YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious(chipp.in)
chipp.in
YouTube: Google has found a way to break Invidious
https://chipp.in/news/youtube-google-has-found-a-way-to-break-invidious/
17 comments
It's already fixed - https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4552
Someone says the fix is very clever but what did they do? I just see CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D
A parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time.
I don't think this was a hostile action by Google. An engineer probably just fixed a bug with input validation which broke the malformed requests Invidious was sending.
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...
I don't think this was a hostile action by Google. An engineer probably just fixed a bug with input validation which broke the malformed requests Invidious was sending.
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...
https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/pull/624 has a bit more information - looks like this is just updating an internal parameter (maybe to match what the real client does)
From the article:
> It is likely that existing alternatives and new alternatives will see huge user jumps when that happens.
I've heard that often and i'm pessimistic about it in general. Although there might be some hope, because the channels Invidious users might prefer (nerd stuff) are more likely to move to an alternative, than others.
> It is likely that existing alternatives and new alternatives will see huge user jumps when that happens.
I've heard that often and i'm pessimistic about it in general. Although there might be some hope, because the channels Invidious users might prefer (nerd stuff) are more likely to move to an alternative, than others.
Google really needs to revamp their YouTube model. I'd sign up for an embedding API with a low user fee (~$0.50) and generous low volume (free) and reasonable high volume (>50k requests/month at $0.01/1k). Ad free, of course, because YouTube ads are probably not great money makers for small businesses, hence the awful commercials we see pushed and successful creators reliance on in-video promotions.
YouTube streamed 21,885,984,000,000 minutes of content in 2023 and made $31.5 billion, which works out to an average of $0.0014 cents per minute.
If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.
If you'd be willing to pay more than that to watch videos I am sure they'd take your money.
Given your numbers, you are off by 100x. 31.5 billion / 21,885,984,000,000 minutes is 0.14 ct/minute.
You are correct, thank you. I've updated the post.
Wolfram Alpha helpfully formatted it as "0.14" and I missed the cent sign. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2431.5+billion+%2F+21%...
Wolfram Alpha helpfully formatted it as "0.14" and I missed the cent sign. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2431.5+billion+%2F+21%...
Could you point to the source on that figure? I gather streamed means simply “showed to an individual” in this context, but is this figure official or an estimate and does it take jnto account actual viewing time or is it based on an estimate of virwijg time and total video views?
> $0.0014 cents per minute.
0.0014 cents per minute is $0.000014 per minute.
0.0014 cents per minute is $0.000014 per minute.
Perhaps you didn't catch my comment's assertions. I stated the model and approximate values I'd be willing pay, given that most creators take in in-stream paid promotions already (above and beyond YT ads) and that general YouTube ads have poor power/are garbage/have low signal to noise ratios.
I don't really care what Google attributes to YouTube indirect or direct revenue and costs on their P&L in the context of average revenue, costs, and approximate minutes streamed, since the marginal costs are ridiculously cheap.
There is a lot of value in Google adopting the first mover advantage in a Bernoulli market. I'd imagine shareholders care about that a lot.
I don't really care what Google attributes to YouTube indirect or direct revenue and costs on their P&L in the context of average revenue, costs, and approximate minutes streamed, since the marginal costs are ridiculously cheap.
There is a lot of value in Google adopting the first mover advantage in a Bernoulli market. I'd imagine shareholders care about that a lot.
> Perhaps you didn't catch my comment's assertions. I stated the model and approximate values I'd be willing pay
No I understood it perfectly, it is just absurd. You lack power, leverage, or influence over Google so the only lever you have to make a better deal is by offering more money than you are currently to get the terms you'd like.
No I understood it perfectly, it is just absurd. You lack power, leverage, or influence over Google so the only lever you have to make a better deal is by offering more money than you are currently to get the terms you'd like.
I don't need power, leverage, or influence to state level of willingness to pay. That's independent of whether Google chooses to service the market segment I belong to. I'm part of the demand side, not the supply side.
They should still rethink their model, regardless.
They should still rethink their model, regardless.
Why would that make sense for them?
They are artificially suppressing the api value by banning uses people want. If people want to opt out of the recommendation engine and ads that makes hosting cheaper and easier for YouTube. They only do it to leverage market position and imo that's bad.
What factors do you think drives their cost? I doubt it’s recommends. The ads help fund payments to top creators which in turn drives usage.
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this happens every few weeks. wait for the update, or contribute
This is the first time i witnessed, that every single instance doesen't work. Did that happen before?
Going through the linked issue, it seems that the fix has already been merged and should be part of the next invidious release.
