YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos | Hacker News Reader

YouTube-dl can no longer download age-restricted videos

github.com

596 pointsmakeworld445 comments

A few days ago, I clicked an age restricted video on Youtube and usually I just state that I am above 18 but now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it.

I am not going to send this just to watch some random video clip that users have declared not appropriate to a young audience because it features a zombie. Seriously!

You work so hard explaining to your friends good infosec practice like not just typing their credit card in because some site wants to "verify their age" and then Google and Apple just go and fuck around with stuff like this.

At this point the best advice you can give your friends is "stay the fuck away from computers unless you're willing to sit down and read a bunch of FOSSS manuals."

Related anecdote: A few years ago, my father bought a android tablet to my grand parents (both 85+). After watching them use it for a few minutes, I realized how user hostile the technical world has become: tons of ads popping up and asking for your attention (“click me”, “download x”, “make your device run faster”, etc).

This and apps “redesigned” every few month, breaking the workflow they've struggled to learn (they usually needed to follow the hand-written note, they had taken when I showed them how to do).

They've used it a bit more than a year, with occasional breakage, and they now have stopped completely.

> This and apps “redesigned” every few month

This is why my 90++ old completely non-technical mother has been using Linux since the 90s. I set up a very customized fvwm environment with mutt (also customized) and emacs (same) and helped her learn it. The beauty is that nothing has changed at all in over 25 years!

Root it, install a dns level adblocker (either for their network or just the tablet), install appropriate apps for them (preferring FOSS when possible via fdroid) and relock the tablet before giving it to them. Oh, and run a backup of the whole device first.

I can't believe it has to come to this to get a usable device for a growing segment of the population. Old people practically need their own IT department fighting for their best interests with how predatory tech companies have been towards them. They are SOL if their kid isn't a techie.

In fact I did exactly this to solve the ad issue, but they ended up stopping anyway because they couldn't cope with the constant UI change of their apps (Skype & TV replay apps). And there's nothing I could do about it.

It's why Apple is the best at what they do. Their apps are consistent for years.

Interesting, when does Apple ask for a cc for age verification? I don't think I've come across that UI.

Edit: Looks like it might be an EU thing?

Must be.

On major mobile networks in the UK, SIM cards/data plans by default have an adult content internet filter enabled. Blocks stuff like pornography (obviously) and even some other various adult age-focused content like gaming websites. (I've seen the EA Battlefield/Call Of Duty websites blocked before)

Usually if you try to access, say, pornhub.com, it'll redirect (ala. WiFi captive portal style) to an internal network page and you have to enter a credit card to disable it on your account. A debit/bank card won't work. I'm over 18 now but at the time I came across this (also over 18) I didn't have a credit card but I ended up bypassing this with a Curve (Fintech 1->many card thing) card which seems to identify as a credit card on the network's system.

Alternatively, if you don't mind never seeing the assistant again (jk.), you can go into one of the network's shops and ask the assistant to turn it off by providing some ID like a passport/driving licence.

This only reinforces my image of the UK as a long since resigned totalitarian police state — that, along with the huge 1984-esque CCTV posters with giant eyes hanging watchfully over a dreary autumn midday in London.

I set my age to about 3 months old in Skype and got locked out. They need my CC to verify my age because of COPA (child online protection act in the US) or something.

Skype is not Apple though

But other websites don't do this, so I don't think it's a COPPA thing.

tv.apple.com did for me when trying to play a video

What videos are free to watch on there?

Not an EU thing.

On the more humorous side they could have implemented an age check similar to the one from Leisure Suit Larry.

Although the questions were a lot harder back in 1991 when the Internet was not at your disposal.

http://www.classicgaming.cc/pc/leisure-suit-larry/age-quiz

I had to solve these questions back in 95-96 (when I was 15) after buying these games used from a pawn shop. I used various sources from multiple BBS's and teachers at my high school.

Tbh I think this sort of thinng would be harder today, if you took away the internet "for a night", because pop culture is now much more fragmented than it was back then.

On one hand, people have given up their credit card for worse pre-Internet or outside of the Internet (like "free" or nearly free trials that turn into a subscription service).

On another, Google already has a lot of peoples' credit card numbers by way of Google Pay. Does this expose those people to any more risk?

And for those who haven't given their credit card number, as a protection against abuse or "accidental" purchases (in-app, in-game, premium content, etc.), this looks like a suspiciously-convenient-to-Google mechanism for acquiring CC data.

We were previously told that it was advisable to use YouTube under an alias, and that other personal information such as phone numbers would be used only for account verification.

Those policies were rescinded or proved to be lies.

Google have no credibility here.

> this looks like a suspiciously-convenient-to-Google mechanism for acquiring CC data.

Actually wouldn't be surprised if the newly acquired CC number appeared right away as a new means of payment in Google Play.

The problem isn't that Google is going to do something bad with your credit card, it's that because it's Google, they are training people to be okay with it everywhere else. Like when my bank sends me an email with a link to an external domain because I have a "secure" message.

Actually Google is going to do something very bad with your credit card - link your online nym to your meatspace identity so they can better surveil you. That's much worse than having to deal with a few fraudulent charges, which at most requires mailing in an affidavit.

Aren't there some credit cards that can create virtual numbers?

Just give them a virtual number and then disable it right after registering. Then have your free trial, and only if you decide to actually subscribe, change it to a credit card number that is active.

Businesses should not be unscrupulously trying to make money off people who forgot about the product during their free trial.

I use Privacy.com to make virtual cards for this purpose.

It might not be that dangerous right now, but it sets a bad precedent. It gets users accustomed to that, and gives bad actors a cover for their activities: Look, Google does it!

My favourite is how many sites want you to click on a link in a "verification email" to log in, especially if you take basic precautions like blocking scripts and trackers and deleting cookies periodically. All that work training people not to click links in unexpected emails, and these companies get a bright idea to require that to log in.

Blame Government not Google and Apple.

I hate both, but this is purely a function of terrible regulations

It's really bad but seems to be some EU law, this isn't something Google ever wanted.

An alternative would be entering your passport or something which would be even crazier

It's not required by the EU. If not all the sites that have content not appropriate for children, such as porn sites, or Reddit, would need to implement this. And of course you wouldn't give your ID or credit card to a porn site.

Google is the only company that started to implement this. To me it's not required by law but they decided to do so to get more user data. Also because having a credit card doesn't confirm nothing about your age. I use a credit card to buy things online since I'm 13, you can have a credit card even if you are not 18, simply your parents need to sign for it, but then it can have your name on it.

In 2010, Google required your ID card if you enter a false birth date, and you are locked out of your account in the meantime. Happened to a colleague of mine because we were using Google Apps for Business. Because he didn’t want to give his real info to Google at work, he couldn’t work for 2 days and had to give Google his ID.

