[Announcement] Upcoming new requirements for YouTube downloads · Issue #14404 · yt-dlp/yt-dlp
github.com
Beginning very soon, you'll need to have Deno (or another supported JavaScript runtime) installed to keep YouTube downloads working as normal. Why? Up until now, yt-dlp has been able to use its bui...

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.

  • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgOPEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice

    • Opus would have MP3 beat for speech at lower bitrates as per the HydrogenAudio KB, Opus is transparent for speech at 32kbit/s with stereo speech being transparent at 40kbit/s. Beyond that, a typical bitrate for Opus audio on YT is something like 150kbit/s and that codec is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s. Point being if one works in spoken word and they want to save as much space and bandwidth as possible while still sounding reasonable, 40-48kbit/s Opus would be the ideal audio codec for that as it would give transparent speech at half the bitrate of the 80kbit/s MP3 that’s quoted here.
      • DFX4509B@lemmy.orgOPEnglish
        2·
        1 hour ago

        To directly quote the HydrogenAudio KB article on Opus:

        • 32kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent speech plus moderately good stereo music
        • 40kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, fairly good stereo music
        • 48kbit/s CELT encoding gives you: Essentially transparent mono or stereo speech, reasonable music

        You’re getting basically transparent speech at a bit over half the bitrate of 80kbit/s MP3 or less, and even with music, Opus like I said is transparent for music at 160-192kbit/s according to the same KB article I’m quoting, while MP3 needs 320kbit/s CBR for transparency for music, although if I’m transcoding FLAC files to Opus, I normally just max out the codec at 510kbit/s where MP3’s transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s is also the bitrate it maxes out at.

        The only good reason IMO why one should use MP3 in 2025 when better codecs exist, both lossy and lossless, is when the device they’re targeting is so old or crappy that it can’t support anything better than MP3.