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What does the Society of American Baseball Research have to do with this?

Sneak Attack By Roger?

This is unrelated to the JavaScript challenge this post is about, and a very specific technology for video streaming. SABR means "server-side adaptive bitrate" and is a bespoke video streaming protocol that Google is moving towards, away from the existing DASH protocol. There is some info here https://github.com/LuanRT/yt-sabr-shaka-demo

it's pronounced sabray

"In 2025, YouTube started rolling out a new streaming protocol, known as SABR, which breaks down the video into smaller chunks whose internal URLs dynamically change rather than provide one whole static URL. This is problematic because it prevents downloaders (such as yt-dlp) from being able to download YouTube videos at resolutions higher than 360p due to only detecting format code 18 (which is the only format code available that doesn't use SABR). So far, this issue has only affected the web client, so one workaround would be to use a different client, such as tv_embedded (where SABR has not yet been rolled out to), so for instance in yt-dlp you could add --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=tv_embedded" to use that client. It is not known how long this workaround will work as intended, as YouTube rolls out SABR to more and more clients."

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/YouTube/Technical_det...

From https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/33186

> Currently, a new style of player JS is beginning to be sent where the challenge code is no longer modular but is hooked into other code throughout the player JS.

So it's no longer a standalone script that can be interpreted but it depends on all the other code on the site? Which could still be interpreted maybe but is a lot more complex and might need DOM etc?

Just guessing here, if anyone knows the details would love to hear more.

YouTube is mining cry-

I mean, running some unknown highly obfuscated CPU-demanding JS code on your machine - and using its results to decide whether to permit or deny video downloads.

The enshittification will continue until user morale improves.

Node does not have the concept of security and isolation like the Deno has. There is maintainer comment in the same thread.

The sandboxing features of Deno also seem to have played a role in that choice. I wouldn't overly trust that as a security layer but it's better than nothing.

until someone shares a video with you

Thanks for letting us know!

My brother sent me a long talk on YouTube and pleaded with me to listen to it. Watching was pointless the video was just talking heads sitting in chairs. However you can’t just play a video and turn off your phone while listening to the audio on headphones. The mobile browser sleeps and the audio stops. So I used yt-dlp to rip the audio and dropped it into my Plex server to listen to with Prologue. It wasn’t even about the ads, I just wanted to do some gardening and listen to something on headphones while I worked, without my phone screen on.

It's obviously not about YT the product, but about YT the content library. I don't think there are better alternatives to that content library.

I'm watching not youtube but video creators. There is no even worse alternative if person you want to watch doesn't publish video on other site.

Maybe, for watching "recommended" stream without any subscriptions there are alternatives (which? I cannot name good ones, anyway), but if you watch your subscription you are bound to platform which contain this subscription. And no, content creators are not interchangeable.

Canceled mine after ad-free stopped working on YouTube Kids of all things (on ShieldTV). Was probably a bug, but with practically no customer service options, no real solutions besides cancel.

I was also a holdover from a paying Play Music subscriber, and this was shortly after the pita music switchover to youtube, so it was a last straw.

Even more hilariously, if you upload to YouTube then try to download from your creator dashboard thing (e.g. because you were live-streaming and didn’t think to save a local copy or it impacts your machine too much) you get some shitty 720p render while ytdlp will get you the best quality available to clients.

I’m another Premium user in the same position. I use uBlock Origin and Sponsorblock on desktop and SmartTube on my TV. I pay for Premium to be able to share ad-free experience with my less technical family members, and to use their native iOS apps. If they really tighten the rules on Premium family sharing, I’ll drop the subscription in an instant.

Why not use Brave browser and their playlist feature for offline downloads?

I also pay for YouTube Premium, but I still use ReVanced on my smartphone just to disable auto-translation. It’s absolute madness that users can’t configure this in the official app.

> Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel

That's been a policy for a while, the sign up page prominently says "Plan members must be in the same household".

