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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

The page doesn't really say... But one of the things which made youtube-dl great was that it worked on almost any website you threw it at.

Looking at the readme and code... This project seems to only support youtube.com? If so, that doesn't really make this a drop-in replacement.

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I'd assume it's only YouTube, the usage message has this text [1]:

    Download a video from youtube

The beauty of youtube-dl is that it is so universal, supporting a great number of sites, even the simplest case of giving it a direct link to a video file and it will essentially wget it, and process according to your config.

[1] https://github.com/kkdai/youtube/blob/00a2aefb29c4fbf4fc3bf3...

The youtube-dl software still exists, it's just been taken down from GitHub.

Are the maintainers still maintaining it? The next time Youtube changes something in their "DRM"/obfuscation code, the last version of youtube-dl you got from Github will stop working...

Yep, I also used youtube-dl mainly on non-Youtube websites (Twitter, some news sites, etc). Definitely not a replacement.

The beauty also is that it's integrated with many other projects. You can open URL in smplayer and it will use youtube-dl to get media URL and play the video in that page. The same for mpv, and probably others.

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