> In 2010, Google required your ID card if you enter a false birth date

How do they know it's false? And if they know it's false why do they ask for it, they already have the right one.

AFAIK the age restriction credit card thing (inside the EU) is the result of some stupid law change (the Audiovisual Media Services Directive). Google probably doesn't want to validate users' age (because selling ads to impressionable kids is very lucrative) but they have to now.

I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. You hear it all the time when discussing tracking banners or ID verification. NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck, and most laws give you plenty of leeway in how you implement it. This is really not personal, but I HATE the argument.

Take this as an example. The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1], and on that website you can read the rules (they even simplified them for us). The rules about minors are pretty relaxed[2]. For non-linear content (such as on-demand video) the law requires that content which "might seriously impair the physical, mental or moral development of minors" wont "normally" be seen/heard by kids. Nowhere does it say that YouTube has to require a National ID to show a video of a zombie. It's all interpretation, because that's how we do laws.

It's true that YouTube said that it's "in line with AVMSD"[3], but it's a lazy excuse to shove in a feature.

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [2]: https://ec.europa.eu/archives/information_society/avpolicy/r... [3]: https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/using-technology-more-c...

> I'm so tired of tech people saying "it has to suck because the law requires it", when they clearly haven't read it. [..] The AVMSD isn't new, it was codified in 2010. It has a website[1]

You know, if you were going to rant about people not reading things, you probably should have first validated your own assumptions. AVMSD was just updated ( https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a... ) which just recently went into effect. The updated law requires online video platforms to age gate content for children. How, exactly, do you propose they do that with an implementation that doesn't suck?

> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck,

This is kind of an excuse though, because I have never seen an implementation of an age gate online that isn't kind of awful. You either make something that is trivial for kids to bypass, or you make something that is invasive, like Youtube's system.

So we get these laws that say, "solve the problem", and there isn't a way to solve the problem. But criticism of the law or criticism of the law's outcomes aren't allowed because the law doesn't technically require that your solution to be terrible. It just asks you to do something that's impossible to do well without violating someone's privacy.

In the US (at least for a while) this was solved by pretending that self-reported ages are an effective way to protect kids. And we pretended that would at least reduce exposure to this kind of content, even though in practice it has basically no impact at all. But if the law doesn't care about effectiveness, then why have the law in the first place? So we raise the standards a bit so that the law has some teeth. But again, nobody has ever in any context demonstrated a working age gate to me online that doesn't involve violating someone's privacy or collecting identifying information about them like a credit card or ID.

So it doesn't actually matter whether or not the law says the solution has to be terrible. The only outcomes that are possible from these laws are either ineffective solutions or invasive solutions. If there is only one method to accomplish an outcome, then requiring the outcome is effectively the same as requiring the method.

If it was codified in 2010, was is it only going into affect now 10 years later? I'm not an expert in browsing EU law, but I do see a "revision" of AVMSD [0] that passed in 2018 and started going into effect around 2021 in various countries [1]. The two links you posted very clearly say "archived on 2012" so they are not the new version.

[0] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/revision-a...

[1] https://www.obs.coe.int/en/web/observatoire/avmsd-tracking

How do you even define content that "might" seriously impair the physical, mental, or moral development of minors. This is so subjective I don't see how you could get away with marking anything that wouldn't in the US be rated PG.

At that point in order to ensure that such content isn't shown to minors you have to require a credit card or an ID because any reasonably kid would figure out how to set his or her age to a reasonable age of majority to avoid being pigeonholed into kid stuff.

Can you give me an example of an alternative strategy that would be legal and more reasonable?

> NO, the law does NOT require your implementation to suck,

When the law is "you have to verify a meatspace user's age before showing them content that could arbitrarily be considered 'adult' by some group of lawmakers who most likely have different and more puritan values than you," yes, it does require your implementation to suck, because that law sucks by definition.

I'm glad YouTube implemented it this way, so that the pain of shitty laws can be felt instead of being allowed to proceed. Maybe people will actually try to push back against overzealous Internet regulation at some point.

It's possibly not how they wanted to interpret it (though I see how it helps their ad/tracking business). But it is probably how they have to interpret it because they might get sued if they didn't. At the very least it's an expensive court case to dismiss. All whilst eyeball-thirsty news agencies print articles such as "Google Refuses to Support EU Child-Protection Legislation", and Twitter-personas post tweets like "Uh Google - what about the kids?"

I'm not saying that the law requires that YouTube does this, all I'm saying is that this policy is the result of the AVMSD. Without the extensions to the AVMSD, Google would not have implemented this behaviour. You can argue that they've implemented an intentionally awful way to comply just to spite the politicians, or that they're overthinking the law, but there's still a direct relation between the update of the directive and the change in YouTube's policies.

Apparently you'll need to scan an ID if you don't have a credit card, and I bet the EU has millions of young adults without a credit card. Either way, the end result is that you cannot use a video service without exposing your real identity to the service provider. And for what? Is there an epidemic of video clips wrecking children's minds I'm not aware of? Lacking that, this doesn't seem even remotely justified.

All this is either EU lifers keeping themselves busy to justify their existence to themselves, MEPs wanting something to grandstand on, or something equally vapid. A much better approach would have been to keep the age prompt and leave the rest up to the parents, ie, to do nothing.

> Is there an epidemic of video clips wrecking children's minds I'm not aware of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

> And for what? Is there an epidemic of video clips wrecking children's minds I'm not aware of?

I mean... maybe. I have young children and have no desire to have them anywhere near YouTube for essentially as long as possible _because_ of that very concern.

> Google probably doesn't want to validate users' age (because selling ads to impressionable kids is very lucrative) but they have to now.

I mean, I hate this age validation as much as everyone else, curbing advertising to impressionable kids doesn't sound too stupid to me...

Selling ads for non-kids stuff to impressionable kids is the opposite of lucrative. Advertisers generally don't want to waste their money on advertising to people who aren't buying.

> now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it

Related, I can’t install my telco’s app because it’s region-locked to Australia and Google Play Store seems to think I’m in the USA—never mind that my account was created in Australia over fifteen years ago and it’s only been to America twice for a total of less than three months, and that my phone was bought in Australia and set up in Australia, as was my first phone. Seems like a case of an absurd and harmful default. Anyway, the only way to convince them I’m in Australia is to add a billing method. Nope. I’m not giving them billing details. (Now if only the telco would unlock it, as their support staff said they were working on, never mind that the whole process takes less than five minutes and I gave them the help page over a month ago. Or better still, if the telco would just provide a web interface like literally everyone else does, rather than just Apple and Google Android apps. Sigh. If only they weren’t the cheapest for my needs by a large margin.)