But it still is a fact that Google is trying to limit access to YouTube through alternatives like yt-dlp and invidious by constantly trying to break stuff.
But it still is a fact that Google is trying to limit access to YouTube through alternatives like yt-dlp and invidious by constantly trying to break stuff.
My hypothesis is that Invidious is small, unimportant and unprofitable enough that Google just does nothing to care for it. It's not being tested, there's no QA, and the impact on Invidious isn't considered at all when planning API changes.
If you're taking a walk in the forest, you don't care if you're crushing insects under your feet. You do nothing to deliberately crush them, but you don't walk extremely slowly all the time in case there's an insect nearby.
If you're taking a walk in the forest, you don't care if you're crushing insects under your feet. You do nothing to deliberately crush them, but you don't walk extremely slowly all the time in case there's an insect nearby.
by constantly trying to break stuff.
It's long been known that Google's weapon is change; they've been doing that with web "standards" too. For YouTube, I guess the next stage in the cat-and-mouse game is to automate fixing it, and I even dare say that this new AI stuff might come in handy for that.
It's long been known that Google's weapon is change; they've been doing that with web "standards" too. For YouTube, I guess the next stage in the cat-and-mouse game is to automate fixing it, and I even dare say that this new AI stuff might come in handy for that.
> by constantly trying to break stuff.
> > Google's weapon
The culture I find myself in, in 2024, is one of war; unrecognisable from anything I've seen in "peaceful civilian life" before. It has no resemblance to business, to markets, to value, to a lawful society of fairness, utility and cohesion. What happened to us?
> > Google's weapon
The culture I find myself in, in 2024, is one of war; unrecognisable from anything I've seen in "peaceful civilian life" before. It has no resemblance to business, to markets, to value, to a lawful society of fairness, utility and cohesion. What happened to us?
I don’t think anything happened to us, so much as your memory is flawed. We’ve never evolved beyond base self-interest, we’ve just become much more productive at extracting value from every aspect of life.
(Edited)
I'm genuinely sorry for you that you feel your culture has become nothing but an extractive free-for-all. There remain people who still aspire to treating others as ends and not means. Extraction is not productivity. To produce is to create. Your comment kinda validates what I was hinting at more though; that BigTech now sees itself as in all-out "do what though wilt" conflict with the civil population. It's a cyber war in all but name - though we still pretend it's "business". At some point the population are going to figure the rules have changed. From that point I'd give FAANG a few months to a year. Most analysts have figured that a cyber war would be inter-national rather than intra/civil conflict. We'll need a backup plan for Google/Microsoft etc unless they're radically neutralised (by government breakup or similar)
I'm genuinely sorry for you that you feel your culture has become nothing but an extractive free-for-all. There remain people who still aspire to treating others as ends and not means. Extraction is not productivity. To produce is to create. Your comment kinda validates what I was hinting at more though; that BigTech now sees itself as in all-out "do what though wilt" conflict with the civil population. It's a cyber war in all but name - though we still pretend it's "business". At some point the population are going to figure the rules have changed. From that point I'd give FAANG a few months to a year. Most analysts have figured that a cyber war would be inter-national rather than intra/civil conflict. We'll need a backup plan for Google/Microsoft etc unless they're radically neutralised (by government breakup or similar)
yt-dlp is still working for me, and when/if Google ever break that, I'll stop watching youtube.
How are you using it? If you come across a youtube link, do you run yt-dlp on the command line and then watch the downloaded file in a media player? Asking because I'm too lazy for that, and interested to know if there is some fancier way.
Yes, exactly that. So much stuff just vanishes, it's prudent to simply download everything by default. Whether that's a video with yt-dlp, or a webpage with singlefile or other tools, save it all.
I wish I had better tools for simply saving everything I see on the internet at all times. The disk-space cost would be trivial in the era of terabyte drives, and simply never worrying about link-rot would be huge.
I wish I had better tools for simply saving everything I see on the internet at all times. The disk-space cost would be trivial in the era of terabyte drives, and simply never worrying about link-rot would be huge.
I found grab-site to be extremely effective with even complex, content-heavy websites. Dunno about YouTube though, I’m afraid of what would happen if I tried running such an archival routine. My server would probably catch fire.
What I really want is a thing that goes through my browser history and just archives everything unless I specifically exclude it.
Browser history _used_ to do that, almost. You could browse your history offline and pages would still render. And at some point, that stopped working.
Browser history _used_ to do that, almost. You could browse your history offline and pages would still render. And at some point, that stopped working.
I often use mpv with a yt-dlp hook, which means I can basically just do ``mpv youtube.com/watch/whatever``, and stream the video in mpv.
