Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mike_hearn 620 days ago
Well you're about to find out, because YouTube is doing a massive bot/unofficial client crackdown right now. YTDL, Invidious etc are all being banned. Perhaps Google got tired of AI competitors scraping YouTube.

In reality, as others have pointed out, Google has always fought bots on their ad networks. I did a bit of it when I worked there. Advertisers aren't stupid, if they pay money for no results they stop spending.
2 comments
LorenPechtel 620 days ago
I've found the opposite. These days I absolutely can't play a video in YouTube, it always comes back as not available. But I can use JDownloader to grab it unless there are language issues. (It unfortunately might not get the right language for the audio.)
link
mike_hearn 620 days ago
JDownloader is also having issues:

https://board.jdownloader.org/showthread.php?t=48894&page=16...

but it seems like YT have various rules for when they do and don't trigger bans. Also this is a new change which they usually roll out experimentally, and per client at that. So the question is only how aggressive do they want to be. They can definitely detect JDownloader as a bot, and do.

link
internet101010 620 days ago
yt-dlp works just fine for me. Or are you saying that are limiting those that do downloads in bulk?
link
mike_hearn 620 days ago
Probably the latter. yt-dlp can be detected and it yields account / IP bans, it seems. They've been going back and forth around the blocks for weeks but only by claiming to be different devices, each time they do the checks are added for the new client and they have to move onto the next. There's a finite number of those.

Here's a comment from Invidious on the matter:

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734#issuecomment...

link