Also related to the whole age thing, I just started the Google Settings app half an hour ago for other reasons and it triggered a notification asking me to enter my birthday “to help us comply with the law”, expressed even more strongly on the page the notification takes you to as “Your date of birth is missing. This info is needed to comply with the law.”, with a “learn more about why Google asks for this info” link to https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/1733224?hl=en-GB, where the only sort of thing that they could conceivably be referring to as a legal compliance matter would be the minimum age of 13, and… I’ve been using that account for longer than that anyway.

Create a new account from an Australian IP, sign it in to your Android phone as a secondary account, and then switch to the new account in Play to install the app. (Once installed, use of the app is not tied to the secondary account in any way.)

Have you tried googling the app identifier (grab it from the google play url) to find an APK download?

I had this happen with the old "Ah fuck, I can't believe you've done this" video.

I'm not sure why exactly that has an age restriction, or why I'd give Google some ID to watch a vintage Youtube meme. I presume it's because their ML detected 'fuck' in the audio.

Note to Google: Ah fuck, I can't believe you've done this.

This encapsulates my feelings perfectly. My Gmail account is 17 years old, but I get a notification on my phone every hour or so, that I must verify my age with Google. Nevermind that I've bought plenty of things from them over the years and that all I want to do is watch a YouTube video they happily showed me many times before.

Now I'm shopping for some storage to keep seventeen years of emails etc. so I can do a quick Takeout so that I don't lose access to all my data when I inevitably get unfriended and blocked by them for not being sufficiently compliant.

Hearing the funny man say fuck now requires ID, wonderful.

I had that too. A 14 year old account, with Google Cloud and Google One billing, plus many Google Store purchases and they still wanted me to prove my age. WTF?

That totally makes sense from a software engineering point of view. The age check was probably implemented as a "verified_age" column somewhere, and they didn't bother backfilling it with your existing google account info.

Same situation here.

This, the 2/3 ads being forced down me which are of no interest at all and the constant upselling of YouTube music and the recent shoot down of ad blockers on the desktop browser front really makes it a hostile place to be a consumer of media. I have experimentally uninstalled the YT app off my phone and not used the web site and I haven’t missed it a bit.

> the recent shoot down of ad blockers on the desktop browser

Mobile browsers have been affected as well. uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android has been letting the ads through recently. Fortunately, NewPipe exists, but it depends on youtube-dl so, while it remains free of ads, it's also affected by this change surrounding age-restricted content.

Hopefully people start moving somewhere else within the next few years, maybe PeerTube. Admittedly, YouTube's network effects are disgustingly strong. I wonder what it would take to break them.

On Android there's Newpipe that's really good. But now they're gonna face the same problems as youtube-dl with age-gated videos.

The only real solution is to move out of the walled garden alltogether. Peertube, anyone?

The App experience just got worse and worse.

I deleted the app and now use Brave for YouTube watching on iOS. Clears most ads, and allows background playback if you full screen the video first.

A friend of mine had trouble with his young kid - he used a youtube video to walk himself through getting a credit card with grandma's birthday money. (I assume the prepaid cards you can get in the grocery store)

They found out when they found a nintendo portable full of games in his closet.

He was about 12.

How did everything end up shaking out? Were the parents on the hook for the credit card bill, or was the credit card company on the hook for issuing a card to Santos L. Helpar?

Had a video come up as age restricted forcing me to sign into watch. It was a cooking video, they added some form of alcohol to the dish at one point..

I mean, I get it, but it still feels ridiculous.

Looks like they are trying to reduce the friction to subscribe to Youtube Premium

Take a look at the EU's Audiovisual Media Services Directive [https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/avmsd] and you'll have your answer for why this feature exists.

YT Premium subscribers also get this prompt. At least I did.

Do debit cards work? If so, maybe get a prepaid debit card, buy stuff with it until it has a very low balance, and from then on use it for age verification.

A screenshot: https://twitter.com/bad_at_computer/status/13996876854810583...

I got hit with it too. I even have a youtube premium subscription - they already have my card on file.

Google is so incredibly evil.

Yep, this happened to me a few weeks ago (even commented about it on a HN thread). I've had this youtube account since about a year after youtube came out and the google account its attached to since about 2005. To not be under 18, I'd have had to be be rather young when I created those accounts.

With all the privacy-invading data google and youtube collect on me, surely they know that I'm old enough to watch whatever I like on youtube. But there's no way I am using either of the available methods to verify my age. I'd rather just not watch stuff on youtube.

I wonder if I could just wait a year and pass the filter on virtue of gmail-account being 18 years old...

I just get a sign in to confirm age. Are you absolutely certain you weren't on a third party site?

This is mainly a thing in the EU

> now they ask for a credit card number or an identity card to prove it

I got the same thing and it left a bad taste in my mouth -- it felt to me that it was just Google's excuse to hoover up more information about me.

No, Google, I am not going to give you my credit card of government issued ID.

I am not going to send my ID card to Google period. Neither will I give them a credit card # unless I'm ... you know ... paying for one of their services. Which isn't likely to happen either.

Edit: especially since it's US age ratings which have no connection to EU age ratings. I ran into it while trying to view some collection of every time Samuel L Jackson says "motherfucker" in a movie. For example Pulp Fiction - which is one of the movies - is rated 18 in the US but ... 12 to 16 in various EU countries?

A credit card seems like a reasonable way to verify age. Can you think of a better way? Or do you think no content should be age restricted?

And if I have no credit card?

(I have no credit card. I approach 6 decades in age.)

I doubt it has anything to do with verifying age though. More likely they know people are hesitant to sign up and pay for youtube, but if they can get your credit card in other ways, then later it easier to get you to pay for something because then you just have to press "ok" since your details are already entered.

Plus this gives them your identity, which is relevant because their business model nowadays is based around tracking people.

eIDAS + smart card reader. :)

But I guess, google still wants to make the check passable.

This is how youtube and other SV websites will blackhole the undesirable channels and creators, mark my words.

That’s interesting because I had a credit card at 16 (it was on my parent’s account).

I had a debit at 12 (Visa Electron), my own account but approved at the bank by mom.

_solr perhaps you have the link to the video your interested in?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIrmxOBnKcs

This is clearly Google pushing $12/month youtube red.

redtube you say? redtube.com is a porn site.

Its a poor product naming with google. I'd imagine that's going to make for some consternation.

That’s on the EU, not Youtube.

EU citizens needs to convince their government(s) that these age restrictions are not acceptable or live with the status quo.

As someone else mentioned in the comments, the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure and i have been using it with success for weeks now.

get the extension, export the cookies.txt file to a folder, then run youtube-dl in that folder with:

youtube-dl --cookies cookies.txt https://youtu.be/id

it works as of right this minute [1] and in my experience that cookie continues to work even if you log out of your account in the browser and log back in etc

i'm trying to imagine a way to have a more permanent solution, maybe if youtube-dl provided some kind of login prompt type thing to enter some your credentials to virtually log in, although i imagine that would start to be another cat and mouse game of it working and then not working.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bga...

