Hello,

Recently, yt-dlp stopped working on the site it was originally made for,
youtube with no easy fix possible.




Problems have been cropping up recently, such as YT's requirement for a
PO token to be passed when downloading, but in the last few days the
whole manner of getting a video just broke.

The authors noted that the complexity of YT's site has significantly
increased leading to them needing to support a full JS runtime in their
tool whereas they used to use a sort of hacked together python JS runtime.

They suggested that people install the Deno runtime, as it uses a sandbox
by default. IDK how much we should trust sandboxes, but that's what they
said.[1]

Other options include Node version 21 or later (they say that they may try
and backport support for version 20). Currently, Devuan stable is running
node 18.

The other option they intend to support is Bun. [2]

They may also support QuickJS in the future, and PhantomJS support is
being dropped.

Neither Deno nor Bun are available in Devuan repos as far as I can see
and backports doesn't contain a newer version of nodejs.





IDK exactly how updating packages in Devuan work (just depend on Debian?),
but I'm writing in hopes that yt-dlp, and thus it's dependencies, can be
updated on our systems at some point in time.

The update from the yt-dlp folks can be found here[3] and the github
issue is here. [4]


Thanks,
David



[1]: https://deno.com/ https://github.com/denoland/deno
[2]: https://bun.com/ https://github.com/oven-sh/bun
[3]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases
[4]: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14404