Find out if CrowCamKeepAlive is even still needed. Either fix or remove it (and YouTube-DL)

There is a possibility that, since it's been a few years since I wrote it, YouTube might have potentially fixed the bug that required me to write CrowCamKeepAlive in the first place.

The bug was: If nobody is watching the stream, then the "DVR functionality" of the stream (being able to scroll back in time) doesn't work until after somebody joins the stream. It's almost like YouTube doesn't bother caching the past video chunks if there's nobody actively watching them at the time.

To Do:

Get the CrowCam up and running and do all the other bug fixes, but leave CrowCamKeepAlive turned off and unused for a while.
See if you notice any issues with DVR functionality if you haven't tuned into the stream in a while and you're the first person to tune in.

If CrowCamKeepAlive is no longer needed:

If everything seems to work correctly without CrowCamKeepAlive, then just delete it from the code.
Also delete everything related the companion program Youtube-DL.
Also update the docs to remove references to both CrowCamKeepAlive and Youtube-DL.

If CrowCamKeepAlive is needed:

Update the code and instructions to work with YT-DLP instead, more details below.

The CrowCam instructions currently say to get the latest version of Youtube-DL with these commands:

Get YouTube-dl:

YouTube-dl is a third party program which downloads video streams and other information from YouTube. We use it for checking and connecting to the YouTube live stream in an automated fashion. It is used for checking whether the stream is up, and for making sure that the stream's DVR cache stays functional at all times. Obtain the Linux and Windows binary executables of youtube-dl (one file each, "youtube-dl" and "youtube-dl.exe") and place them in the same folder as these scripts. Youtube-dl is obtained either by grabbing both files from the YouTube-dl web site, or by issuing these commands at the Bash shell prompt in the same directory as these script files:

 wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O ./youtube-dl
 wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl.exe -O ./youtube-dl.exe

Under the hood, the CrowCam code periodically does something similar, keeping the tool updated. However, this stopped working at some point in late 2021, and now, if you try to download youtube-dl using the commands above, you get an error, saying, "Access denied - Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked."

To work around this, try to update the CrowCam code and instructions to use YT-DLP instead of YouTube-DL, which can still be retrieved. Here is some powershell code (ganked from a different project of mine) which shows how to retrieve the latest one of these files. You will need to convert this code into Bash code:

  # 2023-08-03 - I discovered that yt-dlp is better than yt-dl and I am switching to that one.
  $nightlyBuilds = "https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/"

  # The nightly build URL above redirects to something like
  #     https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly/releases/tag/2023.07.21
  # Retrieve it into a string.
  $nightlyRedirect = ([System.Net.WebRequest]::Create($nightlyBuilds)).GetResponse().ResponseUri.OriginalString
  Write-Host "Latest nightly build of yt-dlp is at: $nightlyRedirect"

  # The URL has to be modified in order to actually download the file itself.
  #    https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly/releases/tag/2023.07.21
  #    https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly/releases/download/2023.07.21/youtube-dl
  $nightlyRedirect = $nightlyRedirect.replace('/yt-dlp/releases/tag/','/yt-dlp/releases/download/')

  # Download the EXEs directly for Unix and Windows.
  # 2023-08-03 - Changing to YT-DLP instead of Youtube-DL.
  $nightlyDownloadUrl = $nightlyRedirect + "/yt-dlp"
  UpdateInternetFile $nightlyDownloadUrl "yt-dlp"
  $nightlyDownloadUrl = $nightlyRedirect + "/yt-dlp.exe"
  UpdateInternetFile $nightlyDownloadUrl "yt-dlp.exe"

Of course, you need to make sure that YT-DLP will function for your purposes first. Not sure if it will.

tfabris / CrowCam

Find out if CrowCamKeepAlive is even still needed. Either fix or remove it (and YouTube-DL) #70

Get YouTube-dl: