[netsharc]

The video from the article, in case you don't want to accept cookies: https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg

It doesn't even say which type of cookies have to be accepted, I tried selecting just functional cookies, that didn't work. Funny how it's an arcane bunch of toggles in a cookie popup, on a page describing an arcane way of booting up a system.

[embedding-shape]

I've started doing:

    yt-dlp https://youtu.be/bqz65_YfcJg -o - | mpv -

And never been happier. I hope it still counts as a view for the channel/owner though, but never investigated if that's actually the case.

[mariusor]

In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

[embedding-shape]

Ay, but then I don't get to teach beginners about the unix principle and how easy it is to pipe stuff between different tools :)

Thanks for the heads up regardless, I'm sure there was others who didn't know, who learned something new! :)

[thaumasiotes]

> In most builds mpv has yt-dlp integrated, you can directly pass the URL to it.

Last time I was passing youtube URLs to mpv, it relied on having an executable named youtube-dl.exe somewhere visible to the mpv executable. To get it to work with yt-dlp, I had to copy and rename the yt-dlp executable.

> has yt-dlp integrated

Have they switched to supplying their own youtube downloader instead of just working with whatever you happen to have in your path?

[0-_-0]

Very unlikely, you need the browser for that

[petcat]

I would be very surprised if they didn't still have analytics tracking on the MPEG-DASH streams directly (what yt-dlp is downloading)

[basilikum]

yt-dlp needs to get the stream from somewhere. It has to fetch the website for that and even execute a JavaScript challenge to retrieve the media endpoint.

[netsharc]

I'd guess it skips running the JavaScript that reports to the Analytics backend...

[embedding-shape]

I ended up trying to look it up and found this:

> Available options: [...] mark_watched: Mark videos watched (even with --simulate). Only for YouTube

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/c8680b65f79cfeb23b342b...

So I'm guessing without that, it doesn't, so would have to add the flag for it to try to count it as a view.

[estimator7292]

Good thing yt-dlp is a browser.

[direwolf20]

It's not. It runs enough JavaScript to pass the CAPTCCA (completely automated public turing test to tell computers and computers apart) challenge but it doesn't actually load the page and execute everything.

[afandian]

Youtube has tonnes of cookies! Why give youtube a free pass but not some independent hobbyist's site?

[fc417fc802]

It doesn't get a free pass from me but it seems to work fine with only first party cookies, ublock origin and built in tracking protection active, and most (but not all) third party content blocked by umatrix.

Alternatively you can use the link in GP to grab the video via yt-dlp. Can even do that via tor if you want. (Weirdly at least historically youtube was friendlier to tor exit nodes than it was to a lot of mainstream VPNs. Not sure what was up with that, haven't tested it in a while.)

[nottorp]

You mean, in case you only accept google cookies?

Youtube has stopped working with privacy plugins on...

[hagbard_c]

I never got any cookie prompts for this site so I guess these did not make it past the content filters which keep cdn-cookieyes.com at bay. No cookies, no problem.