they would inject adds inside those blocks and the player won't be able to distinguish between ads blocks and video blocks. They can stop sending you blocks if you didn't get all the "ad blocks" beforehand for the duration of the ad. Even if your player "knows" because of a "Sponsor Block" database the interval it needs to skip, by not giving you the blocks beforehand you'd need to wait.

They can also give the stream only to DRM compliant players.

We may end up with some shadow YT libraries with ripped videos. Some distributed crypto hosting platform where the more you seed/rip, the more tokens you get for watching or something like that.

"The only free cheese you'll find is in the mousetrap". Free hosting and streaming is not guaranteed, when the big company pays for the hosting.
They can detect whatever spoofing these apps use and fuck with you if they do detect it.