[1] https://i.jollo.org/ytdl.gif

But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in. I don't want YouTube to track which videos I watch and make history-based suggestions so I never sign-in and reset cookies often. I occasionally stumble upon age-restricted videos and feel curious what's there but I don't want any of them to influence what does YouTube believe my interests are so I just use youtube-dl INSTEAD of signing-in.

And by the way, I always mostly used random birth dates whenever registering anywhere because I consider that personal information and don't want to share it. I don't even know what birth date did I set when I got my GMail back in the days it required invitations.

I don't feel like watching an age-restricted video ever again if this actually requires identification and leaves no workaround.

UPDATE: I'm actually surprised this gets down-voted.

> But I don't want to use the cookies, I used youtube-dl exactly to watch age-restricted videos without signing-in.

Yes, and I want a pony. We can absolutely discuss how useful or harmful age verification on the internet is, (and your points about tracking are certainly valid) - but fact is that Google implemented it.

It is not youtube-dl's job to circumvent that. Their responsibility is letting me download the videos to my hard drive that I can already view in my browser. They never advertised themselves as a tool to circumvent access restrictions.

If the new age verification broke youtube-dl in such a way that you couldn't download the video at all, I think the outrage would be justified - but that isn't the case.

It's just FAANG being FAANG. Why make working software when you can make non-working software?

It's not about software, it's about appeasing advertisers and puritans who want to keep the children safe. It's a legal and business issue.

This feels a bit overdramatic. You can remove videos from your watch history and, in my experience, YouTube will cease to give you recommendations based on them. You could also create a separate account used solely for watching videos with YouTube-dl instead of using your main one if you're worried about recommendations. I agree that it sucks that a workaround is necessary, but I don't think this particular one is worth getting too worked up about.

Does this work in practice? Most websites require text verification for accounts. With that they can just link separate accounts in the back end.

It works for me in practice. YouTube definitely are capable of linking separate accounts in the back end, but in my experience they don't do so for recommendations. I have a separate account specifically for watching a given type of content and I don't receive any of its recommendations on my main account. Now, whether or not they use linking to give advertisements or sell data I'm not sure, but at that point they can link based on IP anyway and we're talking about a separate issue.

Maybe get a cheap MVNO SIM like Ting Mobile and use that to register?

I know I've had google accounts that didn't require any re authentication in the way of phone numbers for going on years so you can likely discard the number after you show you are human.

I ran into this earlier this week when I went to watch Kung Fury, a free movie hosted on YouTube which is now age restricted. I pretty much just couldn't. Luckily the Pirate Bay exists, and now I have a permanent copy which is what I probably should've done anyway.

I guess this means I watch less YouTube, which is probably better for me in the long run. But like hell I'm signing in.

What an excellent film

I'm born in whatever far back year forms will let me choose in most internet services, over a 100 years old in a lot of cases, I assumed everyone did this.

Three dead trolls in a baggie even made a song about it way back in early 2000s. The privacy song, just fill their database with garbage. Also I'm a 43 year old nun.

Oddly enough, it seems the internet [login forms] have created an uptick in 43 year old nuns.

The church finally has a solution to their clergy loss. ;)

wouldn't it be better to change age/profession/etc stuff per website?

On a site like HN I assumed everybody’s birthday was Unix epoch 0

Bah, young whippersnappers.

Never had the patience to go all the way to the top, so I'm typically born in <couple of mouse scrolls up, random click>.

I was born in the year zero; if that breaks your database, good.

Youtube make you submit your ID or credit card details now as proof of age.

I was going to post something very similar, as I would use it specifically to watch videos that want me to give up information and sign in. I don't find that reasonable, thus I adjust accordingly my taking these countermeasures.

You are being downvoted to suppress your well thought out information. It would be nice if HN had a public ledger of who up or down voted a post. You would click on the post and could see which usernames voted and which way. It would bring much needed transparency to combat these information suppression abuses.

"I want to maintain my privacy when watching videos."

"I think the site should publicly post a list of users who upvoted and downvoted comments that I feel were wrongly suppressed."

I had to read your comment multiple times to determine whether it was intended to be sarcastic or not.

Not sure I agree with it, but "Exactly those actions intended to cause publicly visible changes (such as comment graying) should be subject to transparency, which anything else (such as viewing videos or comments) should be subject to privacy." seems like a prefectly self-consistent position.

The moment you participate in voting, you become a participant , even if your participation is really small, instead of being a pure consumer. When the internet came along, so much content has been made available without requiring accounts. Then services appeared that began auth-walling their content. Nowadays you can't even visit someone's linked in page without logging in, and there are major restrictions for places like facebook or instagram. This "must have an account with us" internet isn't the internet the world deserves. And again, requiring accounts for participation is fine. Talking about consumption only.

And what did you determine?

I am not much of a youtube-dl user (I can download fine from YouTube with a few lines of shell script) but I notice youtube-dl tries to send a "consent" cookie for every video even when not logged in. For example:

   cookie: CONSENT=YES+cb.20210328-17-p0.en+FX+203

maybe one solution might be to create a new youtube account in an incognito browser, and then just use the cookie from that brand new account indefinitely for youtube-dl purposes. that way, the cookie you're using in youtube-dl wouldnt be 'tied' to your real account.

I did this with another Google product and I'd be surprised if they didn't know that both accounts belong to the same person.

I don’t have a Google account and yet I watch YouTube almost daily. The algorithm still curates a feed for me so why should I have to sign up? I ran into an issue where I was not able to download an age-restricted video last week and just moved on.

Nothing Google does will make me want to create an account.

Get a second account just for yt?

"... in my experience that cookie continues to work even if you log out..."

Honest question: Should logging out invalidate the cookie for future use. If one of these cookies falls into the wrong hands it grants "evergreen" access to the account. No password needed. I have noticed this behaviour with both Gmail and Facebook. These evergreen cookies makes it very easy to check FB and mail using shell scripts without logging in, which is nice, but it seems like it should be a security issue.

>Should logging out invalidate the cookie for future use

Yes. The act of logging out implies that you want the session terminated.

> the "get cookies.txt" [0] extension works to circumvent the age restricted measure

Doesn't that only work if you a) are in the EU and have verified your age or b) outside the EU?

youtube-dl does have “—-username” and “—-password” flags, or will prompt for a password if you just specify “-u”.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#authentication-option...

But as of a couple days ago it wasn’t working for age-restricted videos.

That is for HTTP auth.

Curious... Do we have any bugmenot like cookies sharing site?

this is a great idea.. i wonder how rapidly youtube cracks down on IPs being used across 1 cookie in a short period of time

Hmm, it's such a shame that we have a single point of failure for so much of internet culture, not to mention people's actual creative lives.

