this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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Google just broke all third-party YT clients, including yt-dlp; a full JS implementation is now required. (github.com)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by DFX4509B_2@lemmy.org to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.org/post/1872634

So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.

This reeks of DRM.

UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.

UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.

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[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

DRM is expensive. Very expensive in fact because it is basically non-trivial encryption.

A website with as much traffic as YouTube cannot afford to DRM every single video stream. There just isn't enough processing power and electricity available.

Netflix et al. have a tiny fraction of YouTube's traffic with more income per user due to subscriptions.

Plus YouTube's storage demands are many orders of magnitude larger. A maximum upper bound for Netflix is 1 PB I'd imagine. Archiveteam alone has selectively downloaded more than 3 PB. YouTube has, I'd imagine, a double digit exabyte amount of data stored + backups.

[–] REDACTED 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And yet, youtube uses resource intensive compression methods for said exabytes

[–] yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 23 hours ago

Do we know this?

I suspect they usually compress videos at most a couple times (for each resolution) and then keep the results cached somewhere. At least for popular videos that combined take up 99% of bandwidth. For 0 views videos I'd imagine they only store the highest resolution and compress it further down on demand.

I'd argue DRMing all those popular videos would take up so much computing power it cannot be offset by ads.