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ytdl-org / youtube-dl

Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites
http://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
The Unlicense
132.34k stars 10.03k forks source link

Why are there no new releases? #29753

Closed sdan41517 closed 2 years ago

sdan41517 commented 3 years ago

Is youtube-dl dead again? Are there no other maintainers that can approve the PRs?

Is there some legal issue going on in the background which has forced the development to be stopped? You guys can't just disappear on us like how you did before RIAA took down youtube-dl. At least add new maintainers that can take over the job while you guys are away. A lot of projects and software depend on youtube-dl.

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

If you need the commits that have come since the last release it helps to use the Git version with PIP, but otherwise it really doesn't ATM.

sdan41517 commented 3 years ago

Just use this:

pip install git+https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

or, if you just need YouTube, I have an alternative here:

https://github.com/89z/mech

If you need the commits that have come since the last release it helps to use the Git version with PIP, but otherwise it really doesn't ATM.

Is there a way to get the binary versions with the latest commits? Or do I need to build it myself?

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

Need to build it yourself. You can cheat by using the "EXE" file that's made when installed through PIP, which is actually more like a self-extracting archive with a Python script inside that boots the actual Python source code installed alongside the "EXE".

ugjka commented 3 years ago

I've switched to yt-dlp

fstirlitz commented 3 years ago

My suspicion was confirmed, @fstirlitz just blocked me on GitHub. What a child.

@89z Because nothing screams ‘adult’ like calling people trolls completely unprovoked. (And then deleting your comment.)

(The earlier deleted comment was:)

I would ignore @fstirlitz he seems to be a YT-DLP troll:

https://github.com/issues?q=involves:fstirlitz

liamengland1 commented 3 years ago

not a troll, but thank you for that link. Interesting to see how much time I've wasted on github lol @89z

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

To echo the OP's question, is youtube-dl still alive? Two months is a long time between updates.

filixm commented 3 years ago

The question that was posed here is very valid and no need to get defensive. I've been using youtube-dl for number of years, and this is the longest it has gone without an update, other than that time they were forced to shut down the repo due to RIAA lawsuit. I did take your advise 89z and switched to a different repo, yt-dlp, thanks for the suggestion!

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

Steven Penny wrote:

Please stop making pointless comments. Two months is not long in the terms of open source. I had an issue on another project (FFmpeg) that literally took five years to fix. If you dont like how long its been since a release, then use another project. I already made a suggestion above, plus other active good YouTube projects are available as well.

Given the large number of pending issues and that 2+ months is a long time for this project since the last update of any sort other than when it was taken down for legal reasons, I thought the OP's question, still not answered, was valid. There are plenty of users on other forums wondering what's happened to yt-dl viz updates. I'd already switched to another fork before the last update when yt-dl fell over with several streaming sites I frequent - they still don't work with yt-dl and issues were logged months ago .. I didn't get upset, I just moved to another fork.

For the person who is making the same criticising post quoted above & deleting it straight afterwards, this is not a whine about "why hasn't there been an update?" but rather a concerned "are there problems, legal or otherwise, behind the lengthy time since the last update?" It may take a long time (or never) to fix a specific issue, but we have gone over 2 months without a fix to any issue with yt-dl when previously updates came every few weeks. Users deserve to know whether a project is still alive or not. I've used other open source software where the devs have walked away yet the forum viz discussion & issues continued for years afterwards.

fastily commented 3 years ago

Definitely agree with the sentiments expressed above. It does seem a bit odd that none of the maintainers (e.g. @dstftw, @remitamine) have been active on GitHub for the past couple months. Yes, burnout is a very real issue, but I have to wonder why a successor was not named. Based on the number of outstanding PRs, there seem to be plenty of eligible volunteers

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

I've known of more than a few downloaders & front ends that weathered attacks from 'authorities' but suddenly went silent before completely vanishing after the said authorities switched from attacking the project to pursuing the developers. Yt-dl is a sizeable project with quite a few devs ... it seems odd that the whole project should suddenly freeze & the maintainers vanish .. it raises lots of red flags that there may have been some sort of legal action. The longer the uncertainty goes on, the more ominous it gets.

ugjka commented 3 years ago

Could it be because of "YouTube™" in the project's name?

