pytube

Quicker explanation of how Youtube is doing it is at the source code of pytube: https://github.com/tfdahlin/pytube/blob/bb890af3b271a616bbe1... This is linked from the description of PR 30184 of youtube-dl but @varenc linked to a specific comment (talking about patching Windows builds, AFAICT) which might confuse some people. I'll even save you the click: > YouTube's strategy to restrict downloading videos is to send a ciphered version of the signature to the client, along with the decryption algorithm obfuscated in JavaScript. For the clients to play the videos, JavaScript must take the ciphered version, cycle it through a series of "transform functions," and then signs the media URL with the output. There are still a lot of things I don't understand here but gotta give Youtube a slow-clap moment for their devious ingenuity.

There are workarounds (detailed very nicely in dirkf’s pull request for youtube-dl): https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/30184 Pasting the content here for convenience: Since summer 2021, YouTube has started serving media URLs with a query parameter such as …&n=SXiXBH-xzrjeioPN&…. This now appears to be the default behaviour. Unless the value of this parameter is transformed according to an algorithm delivered in the site player JS, the download speed for the URL is throttled to ~50kB/s. Solutions for this include: • implementing a more complete JS interpreter, eg based on PR [jsinterp] Actual JS interpreter¹ #11272; • using an external JS interpreter (PhantomJS, now unmaintained, is used by some extractors); • spoofing the Android or iOS client to acquire unthrottled links, as successfully implemented in yt-dlp². This PR takes a