Re: (was Re: Adding a description text property for a track) non-free javascript and ytdl

[Alexandre Garreau]

Le vendredo, 18-a de marto 2022, 21-a horo kaj 23:04 CET Yoni Rabkin a écrit :

> Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net> writes:

>

> 

>

> > I realized that I don't know a lot about ytdl/youtube-dl and went to

> > have a look. As a result, I came across a potential show-stopper for

> > inclusion in Emms in any form.

> >

> > I was concerned when I saw that ytdl/youtube-dl has a _javascript_

> > interpreter built-in.

> >

> > I found the following thread that reports that ytdl/youtube-dl

> > downloads and runs non-free _javascript_ automatically as part of

> > accessing the sites it supports:

> > https://trisquel.info/en/forum/do-youtube-dlhtml5-video-everywhere-run

> > -nonfree-js

> >

> > The thread is from back in 2017. Is this still the case? If so, is

> > there a libre version of ytdl?

>

> I bit more research reveals that this concern is real. Apparently there

> is a fork called hypervideo which removes the non-free parts:

> https://notabug.org/heckyel/hypervideo

yes, but i think the decision to make is more tricky as it may appear as: the _javascript_ interpreter youtube-dl claims to use disable most of its API, essentially interpreting turing-complete IO-less program that’s actually not redacted by humans but generated randomly by a script so that to act as an obscure key for some kind of weird kindof symetrical encryption

i don’t know if it has much impact that this code is proprietary.  anyway the mere fact we have to resort to reverse-engineering and scraping to get videos is concerning, and the whole usage of youtube (its standard interface is proprietary and there so way to use it as a creator/writer without using proprietary software) is problematic.  Yet the sharing and archiving of its videos is imho appropriate resistance.

However I’m unsure it still needs it for youtube, afaik, they mostly used it for openload and a very few other backends.  Actually it doesn’t hurt really much to remove them, and could mostly lead users to instead prefer other streaming platform to download (and then share) movie, series, etc.