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

It doesn't matter what the project is named cuz the code is publicly Open Source ! Search Engines see it and can show the files when using the word.

ugjka commented 3 years ago

You have never met lawyers, have you?

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

Not in person, but followed a couple, and a name as part of a software hardly matters.

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

youtube-dl may have originally started off many years ago as a youtube downloader, but it has long since branched out to work with almost any non-DRM'd streaming service. The "youtube" is merely a legacy of it's origins.

As for lawyers .. I've met some, some are even quite nice people. yt-dl has weathered legal attacks in the past and every time that's happened the news of the legal attack is not only mentioned on the yt-dl pages but it is reported in the technology media around the world. There's been no such reporting this time.

One reason why yt-dl has weathered previous legal attacks is that whilst it can be used for "breach of rights" downloads, it also has a lot of legitimate users. Educational institutions for instance, can obtain a licence to download streaming media for research and/or educational purposes.

dimitarvp commented 3 years ago

We are not entitled to the work of unpaid volunteers.

That being said, defensive or even flamey responses like the quotes above are not the way to go either. Putting a section on the top of the README, say named "Current status", that's being updated once every 1-2 weeks, is going to go a long way assuaging people's fears.

RIAA is a scary entity and it has some pretty scary people behind it as well. I think it's fair to expect that projects like youtube-dl should issue periodic "heartbeat" updates. Example: "We are still here and working hard but the current issues require more time. We'll post another update as we're progressing".

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

dimitarvp wrote ...

I fully agree. It's not just yt-dl though - the two co-ordinators for the yt-dl project have been missing in action from all of their github projects for 2 months now. And in their absence, yt-dl is in limbo. Unless the project co-ordinators are residents of the USA, the RIAA has much less power to threaten them than it would against github itself since Github is based in the USA and now owned by microsoft, so an easy target for the RIAA. Yet there is no sign, either on github (yt-dl has not been removed) or in the tech media of an attack on yt-dl. If the RIAA or some other entity had embarked on legal action against the yt-dl co-ordinators, part of that action would be a requirement to take down yt-dl. Since that has not happened, it strongly suggests their silence is due to other reasons & not legal attacks. Burnout & health reasons come to mind. :(

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

Amen to that, exactly my thinking. COVID-19 is still in circulation, so that could end in multiple ways.

furkanmustafa commented 3 years ago

This is extremely concerning. I hope everything is all right.

I did not forget about Grooveshark yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Greenberg#Death_and_legacy

animelover1984 commented 3 years ago

The PRs have been piling up for years now; it isn't as though this is a recent development.

dimitarvp commented 3 years ago

I switched to yt-dlp today and was pleasantly surprised that it downloads even higher quality videos and, at times, a better audio stream as well. Also it does seem to handle YouTube's throttling very well.

Thanks for the recommendation! I'm very pleased with the switch.

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

Re the reference to Grooveshark, when that takedown happened the service was no longer available and the takedown was widely reported in the media pretty quickly .. as with last year's takedown of yt-dl. There's been nothing this time, which suggests the issue is personal. I wasn't going to mention covid, but since someone else did, that was exactly what I was thinking. I lost a close friend to it a few months ago. :(

yt-dlp works a treat .. but be aware that quite a few of the command line options are different, including default options. Of course, most of the time the default settings for both are fine.

ghost commented 3 years ago

NSA?

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

Pfft, I highly doubt it. Like it was a national security problem.

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

If it was any government or legal agency then the yt-dl project would have been taken down as well., After all, their goal would be to eradicate yd-dl, so going after devs would only be a means to that end. No, I'm more inclined towards health problems or burnout. Or they all decided to take a holiday at the same time.

ghost commented 3 years ago

Two people at the same time, with no warning? Well, we'll see.

bnw42 commented 3 years ago

We are in the middle of a pandemic, so more likely now than 2 years ago. :( As for burnout, that can affect the whole team at the same time.

nicolaasjan commented 3 years ago

Burnout or not, they could have at least issued a statement.

furkanmustafa commented 3 years ago

Assuming that this is/was NOT the main thing in authors' lives.. burnout, or being too busy, or being engaged in an issue (like sickness), it's fairly possible to not comment at all, anywhere on the project. But all possible cases are concerning :(

Thanks for pointing out yt-dlp, looks like that is already a replacement.

myfirstnameispaul commented 3 years ago

Looks like there were only a handful of commits in July and August of 2020. Maybe they are taking a break during these months?

rautamiekka commented 3 years ago

Looks like there were only a handful of commits in July and August of 2020. Maybe they are taking a break during these months?

