[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.

[charcircuit]

I don't think that flag is related at all.

[embedding-shape]

What else could it mean? Aren't "views" something that matches with "watch"? Maybe I'm missing something from how YouTube works, not a big user, happy to be corrected :)

[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.