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mike_hearn10/01/20242 repliesview on HN

Well you're about to find out, because YouTube is doing a massive bot/unofficial client crackdown right now. YTDL, Invidious etc are all being banned. Perhaps Google got tired of AI competitors scraping YouTube.

In reality, as others have pointed out, Google has always fought bots on their ad networks. I did a bit of it when I worked there. Advertisers aren't stupid, if they pay money for no results they stop spending.


Replies

LorenPechtel10/02/2024

I've found the opposite. These days I absolutely can't play a video in YouTube, it always comes back as not available. But I can use JDownloader to grab it unless there are language issues. (It unfortunately might not get the right language for the audio.)

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internet10101010/01/2024

yt-dlp works just fine for me. Or are you saying that are limiting those that do downloads in bulk?

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