yt-dlp is a tool I think needs no introduction. Many of us have found it a great tool for mass archiving videos as well as just watching a video locally whenever theres a video that doesnt want to cache in mpv while streaming it. Despite this tool being made with youtube in mind, oddly enough it supports several providers and works better on pretty much everything that isnt youtube. Ofc this is because youtube is anal about you downloading videos from them, so much so that its been a constant uphill battle for the development of yt-dlp for quite some time, probably as long as its existed once it became the defacto replacement for youtube-dl.
Well in recent weeks, its become almost impossible to download or stream videos from youtube at all (with anything that isnt vanilla youtube for that matter, not just yt-dlp). That is an annoying issue on its own, but it has especially been annoying for me considering I make videos where its common to remix existing source material, and it sure would be nice to be able to actually download said material. That being said, there are at least some ways around this. For one, depending on who you watch, chances are they have an odysee channel with youtube reuploads, and its much easier to actually download videos from odysee, so thats definitely come in handy at times. archive.org can also come in handy for assets and even youtube reuploads. You can still try using a vpn, but a lot of ips dont seem to work.
There are a number of things you can try, but it doesnt always work out. Even if it does, its still sad to see youtube trying to lock things down like this. It'd be one thing if youtube was like most other social media where it either hasnt been around long enough to have much value, or it has been around a while but manages to not have much value anyways due to things like impulsive microblogging paradigms, phoneposter resolution normalization (well theres youtube shorts but thankfully full videos are still the norm), and/or being a hopeless meme alternative from day 1.
No...YouTube is different. There is a concrete reason why out of all of the sites out there that people have built command line clients, alternative front ends and other more private methods of access, damn near everyone still uses youtube one way or another whether they want to admit it or not. YouTube may not have been what started multimedia sharing off, but it popularized it and gave the common man an easy way to share their creations and passions via the world wide web. Some people will say this was the beginning of the end since it also normalized a centralized video sharing paradigm, but I'd argue this was a great era that brought about so many fun and iconic videos on the internet, and I'd even go as far as to argue that back then, YouTube proved that centralization didnt always have to be a bad thing. These days however, it seems us being lenient about that has come to bite us in the ass big time. Things have changed greatly both in how youtube works and even how we view the 'common man'.
There may come a time very soon where decentralization is not just a nice bonus, but a necessity. Reembracing the decentralization we had before the rise of youtube may be our best bet to get out of this mess. That being said, we can not allow YouTube to lock down a trasure trove of old videos before we have it all archived. I'd argue keeping YouTube's videos easily downloadable is almost as important as keeping the Wayback Machine around. There is just so many interesting and esoteric videos on YouTube you can find if you know where to look, ntm videos you cant find anywhere else. Thats why this is so important to me, because despite these videos existing on a site like YouTube, the culture and times of the older videos reflects the spirit of the pre youtube internet at times despite being on youtube (some of that could be due to existing on a website before youtube :p). Some people may even post new videos that are good, you may never know.
I'd like to think yt-dlp will do what its always done and come back strong and just werk again for a while, and it might still do that, but I've gotta say, I've never seen yt-dlp in this bad of a state. It's going to be tough, but realistically speaking, we eventually have to cut off our reliance on YouTube entirely. Yes, I mean ENTIRELY, because I'm not just talking about normies with youtube accounts or even people using alternative frontends commonly and the likes. If you have so much as went to youtube in any way shape or form whatsoever even semi-recently, like if someone just sent you a youtube link in an IRC chatroom and you opened it, frontend or not, guess what? You just relied on YouTube! No shit, but its something thats often taken for granted.
Idk how its going to be done, but there needs to be a mass scale archiving effort done so that we at least dont lose as much. WAY easier said than done, but its gotta happen somehow. Otherwise, you can kiss 20 years of multimedia history goodbye as it gets locked behind the DRM goolag, or worse, videos end up getting modified or deleted.
EDIT: So I got some interesting feedback on this writeup I'd like to talk about. Apparently I should've mentioned newgrounds as its the TRUE common man's website of the early web. That's...debatable. Yeah I went on newgrounds when I was a kid, it didn't require a lot of digging, I enjoyed a lot of the flash games and animations on there, and it just so happens a lot of animations on youtube at the time were reuploaded from newgrounds. So I get where this is coming from, but aside from animations, it seems like there was a lot of videos uploaded to youtube that were original back then. Yes there was plenty of unoriginal reuploaded videos on youtube even back then. Not just newgrounds animations but also reuploads of tv shows and movies and a number of other things. That being said, I still stand by what I said in this writeup that youtube was the first common man multimedia sharing website. It absolutely exploded in popularity like nothing before it. I also acknowledge that even back then YouTube was far from perfect, as even back then there was stupid drama as well as ytps getting taken down thanks to Viacom. However, I still enjoyed early YouTube quite a bit, as a lot of iconic classics have spawned from it.
Oh yeah, the elephant in the room. yt-dlp got fixed. Yeeeah I figured it actually would and that this would probably end up coming off as alarmism. The dramatic title sure doesn't help my case. However, at the time of writing I was genuinely convinced it actually would die soon. It was in the worst shape I had witnessed yt-dlp thus far for one thing, but also if we're being realistic, do you honestly expect yt-dlp to last forever? Maybe it will for most of the other services it supports downloading off of, but youtube? IP blocks, HTTP errors, Sign in to confirm your age, and a number of other errors are common place these days when trying to download or even stream anything off of Youtube these days unless you're literally using YouTube directly, and who would want to do that when it's bloated and spyware ridden beyond belief? This is why alternative frontends are so common these days in the first place. We can't keep relying on them however. I recommend giving this writeup on the matter a read.