EDIT: For those who are too lazy to click the link, this is what it says
Hello,
Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.
Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.
If you are interested to install Invidious at home, we remind you that we have a guide for that here: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/..
This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.
I have updated the public instance list in order to reflect on the working public instances: https://instances.invidious.io. Please don’t abuse them since the number is really low.
At what point/what would it take for yt-dlp to be shut down?
yt-dl was “shut down” at one point. That led to vastly more interest and the birth of yt-dlp. I think they learned their lesson.
yt-dlp now suffers from the same issue that Invidious does: uncircumventable rate-limiting based on IP address.
Same for yt-dlp, currently: It works from your residential IP address, but not a datacenter IP address like a VPN.
If you get Sign in to confirm that you’re not a bot or This helps protect our community. in yt-dlp, do not actually try to sign in, because that will get your account banned (see yt-dlp/yt-dlp#10128).
So once a solution is found for Invidious, yt-dlp will be able use it too, and vice versa.
Never. Even if yt blocks the program from downloading from its site, it can still pull from like 10,000 other sites. I doubt google could do anything to actually stop the software from being distributed. We all know how that goes.
It is a very useful piece of software. I’ve never used it to actually download a youtube video.