This is one of the reasons I started using youtube-dl. I wanted to create an independent backup of all my favorite creators and contributors in the event that they have to leave or delete their channels.

This content should belong to everyone. I wish I could trust that all my favorite videos will be there forever, but this is just not the case. Removing the comments on music videos already hurt a lot.

You can't produce value around content without artificial scarcity. In this case, Google/YT centralizes distribution and access, so that in order to consume content you must pay a fee (watch ads, provide personality data, etc.)

This has both good and bad sides to it. On the good side, it means people can make money as YouTube creators. This subsidizes the enormous volume of content that makes the creators no money.

On the bad side, you have a SPOF, and those failure modes can be many and varied. In this case its unwarranted age restrictions, but more usually its fraudulent DMCA take downs, various algorithmic shenanigans, and of course censorship (which can be good or bad, actually).

But you can't have one property (value producing artificial scarcity) without the other (a central point of failure).

The real question is: can content creators host their own content such that they can derive value from it? Will users consume that content, and pay for it, somehow? Theoretically it's possible, but the technical barriers are quite high. YT has capitalized on massive economies of scale to reduce the technical barriers to hosting and monetizing content to zero. This same pattern is repeated again and again: connect computer to the internet, then specialize that computer's software to do one thing really well, attract users/makers, use your control of the platform to extract value from users (inject ads, membership fees, data brokers, etc), profit. The hope is that the value to society outweighs the cost, and honestly I think that's actually the case! I just hope more people get clear-eyed about the trade-offs for-profit internet services make to be viable.

> You can't produce value around content without artificial scarcity.

Patronage or crowdfunding can work even if the content is released publically.

Sorry I have the opposite perspectives as you:

I don’t want to visit independent creators’ websites to find their content - all with different UIs, etc. YouTube gives me a clean, centralized way to access content where I know I will be able to stream 4K and view content offline. This feels massively more convenient to me than having to maintain a catalog of offline videos…

While I think we all agree that centralization of control isn’t great, the consumer gets tremendous value from centralization and this value doesn’t get talked about enough.

Finally your assertion of “this content should belong to everyone” is idealistic. Who is going to pay to store and stream this content? What about the copyright of the actual content creators?

I think you make a good point that centralization provides a lot of value today. However, if the protocols that youtube used where open-source then it would be easier to create generic user interfaces open to all content makers. Similar to what another poster said about RSS feeds.

I think one of the deeper critiques you and several others have made is that someone still has to pay for storage and streaming. Today I am paying. I bought the additional hard disk to store this on. In addition to my time and effort to collect the files. In the future I would pay some amount each month to stream what I have if it gave me access to everyone else's (essentially staking my video files).

I don't mind paying for a good peer-to-peer service. In fact I feel that I am losing a lot more by staying with a legacy system. Hence backing up the videos I like even though I have no method of distributing them.

> all with different UIs, etc.

Let me introduce you to the concept of RSS and news/feed readers: https://aboutfeeds.com/

> Finally your assertion of “this content should belong to everyone” is idealistic. Who is going to pay to store and stream this content? What about the copyright of the actual content creators?

That’s ironic because YouTube beat Viacom in 2013 because “this content should belong to everyone” not us so you can’t sue YouTube go sue the users.

> Hmm, it's such a shame that we have a single point of failure

You should consider using PeerTube instead, which is federated.

I suppose the next step will be to turn on DRM for age-protected videos, which few will even notice since Widevine is installed everywhere.

Soon after they'll turn it on for all videos, making it nearly impossible for normal people to save any videos and making it illegal to do so in the US.

If there's anything you care about seeing in the future, proactively download it now at the highest quality while it's still possible to do so.

I had this issue recently. The workaround was to use the embedded video link, e.g.:

  youtube-dl https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/VIDEO_ID_HERE

Edit: It seems to have been patched. I can't seem to use this method anymore.

Patched indeed. I used this trick for ages, but it doesn't work for some time now.

IME it depends on the video. I've encountered videos where the embed workaround didn't work, although I was using the youtube domain not the youtube-nocookie domain.

I am not sure if it's the video itself or if we as 'anonymous' users keep getting in and out of regional a/b testing at youtube.

As an anonymous user I keep seeing different behaviours with both 'forcing' embeddded links and also normal mobile links with latest ublock origin. (On Android with FF + ublock)

It seems they've plugged the workaround. I tried it again and it no longer works.

Title seems misleading, it can download it as long as you provide logged in account info. I think the correct title is:

youtube-dl can no longer be used to bypass youtube's age verification checks

> Title seems misleading, it can download it as long as you provide logged in account info

... assuming that you have provided YouTube with a scan of your ID card to prove that you are 18+ ...

"assuming that you have provided YouTube with a scan of your ID card"

I expect that at some point you'll have to prove your identity to use youtube at all, because its in Google's interest to know as much as possible about its users.

Youtube will also probably turn in to a pay-to-view service at some point. They already dominate the video space, and their network effects are enormous, and a huge number of people will pay to continue to get access to that.

It's definitely not in Google's interest to require an action as awkward and engagement-killing as ID verification. They work very hard to not take such drastic steps.

Such requirements are being driven by governments who don't care at all about user convenience, only extending their control over people whilst blaming the private sector for "making" them do it.

Google needs trust to be pay-to-view. These anti-user practices will further erode their trust, not increase it.

...only in some jurisdictions where it's required by law.

It's not required in my country and I get the checks. This has nothing to do with legislation.

I can't confirm without knowing what country you live in. I understand essentially the whole EU requires this, and the US is one example where the checks aren't required.

When you say "get the checks" do you mean YouTube is asking for a copy of your ID or that it's giving you the regular age gate check?

Please say which country you're referring to when you say "in my country" on the internet. It allows others to contextualize and verify otherwise useless information.

Do you get the check that you need any account, or the check that you specifically need an account with ID verification?

I bought a bunch of videos for my son to watch on his YouTube account. We can no longer access them as they are age restricted.

I don't have a problem with Google providing parental controls, if I as the parent am in control. But Google have unilaterally decided that for us. Never buying any media from Google (or any other large tech company again). Reverting to second hand DVDs and putting them on Plex.

Just do a charge back. Oh wait, don't do that unless you want the account and any associated accounts to get permmabanned.

If there's anyone running a YouTube channel getting hit by the age restrictions, consider running a PeerTube: https://joinpeertube.org/

But the age restriction is due to EU regulation. It's only a matter of time until it filters elsewhere. Switching from YouTube isn't going to make a difference.

Google are operating in EU, not so for Peertube. I am able to make Peertube instance and tell EU for to pound sand, it is distributed.

Any source for that? A few people have claimed legislation to be a reason but I'm not aware of any such rules.

Actually I'd be very, very surprised if this was even in the jurisdiction of the EU.

It's literally discussed and linked at the top of this thread.

Umm, no. The start of this thread just a link to joinpeertube and the top comment has no source or link of any kind.