Exactly what's been said multiple times here.

myfirstnameispaul commented 3 years ago

Exactly what's been said multiple times here.

I didn't see anyone point out the break during the same months last year.

rusty-snake commented 2 years ago

This issues can be closed IMHO, #30568.

Lee-Carre commented 2 years ago

Why are there no new releases?

🙄🤦‍♂️

Due to the global supply-chain problems, we're awaiting shipment of necessities for the code-monkeys, in order that they consent to producing code. This being a 3-4 (out of 5) banana problem, after all. 😁 Plus, bananas are a (Cavendish) monoculture, so we must be extra careful that the plague doesn't start infecting them, which would require even more vaccine doses.

Of course, ample complaining by many users always greases the wheels.

You could always ask the code fairy, or Santa, instead. That would be quicker than installing a totalitarian government to whip keyboard-bashers into submission.

I hear that code-monkeys prefer free-range bananas, though.

scrutinizer11 commented 2 years ago

It's another 7 months hiatus after the last update in Dec' 21. The oft-recommended yt-dlp failed to compile on my system and I'm forced to use youtube-dl on every site but YouTube. So the new update would be welcome, especially if it manages to hammer out the throttling.

nicolaasjan commented 2 years ago

It's another 7 months hiatus after the last update in Dec' 21. The oft-recommended yt-dlp failed to compile on my system and I'm forced to use youtube-dl on every site but YouTube. So the new update would be welcome, especially if it manages to hammer out the throttling.

If yt-dlp failed to compile on your macOS, open an issue at their repo. If it's because your system Python version is still at 2.7, you can download the macOS standalone build. (see this issue)

FYI, there was just released an update. 🙂

Also, when you'd compile youtube-dl now, you'll notice that the YouTube throttling issue is already fixed in the current master.

scrutinizer11 commented 2 years ago

I installed Python 3. Building it still fails as 10.15SDK is expected (a configuration failure), while I'm on macOS 10.14. Are you saying if I re-download the youtube-dl source and compile I could use it on YT as well? Or is it a static binary that you suggest?

On 22 Jun 2022, at 07:49, nicolaasjan @.***> wrote:

It's another 7 months hiatus after the last update in Dec' 21. The oft-recommended yt-dlp failed to compile on my system and I'm forced to use youtube-dl on every site but YouTube. So the new update would be welcome, especially if it manages to hammer out the throttling.

If yt-dlp failed to compile on your macOS, open an issue at their repo. If it's because your system Python version is still at 2.7, you can download the macOS standalone build. (see this issue https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/1075)

FYI, there was just released an update https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/tag/2022.06.22.1. 🙂

Also, when you'd compile youtube-dl now, you'll notice that the YouTube throttling issue is already fixed in the current master.

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nicolaasjan commented 2 years ago

Building it still fails as 10.15SDK is expected (a configuration failure), while I'm on macOS 10.14.

I must admit that I know nothing about compiling on macOS, so I can't give you any advice regarding that. 😀️ (I build youtube-dl and yt-dlp on Linux Mint)

Are you saying if I re-download the youtube-dl source and compile I could use it on YT as well?

That's what I do and it works on YouTube.

Then put the resulting static binary in /usr/local/bin.

But doesn't the macOS standalone build of yt-dlp work for you?

rautamiekka commented 2 years ago

Why compile, though ?

myfirstnameispaul commented 2 years ago

There are at least 17 subscribers to this issue and your troubleshooting seems off-topic.

Can you please create a new issue and resolve it there? It doesn't seem necessary to flood everyone's inbox with your discussion.