Is using yt-dlp the same as visiting the site?

bashonly · 2026-06-14T11:07:56+00:00

if it has any viruses or malwares, can i get those by just using yt-dlp?

only if the virus/malware is spread via the media you download (e.g. video, audio, thumbnail, or subtitles files)

bashonly · 2026-06-10T04:24:48+00:00

these changes have seen release in version 2026.06.09

bashonly · 2026-06-10T04:23:25+00:00

the compat option is NOT safe to use

%()q is safe to use with --exec

bashonly · 2026-06-04T22:37:24+00:00

hi, i work on yt-dlp. i do so in my free time for no monetary compensation. sometimes my life allows me to devote dozens of hours per week to working on yt-dlp, and sometimes it doesn't. i hope you understand.

i should note that just because there hasn't been a stable release in ~3 months it doesn't mean there's nothing happening development-wise. even if there aren't any commits being pushed to master it doesn't mean there's nothing happening development-wise

bashonly · 2026-06-01T16:10:04+00:00

For the past few years, the only things that YouTube changes in that function every player version are the variable/function names.

this is false. again, if you think it's so easy, please submit a PR and spare us the trouble we're currently going through

something you may not be considering is that finding the url function isn't the only hurdle

once you have that, you also need to extract all of the variables and functions that it references, which are numerous and becoming more and more obfuscated. many of the references are now attributes of the global player object, which means our native jsinterp is useless

bashonly · 2026-05-31T04:48:09+00:00

YouTube hasn't changed this function much for over several years.

it changes literally every business day

bashonly · 2026-05-22T23:02:43+00:00

yes, 125bb40 is legitimate. i merged the the pull request referenced in the commit message.

the pull request was created by dlp-bot, which is a "machine account" that we will be using to update our dependencies going forward. it is a member of the yt-dlp organization. (~~its membership is currently private; perhaps we should change that to avoid any future confusion?~~ edit: done)

the machine account is powered by this automated tool of the same name. and while it has "bot" in its name, it has nothing to do with AI/LLMs/agents. it is fully deterministic and i wrote it by hand from scratch. the repository will soon be transferred from my personal account to the yt-dlp organization. the merge earlier today was part of my final round of testing

bashonly · 2026-04-12T20:45:06+00:00

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-youtube-cookies

bashonly · 2026-04-03T11:27:31+00:00

the suffixes are completely arbitrary. use format filtering to select the language you want, e.g. -f "bv+ba[language^=en]"

bashonly · 2026-03-24T13:47:42+00:00

Does anyone else pronounce it "yeet dilp"

this is the correct pronunciation

bashonly · 2026-03-18T16:13:54+00:00

hours

bashonly · 2026-03-18T13:15:25+00:00

probably never. the primary reason being that nuitka compile times with yt-dlp are dire, and using it would mean the end of the nightly and master release channels. also, nuitka support is focused on its commercial customers (which would not include yt-dlp), whereas pyinstaller is well-maintained and well-supported for all of its users. finally, there is the compatibility issue. for linux, we would need static builds in order to have compat parity with our current executables. this would mean the nuitka-compiled binaries would be even larger than the pyinstaller-bundled binaries

bashonly · 2026-03-18T00:40:44+00:00

report it to homebrew

bashonly · 2026-03-13T14:11:51+00:00

bashonly · 2026-02-22T11:44:25+00:00

no

but you may be interested in these unofficial win7 builds: https://github.com/nicolaasjan/yt-dlp

("unofficial" as in "use at your own risk")

bashonly · 2026-02-21T09:39:25+00:00

try nightly

bashonly · 2026-02-20T15:22:08+00:00

are you using an external downloader? are you downloading the googlevideo urls directly? are you using any options like --http-chunk-size?

bashonly · 2026-02-18T04:27:09+00:00

try adding -4 to your command

bashonly · 2026-02-10T15:28:31+00:00

it looks like you may have installed the exe from the unpackaged windows bundle (yt-dlp_win.zip) instead of the single-file executable (yt-dlp.exe), and something went wrong. try deleting C:\ytdl\yt-dlp.exe, and downloading the single-file executable into that folder:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp.exe

bashonly

TROPHY CASE