So I gather you don't have any source either then.

Last time I took a look at peertube it was tiny numbers of views and a lot of porn, which is fine but not my platform of choice.

Peertube is a federated platform... running your own instance or using an existing open instance that has some content restrictions would solve the mature content issue.

As far as 'views', in reality the vast majority of Youtube channels also get very few views. You can advertise/promote the Peertube instance just like you would promote a Youtube channel.

Another alternative is to just have Peertube mirror your YouTube channel and link to the instance in every video.

It really depends on the type of content you produce and how your content is 'discovered' but unless you are on the winning side of the Youtube algorithm, peertube isn't that worse.

It's pretty infurating that I've had a Youtube account since 2006 (15 years ago), and now they're asking me whether i'm over 18. A basic calculation on their end could filter the accounts based on age, given the TOS of when they were created (e.g. if the TOS specified that I must be over 13, a 2006 account would mean I'm at least 28, therefore automatically verified).

I literally pay a monthly subscription to Google and they still wanted me to pay $0 once to show that I had a card.

There's such clause in TOS and I think that's how it worked, unlike Twitter which locked out every account when they added the TOS clause for needing to be over 13 when the account was created.

So you didn't create your Google account at age 3? That's impossible!

the 100th toddler theory:

given enough time and sufficient numbers of toddlers chewing on keyboards one of them will out of chance alone create a google account

well I did somehow manage to screw up my dad's linux box like that so anything's possible. (although I suspect it was because I liked to be an asshole and shut his computer off using the power button)

Well, if a 3-year old toddler watches age-restricted videos on his mother's verified account, is that against child protection laws?

> A basic calculation on their end could filter the accounts based on age, given the TOS of when they were created

I assumed it was a legal requirement, and basic intuition and common sense aren't relevant. Much like the immigration form that says "Are you a terrorist".

I've found YouTube increasingly unusable in general over the last few months. It seems to be pushing absolute rubbish at me. There's a gap in the market for a music-only video service.

All the videos start in potato quality for me now. What is going on? Surely they can afford the bandwidth of all services?

If you mean a low resolution, you can use any of several browser extensions (I like Iridium) to automatically "manually" select the resolution right when the page loads for every video, and this will also increase your maximum buffer from 20 seconds (?) to 2 minutes, which is nice if you're on wifi. If you mean on high resolutions the videos still look terrible, that's because the av1 versions of many videos look very bad above 720p on purpose if they're mostly watched in certain countries (can't find the source now, so treat as hearsay) where most viewers are on smartphones. You can mitigate this by going to settings > playback and performance and select "Prefer AV1 for SD."

Thanks for the tips. Will give the AV1 setting a shot. By Iridium do you mean "Iridium for Youtube"? It seems it's not maintained anymore? TBH this functionality was default working on Youtube for me until recently and suddenly stopped. I'm on a 4g based wifi at home (long story) so maybe this is the issue but it 1) only just started happening in the past 2 weeks and 2) really shouldn't be an issue as the speeds are pretty good. Everytime I switch to 1080 or higher even there is no buffering issue at all.

Most frustrating is the YouTube video quality with Chromecast. I can get some 4K to my tiny cellphone, but Chromecast projected to 190" picture on the wall is locked to some unknown SD that is compressed to smithereens making it completely unwatchable.

Are you, by chance, using Brave? I've noticed that recently with Brave as well. Didn't seem to happen in Chrome even when viewing the same videos on the same machine.

Firefox. Dark pattern to get people to use Chrome?

I've also been seeing this in Firefox for the past couple weeks or so.

The video quality will default to "Auto-1080p" or similar but it will be visibly much worse than 1080p quality. Switching to 1080p manually seems to be the only way to get good quality.

I've had the same experience on Safari—in addition to the issue with Find no longer working in Google Docs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351855).

I strongly suspect that at least part of the reason for these is to discourage people from using Google's properties with browsers other than Chrome (whether it was the reason for creating them, or just noted as a benefit for refusing to fix them once they were identified).

I suspect this is the real cause. They did it with search, makes sense they would do it with other areas as well.

They did reduce default quality for corona reasons before, might be the same thing?

It just started happening so I doubt it.

This, and increasing tendency to suggest the same kind of stuff I've already seen, aka feeding the echo chamber. Also quite a bit of stuff that I've actually _have_ seen.

>music-only video service

I'm not sure how that isn't soundcloud/spotify.

Soundcloud and Spotify don't have any video.

Spotify has video for some titles, particularly pop.

That was my reasoning.

Given the glut of music streaming services, it seems unlikely to me someone could make money trying to compete with all of those and YouTube simultaneously.

I honestly believe that there's a market for people who want to watch a series of related music videos, and not have "A Vocal Coach Reacts to Silk Sonic!" pushed onto them.

YouTube itself has this. music.youtube.com

Not sure how it is implemented. It seems to just identify and catalog all of the videos uploaded to normal YouTube where the audio track consists of a single continuous musical track. It's not official music videos.

Thanks for the link. I gave it a try. Even songs which do have videos appear not to have videos on that service, oddly.

Apple TV/Music has music videos too, but it's a different kind of lock in with them.

I use medici.tv for Western classical music.

I remember http://nsfwyoutube.com/ hasn't been working for sometime. Maybe it is related. Is there still a way to anonymously watch restricted videos on youtube? I don't want to login to google to watch videos.

You can use https://yewtu.be/ which is an instance of Invidious, all instances are listed here: https://github.com/iv-org/documentation/blob/f8ac896b91888e7...

Are you sure this change doesn't break Invidious as well? How will Invidious access those videos if it needs to sign in to do it?

Invidious can still get around the nanny gate...for now.

It works for me for maybe 2 out of 3 videos, then about half of those that don't work will work with their backup method (which I guess is maybe a download to their servers and then served from there).

But https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp (fork of youtube-dl) can, so it shouldn't be a problem forever for youtube-dl either?

yt-dlp actually does have the same issue (at least when connecting from the US):

./yt-dlp.sh "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8s72aouNE"

[youtube] rR8s72aouNE: Downloading webpage

[youtube] rR8s72aouNE: Refetching age-gated info webpage

ERROR: Sign in to confirm your age

This video may be inappropriate for some users.

Seems to be video-dependent, tried the one you posted, and it seems to fail, but another one "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY4Gz_Axpew" worked with yt-dlp but not youtube-dl. Guess it's the beginning of the end of watching youtube for me soon.