I love that, but lately it seems to freeze a few seconds into the video.
Cool!
> mpv with a yt-dlp hook
What does hook mean in this context? Is it some kind of plugin or addon to MPV or can MPV do that out-of-the-box?
> mpv with a yt-dlp hook
What does hook mean in this context? Is it some kind of plugin or addon to MPV or can MPV do that out-of-the-box?
As far as I know, it worked out of the box for me after installing both mpv and yt-dlp on Arch linux.
If you are too lazy for that, try the New Pipe app. Works really great. You can also have subscriptions without an account.
It turns out that it's easy to rig eww (Emacs's built-in browser) to automatically pass URLs to whatever special handlers you desire, via the "browse-url-handlers" variable. I did that earlier this weekend for Github and Youtube. For Youtube, I have a wrapper function just starts mpv with the supplied url. For Github, a different wrapper just breaks out the user/repo pair from the url and invokes github-explorer, available in MELPA. (When I need more from a repo, I can just clone it and explore it locally. Either way, there's little need to deal with Github's web UI.)
You browse youtube with Emacs? How do you see the thumbnails (or don't you care)?
Not quite. Late last year I began running a Searx instance locally, less for privacy than for having a hackable meta-search engine. Since it supports several "bangs," like !ddg and !yt and the like, I generally use this for quickly searching Youtube without changing context. When I enable images [0], I can see the thumbnails just fine. Regardless, there are plenty of places on the web (like here) where people will post interesting YT links, and having them pop open in mpv is a good default [1].
I've also evolved a CLI YT client, based on mpv/yt-dlp and fzf; it does not show thumbnails. Even so, it's perfectly fine for gathering lots of search results, like
---
[0] One of the first things I did with eww was to bind "I" to a function that toggles images on or off and re-displays the current page.
[1] In my setup, I can override all special handling of a URL by holding Ctrl while hitting Enter to follow a link.
[2] Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with TinyLLama about the medical uses of hollandaise and options for regulating it. Did you know that it can be taken intravenously to help fight cancer?
I've also evolved a CLI YT client, based on mpv/yt-dlp and fzf; it does not show thumbnails. Even so, it's perfectly fine for gathering lots of search results, like
$ yt 500 medical uses for hollandaise
---
[0] One of the first things I did with eww was to bind "I" to a function that toggles images on or off and re-displays the current page.
[1] In my setup, I can override all special handling of a URL by holding Ctrl while hitting Enter to follow a link.
[2] Earlier today, I had a fascinating conversation with TinyLLama about the medical uses of hollandaise and options for regulating it. Did you know that it can be taken intravenously to help fight cancer?
fzf looks interesting, I'll check it out.
I use it two ways.
1. A desktop application call yt-dlg/youtube-dl-gui.
2. Metube, which is a selfhosted application and there is a plugin for the browser to send things to it.
1. A desktop application call yt-dlg/youtube-dl-gui.
2. Metube, which is a selfhosted application and there is a plugin for the browser to send things to it.
mpv $youtubeLinkBrowser extension
YouTube revanced seems to be broken as well. all videos have been replaced with a video playing "not available on this app" over black background.
I wonder how long it took G to push out this breaking change. I wonder if there will ever be a point where G will just give up.
The fight between G and alternative front ends reminds me of the over engineered solution by NYC MTA to prevent people from hopping the turnstile.
They invested some millions of dollars into building and deploying the system. Only for the system to be a very mild deterrent which can be easily fooled.
The fight between G and alternative front ends reminds me of the over engineered solution by NYC MTA to prevent people from hopping the turnstile.
They invested some millions of dollars into building and deploying the system. Only for the system to be a very mild deterrent which can be easily fooled.
[dupe]
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882455
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39882455
Google could break all of the unofficial clients if it wanted.
This is just google being google and changing stuff.
This is just google being google and changing stuff.
How does Piped compare to Invidious? Piped seems to have SponsorBlock built-in, which seems like a great idea.
yt-dlp and NewPipe still work though.
Been running a non-public Piped instance for a couple of years now.
There are videos where it works and videos where it doesn't.
It's been a few months now where some proportion of videos fail to play over Piped no matter what (the same videos will fail across public instances too) and anecdotally that percentage has increased recently.
There are videos where it works and videos where it doesn't.
It's been a few months now where some proportion of videos fail to play over Piped no matter what (the same videos will fail across public instances too) and anecdotally that percentage has increased recently.
Yes, the problem seems to only affect public instances, the Invidous' developers suggest running an instance locally to avoid the issue.
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