No idea if its enforced though.

I'm also a premium subscriber, and have struggled with the same issues on the iPad app. I try to keep some shows downloaded for my toddler, and the download feature never seems to work on the first try.

I finally got so fed up, I bought a Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 off ebay for $50 and flashed it with LineageOS. I can now load whatever media I want onto the 1 TB sdcard I've installed in it. The 5 year old hardware plays videos just fine with the VLC app. And, as a bonus, I discovered that NewPipe, an alternative YouTube client I installed through the F-Droid store, is actually much more reliable at downloading videos than the official client. I was planning on using yt-dlp to load up the sdcard, but now I don't even need to do that.

What video did you watch?

>Awaiting their “premium cannot be shared with people outside household” policy so I can finally cancel.

Then I have good news for you! https://lifehacker.com/tech/youtube-family-premium-crackdown

In fact, I've got an email from them about this already. My YT is still ad-free though, so not sure when it's going to kick in for real.

I am a premium subscriber so I can download via yt-dlp in peace without any errors or warnings.

We are not the same.

I doubt it'd be difficult for Google to detect if the client is a browser or not. They already need to check for signals of abnormal use to detect things like clickfarms and ad scams.

Deno itself is written mostly in Rust, but it also leverages [1] Google's V8 Javascript engine which is written in C++.

[1]: https://choubey.gitbook.io/internals-of-deno/architecture/v8

heh, that's pretty cool.

Heh, now I wonder how much JavaScript it actually interprets and given that it’s < 1000 lines, whether it could be used towards an introductory course in compilers.

I'm on mobile, this seems like an actual js interpreter that only does objects and arithmetic. Impressive that it went that far

you have to feed it multiple arguments with rate limiting and long wait times. i am not sure if there have been recent updates other than the js interpreter but ive had to spin up a docker instance of a browser to feed it session cookies as well.

If you ever wondered why the likes of Google and Cloudflare want to restrict the web to a few signed, integrity-checked browser implementations?

Now you know.

> For the web it requires that you run a snippet of javascript code (the challenge) in the browser to prove that you are not a bot.

How does this prove you are not a bot. How does this code not work in a headless Chromimum if it's just client side JS?

There are: peertube, odysee, minds, rumble, bitchute web torrent)...

It is the same reason why people just can't get off IG. Network effect and in YT case a lot of disk space and bandwidth.

> The lack of any democratization of bulk storage is beginning to be a real problem on the internet.

There are many thousands of paid hosting services, feel free to pick one. It turns out hosting TB of data for free is a pretty tricky business model to nail down.

I keep seeing ads on TV for Photobucket (Which I thought was dead) for 1TB of storage for either free, or $5, depending on the ad.

Maybe there is an opportunity for that company to expand.

If you want to compete with YT you need to basically build AWS S3 in your own data centers. You'd have to find a way to make your service run cheaper than google can if you wanted to survive. You'd have to get very scrappy and risky. I'd start with questions like: how many 9s of durability do we actually need here? Could we risk it until the model is proven? What are the consequences for losing cat videos and any% speed runs of mario64? That first robotic tape library would be a big stepwise capex event. You'd want to make sure the whole thing makes sense before you call IBM or whoever for a quote.

They already had the proper-DRM tech for youtube movies for years, why didn't they already turn that on for all content?

Google is making it harder to download from Youtube. Your first thought is correct! Every other website that yt-dlp supports doesn't require this change. Additionally, yt-dlp is still written in python, it has not moved to deno. They are only adding a deno dependency for the javascript challenges added by youtube.

It must be a pretty recent (as in added yesterday) addition, as I was watching youtube with mpv+yt-dlp.

When did it start requiring one? It didn't require one the last time I used it a few months ago...

> What tool can I use to simply store what my browser receives anyway, in a single video file?

This. I'm interested in such a tool or browser extension.

Because they already charge macropayments for that.