EDIT: From an EU ip.

from USA ip :

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY4Gz_Axpew [youtube] oY4Gz_Axpew: Downloading webpage [youtube] oY4Gz_Axpew: Refetching age-gated info webpage WARNING: unable to download video info webpage: HTTP Error 404: Not Found Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 174, in _run_module_as_main "__main__", fname, loader, pkg_name) File "/usr/lib/python2.7/runpy.py", line 72, in _run_code exec code in run_globals File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/__main__.py", line 19, in <module> File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/__init__.py", line 475, in main File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/__init__.py", line 465, in _real_main File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 2069, in download File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 808, in extract_info File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 815, in wrapper File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 836, in __extract_info File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 534, in extract File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 1502, in _real_extract File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/compat.py", line 2644, in compat_parse_qs File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/compat.py", line 2614, in _parse_qsl AttributeError: 'bool' object has no attribute 'split'

very interesting

i tried "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8s72aouNE" and your link and both return the same thing -- age restricted -- from south america.

I don't see a mention of yt-dlp in the yt-dl issue tracker, so why is this? Does dlp autocorrect videos to the youtube-nocookie.com embed (as stated https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27354423) ?

Nope. There's two issues being talked about here. If you are in the EU then you have to provide cookies from an age-verified account. Otherwise, the age-gate bypass still works afaik. But the latter is broken in the current youtube-dl release (fixed in yt-dlp).

Also, yt-dl doesn't like yt-dlp to be mentioned on their issue tracker from what I hear.

The whole method that YouTube have used to set this up is worrying to me. In the space that the video is supposed to show there is simply a link to a website that you use to upload your details. It's a phisherman's dream.

So they're phisherman's phriends?

Although I'm not sure if this problem is fixed there, you should switch to yt-dlp for more active maintainance and added features/fixes: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

I wasn't aware of this project. Thanks for mentioning it.

I noticed this yesterday and now I am wondering what to do. Especially when more and more videos are getting flagged.

ID is out of the question, credit card seems more plausible. However, i wonder what happens when you give the number. I don't want that it sticks after validation...

The only possibility is to get out of Youtube (and other walled gardens) as soon as possible. Talk to your favorite content producers about Peertube, maybe setup an instance with some friends if you're sure you can handle that for the coming decade and not close down in 6 months time.

Both viewers and producers are heavily dissatisfied with Youtube. Time to move on.

If you allow adult videos without age verification you'll get shut down.

YouTube actually allowing adult videos is not something to diss. The fact that they need age verification is the price for it, the alternative is removing all those videos.

According to google ID cards are deleted after age has been proven, but for some reason they might keep credit card information.

>Important: If you enter your credit card info for age verification, Google will retain this data as necessary to meet legal and regulatory requirements.

Must be because of audit laws relating to processing credit cards.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/10071085?p=age-ve...

Would it be worth it to just get a credit card for the sole purpose of youtube-dl? Maybe put some kind of limit on it, if possible?

Long time ago I remember reading about some service, that allows using single use credit cards. Last year I was looking for it, as many services cannot ne trusted with this information. But I could nothing like it. Maybe I was just dreaming...

Getting a legit card like that could be possible, but I don't think its worth of hassle and possible costs. Some companies practically throw these cards on you, but usually there is a catch.

You might be thinking of Privacy [0].

[0] https://privacy.com/

Capital One has an app called Eno which generates alternate card numbers, but they are still tied to the same account and identity.

My capital one card has virtual cards, and I’ve seen it other places. The only issue is that it’s done by a browser add on that has incredibly high permissions. I handle it by using a separate Firefox profile for the rare occasions I need to use them. I start Firefox with that profile, use it, then go back into my normal profile.

Revolut has disposable virtual cards - https://www.revolut.com/help/making-payments/getting-a-card/...

It's not about the limit, but about the tying of identity. If you enter a CC number, Google will then be able to know exactly who viewed the video. If you use youtube-dl, or even ad-blocking, who knows if that violates some T&C, and they could then shut down all accounts connected to you...

I’d use a temp card from privacy.com or something.

That's naive, they will eventually block those kind of virtual cards just like they block virtual phone numbers. The point is to tie the account to a real identity.

Is there a test video instance that can be used to check this on other systems?

What's the behaviour on Invidious instances presently?

(See: https://redirect.invidious.io/)

Recently, my 15 year old Google account started to nag me for my birthday. If Google was smart, they could have worked out that I'm old enough by now! (The account is older than 13 so definitely not a kid behind it, lol)

But maybe your parents created the account for you, when you were not born yet?

I'm over 13, which is the law that they're concerned with

Ditto. Good thing the only product I use is Chat and can afford to lose it.

True, but are you 18?

I have already added multiple credit cards to the account over the years.

Am I the only one who didn't even know that youtube had age-restricted videos? Somehow I have managed to watch it for years without ever getting prompted for age confirmation!

It depends on what your needs/interests are.

For example I've worked in medical devices, I had to watch a lot of different types of surgical procedures for a specific application.

A lot of surgical content gets tagged as 'adult' even though it has nothing inappropriate as such.

YouTube had to crack down on all kinds of videos because of some laws that congress passed under the pretense of "protecting children". For many content creators it's easier to mark your video as age-restricted than to try and comply with child-friendly guidelines. This is also why so many videos now disable the comments section.

Seeing the incredibly inappropriate content the algorithm (tm) starts suggesting to actual children (I see you like numberblocks, maybe you'll enjoy this fake video of numberblocks killing each other and swearing or this extremely repetitive and epilepsy-inducing flashing video with a couple of numberblocks characters) it’s clear to me they don’t give a crap and just do the bare minimum to tick some legalese checkbox in some compliance form somewhere.

Yeah this definitely a government overreach thing rather than google's fault. Their implementation of the policy is kind of awful I suppose though.

That sounds fine to me; child friendly should mean 'beneficial to children' or at least designed for children and not 'no searching nor nudity [nor extreme violence]'.

Google got a pretty big fine in US due to not properly gating things for minors on YouTube (based on COPPA law). I guess this is now the result.

Fuck American hypocritical Hollywood, puritanical bullshit. Their kids are already watching gay horse sex and sheep bondage by the time they're 10.

I've watched a few channels on retro-gaming where the authors intentionally marked the video as "age-resticted" with the usual disclaimer "the video might contain images that can be disturbing to some people". As in, 8bit gore.

Sadly, the authors need to do this preemptively to avoid getting flagged and potentially taken down.

Needless to say, I was using ytdl to bypass the limit, and I won't be able to watch these videos anymore. I'm not going to log in or give my ID to google.

I had a similar issue few days ago, but managed to do it with downloading my youtube account cookies with Chrome extension

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bga...

This is the command I have used: ./youtube-dl -f best -a test.txt --cookies ./youtube.com.cookies

-a test.txt - i had a bunch of URL in text file.

Just from YouTube it looks like because YouTube-dl works on pornhub and other XXX sites too.

I wonder how this is going to affect NewPipe.

Just checked the video in the issue, it doesn't work in newpipe.

