Lesson learned: always use Creative Commons licensed data to demo your multimedia tools. Else people get the wrong idea. Some examples for youtube-dl might be: * [this video] Big buck bunny * [link] Sintel * [link] Spring In fact, youtube actually allows you to filter by CC, so there's never a reason not to!
Creative Commons demo video suitable for multimedia tools.
I would suggest they remove the screenshot of the Avengers movie given the amount of DMCA going on for such things... (loosely suggesting some open source software could be used for viewing pirated material.) Big Buck Bunny by the Blender Foundation could be a good replacement [1]. [1] [this video]
Freely licensed replacement for copyrighted screenshot.
The post-data OP is sending is different. In the script I shared it is easy to test one post-body against another, or one key against another, and so on. Most folks seem to using an "ANDROID" client, not "WEB". In the example I use "IOS" client but it does not matter. There are many clients that will work. To get throttled videoplayback URLs with the "WEB" client like the OP is using, one does not need to make POST requests to /youtubei/v1/player. There are throttled videoplayback URLs in the HTML of the /watch?v= page. For example, curl -A "" -40s [this video] -o [link] -n 's/\\u0026/\&/g;/itag=22/p'
"However, acquiring this key decompiling the mobile application, monitoring requests through a proxy or relying on values discovered by others." This is again not true. The key is in the HTML of every /watch?v= YouTube page. It's a public key; it's not hidden in any way. Further, it's possible, up until today at least, to use the "WEB" key with clientName "ANDROID" of "IOS" and receive unthrottled URLs. The key in the shell script is in fact the WEB key. The key for IOS is different. curl -40s [this video] \ |grep -o \"INNERTUBE_API_KEY...[^\"]*\"
Okay, but: yt-dlp -f315 [this video] [download] 100% of 1.27GiB in 00:00:52 at 24.85MiB/s Works fine with the version I had installed, 2025.02.19. I don't know if this perhaps affects web browsers playing on non-HDCP displays.
It's a static site that renders the youtube thumbnail + a red play button. When you click on it, it loads the youtube iframe. So it's basically deferring the cookie consent and all. We implemented it as a drop-in replacement: -- <iframe [this video] ++ <iframe [this video] Nothing else needed.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
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