I confirm I've been experiencing "age related" issues in videos this week on newpipe

there are js scripts like https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restrictio... so it seems like this will get fixed eventually

Does not appear to work for the video in the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8s72aouNE

Thanks for linking this. Hopefully it continues to work for a while.

This [0] still works, so it should be doable by youtube-dl too.

0: https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restrictio...

Doesn't seem to work on the video mentioned in the github link.

I noticed this. My android phone is also harassing me for proof of birth date ("to help comply with the law"). I previously just signed out of google, but a couple of weeks ago i signed in for some reason, and can no longer find the way to sign out again. Android is the last google thing I use... looks like it's time to finalise the elimination of google. edit: ah, i think i do a remote sing-out from another device.

Leineage and Grapheneos are good alternatives to stock android.

F-droid and Aurora (oss google play store client) have most of the apps you'd need, and most work well enough w/o google play services.

I have a credit card linked to my account with Google Pay, and yet they want me to provide it again. That makes no sense. They already have the information.

actual HTML title == [[YouTube] Age verification issues - Can't download video. · Issue #28578 · ytdl-org/youtube-dl · GitHub]

actual rendered title == [YouTube] Age verification issues - Can't download video. #28578]

apparently this issue was closed

>> Suika commented Mar 29, 2021:

You are probably connecting from EU, right?

A change to YT was announced ~4 month that there will be extra steps for age verification in EU, iirc.

If you connect from outside of EU, it should work.<<

Gmail recently started prompting saying they need a birthday to “comply with the law”, and that they’ll share it / use it for whatever unless you opt out in account settings.

Under account settings, it only lets you opt out of publishing your birthday to your contacts. There’s no opt out for marketing / sharing it with their business partners, etc.

Scumbags.

This is lame. I download stuff with youtube-dl not because of "piracy" (the quality is shit and things like that are available elsewhere), but because I want to make sure I have a copy of important information. This very morning I changed a part on my car using a YouTube video as a guide. I downloaded this when I found it in case it was removed or my Internet connection was down when I needed it. If you go to the library it's perfectly legal to make photocopies of books for personal use. It's just common sense. But these monopolies naturally don't want us to have this right and want to make is think we're evil if we make our own copy of the information.

I feel like these platforms like YouTube are an addiction. We know they have problems but we just can't shake them. I felt this way about Windows and Microsoft on general 15 years ago. I went cold turkey and stopped using those products back then and I've been very happy ever since. But things have become too easy and I've become complacent. I think it may be time for me to shake another addiction.

I got the pop-up a week back or so. I uploaded a photo of my drivers license with everything redacted except my name and date of birth and clearly watermarked it with the purpose and current date.

It was accepted automatically within a few seconds. Can't really complain.

I don't understand what they expect, I will simply NEVER provide them with this data.

They expect you to comply, or be left out.

Say there were a command-line or .rc option to confirm you're over age X. How much effort would it be to auto-generate or draw-from a pool of throwaway accounts that over age X?

From the thread, this appears to only apply to EU egress IP addressess, and you can pass in the session cookie of an account which has completed age verification.

>From the thread, this appears to only apply to EU egress IP addressess

I tried with several north american VPN nodes and it's blocked as well.

I live in Canada and definitely have the same issue.

This is Google making the first steps to block alternate/privacy centric interfaces such as NewPipe/invidious/youtube-dl. Push back now or never.

The irony of the age verification is that almost all age restricted videos on youtube are things I want to watch when logged out of my account.

This problem may be surmountable, but eventually it seems likely that youtube will be closed to hackers and freeloaders. It's sad in the general sense -- but of course Google is free to modify their services however they like. Hosting all that video is not free and currently they support it via advertising.

This means that any consumer of Youtube should expect that eventually Youtube may stop working for them -- and perhaps all the content they love on Youtube will eventually become unavailable.

Anytime anyone leans on the old "think of the children" meme, it should immediately raise suspicions about intent.

This is what we get for the proliferation of saucy “bikini haul” videos!

Age-restricted videos for adults or age-restricted videos for kids?

I found a way to download one through some proxy thing

can't remember which

"In EU". Why is this not part of the submission?

Use alternate youtube front-ends like Invidious

It seems like YouTube deprecated /v/{video id} direct URL to all videos. All nice hacks slowly gone from Google...

Aren't there better websites if you're into age restricted videos?

An age restricted video could be be one that features mild gore and isn't rated for children, or for example music that originates from an adult rated show... Not everything age restricted is porn.

There are videos that are age restricted because of swearing. Porn isn't the issue here (especially since it's not allowed on YouTube even with age restrictions).

News content, citizen journalist videos

Another great Internet snafu brought to you by over reaching EU technocrats.

By market forces alone, Chinese censors will eventually gain control of YT and tell people of the world they what they can and cannot post. It's already happened to Hollywood movies.

The title should be updated to indicate that this change only affects EU-based IP addresses:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/28578#issuecom...

It's definitely affecting at least some US users some of the time.

As remitamine explained[1]:

> it's not about the issue not related to the US, it's that youtube won't allow access to the video when you're accessing a non-embedable age-restricted video from the EU with passing the new age verification requirement, youtube-dl can't simply bypass this condition.

>> I just connected to a US server using VPN, and this is the report i got:

> you didn't pass the cookies.

and fosam amplified[2]:

> If you connect from the EU and have not verified, there is no way without the VPN. If you have already verified your account you can just pass the cookies and download.

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/28578#issuecom...

[2] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/28578#issuecom...

It affects me from US and NZ ip addresses.

It can't download the video in the same sense that I can't expect to point YouTube-dl at a Netflix URL and have it download that. You need to login.

First step towards automatically stop using youtube. It their choice really.

Yes, I should have added and verified your age. But none of that is a youtube-dl matter, there is no magic video download link hidden in the page source.

Of course this is a youtube-dl matter. It could easily circumvent this by pretending to embed the video.

No I've also had age restricted embedded links throw an error with something like "this video cannot be played here" and linking to non embedded player link.

>It could easily circumvent this by pretending to embed the video.

It doesn't work.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27354599

You believe an appreciable number of people will stop using Youtube over this?

My issue is there is no alternative. I dont want to stop watching or hurt particular creators (not that one person would make much difference, but I enjoy their content) and Youtube is the only option. Even supporting them on Patreon the videos they share are still hosted on youtube... what am I to do about that? For a few (LTT for example has Floatplane) there are alternatives, but there is no app for it to allow me to cast to the TV... so either way I am screwed. The world desperately needs a YouTube competitor. I would be quite happy with a service like Floatplane where I can pick which creators to support, so long as there is a sort of 'preview tier' to help discover new creators which is add based and maybe even time limited.

people wont complain imo, but a few will be lazy enough to not send their ID or put their card info

If they have to give over their CC number (which some people are reporting) maybe a significant numner will stop watching age restricted videos.

I don't know how many, but I certainly will.

I would be willing to bet far less than 1%

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