https://yt-dl.org/ broken by a German court

[DavidGriffith]

Checklist

• I'm reporting a broken site support
• I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
• I've checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
• I've checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

Verbose log

Logs not relevant

Description

When attempting to download youtube-dl as described in README.md or README.txt, you get a "403 forbidden" error. Visiting that website gives this message:

---

Access denied

Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.

---

Zugriff gesperrt

Aufgrund eines Urteils des Landgerichts Hamburg ist der Zugriff auf diese Website gesperrt

[dirkf]

This is true though not what "broken site support" was intended to mean.

There's no point downloading that version anyway: the court is actually doing you a favour. When a new release is made the DNS will have been reset to avoid this block.

Meanwhile, refer to #30839 for the nightly build that fixes many known issues.

[Keisial]

I'm sorry, as you may not like to hear this, but if "There's no point downloading that version", which happens to be the latest release, that's a strong indicator that there should have been a new release since. It's up to you as maintainers, though. While the list of known issues now fixed seem worthy, there may be good reasons not to have cut a release yet.

Anyway, I didn't want my main point to be whether there should be a release or not. I wanted to ask: How are we expected to know the latest version?
I used to have:

  version="$(wget -q -O - https://yt-dl.org/ | sed -n '/Latest/{ s!.*(v\(....\...\...\)).*!\1!p }')"

(which I admit perhaps was not the proper way before, either), but now that obviously fails with a 403 error.

Thank you very much for this software. It's dismaying that it is now having this kind of issues again.

[fmonts]

If you really want that version you find the binaries on the github releases page: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/latest

[dirkf]

Even if a version was released with all site extractors passing their tests, the turnover of site issues would invalidate the release after a few days. For now, the nightly release is the best bet. Should some site work with 2021.12.07 and not with the latest nightly build, please open a new issue.

A lot of data about available versions is returned as JSON from https://api.github.com/repos/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/latest. For convenience, the nightly builds are released in a different repo and the internal update check uses the corresponding JSON URL (s/youtube-dl/ytdl-nightly/). These version data sets are generated by GH and are disjoint.

[fmonts]

Also you can just add to cron something like

6 4 * * * root /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl -U

and the nightly build will update itself

[karstengit]

The last version can be build with

git clone https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl.git youtube-dl
cd youtube-dl
make youtube-dl

But this does not solve the problem that a player must be downloaded from https://yt-dl.org/

Example:

youtube-dl -x --audio-format best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCHrO83XEho
[youtube] dCHrO83XEho: Downloading webpage
[youtube] dCHrO83XEho: Downloading API JSON
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

Is it possible to add the needed player here at github?
So that the player is integrated in the youtube-dl ?

[dirkf]

#32495 (comment)

[karstengit]

the court is actually doing you a favour.

Censoring as "favour" is a nice idea. ;-)

A traceroute shows

 5  ipv4.de-cix.fra.de.as25560.rh-tec.de (80.81.193.106)  19.162 ms  18.317 ms  19.692 ms
 6  * * *
 7  62.216.183.46 (62.216.183.46)  14.936 ms  13.716 ms  14.057 ms
 8  aries.uberspace.de (95.143.172.170)  14.053 ms !X  13.979 ms !X  14.604 ms !X

The IP is blocked by this company:
rh-tec Business GmbH
(DCH) Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit
https://www.ip2location.com/demo/95.143.172.170

Professional censoring in GERMANY!
https://www.ip2location.com/as25560
https://rh-tec.de/services/netzwerk/rhprotect-vutm/

[PSLLSP]

I am in Central Europe (not in Germany) and the site is blocked in our country:

This is the first time I see this kind of censorship...

---

Description/README on GitHub has instructions to use that site, but it doesn't work (because the site is blocked):

user@ubuntu:~/tmp$ curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o youtube-dl
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   384  100   384    0     0   4042      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  4042

user@ubuntu:~/tmp$ ll youtube-dl; file youtube-dl 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 user user 384 Jan  9 20:15 youtube-dl
youtube-dl: HTML document, ASCII text

user@ubuntu:~/tmp$ html2text youtube-dl 
****** Access denied ******
Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is
blocked.
===============================================================================
****** Zugriff gesperrt ******
Aufgrund eines Urteils des Landgerichts Hamburg ist der Zugriff auf diese
Website gesperrt.

---

youtube-dl is in Ubuntu repository but it is not the latest version. I tried to download a video from YT but it doesn't work, it recommends to download the latest version. I removed youtube-dl with apt and installed it from pip repository (pip3 install youtube-dl) but that version cannot download unlisted video too and recommends to update to the latest version and is why I have found that the site is blocked...

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youtube-dl asks to report bugs to website that was blocked:

user@ubuntu:~/tmp$ youtube-dl --version
2021.12.17

user@ubuntu:~/tmp$ youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfEdhlBuxCU"
[youtube] yfEdhlBuxCU: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to extract uploader id; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

[dirkf]

Until the domain points to a valid domain, a version of the README that doesn't mention yt-dl.org is provided in the PR above.

[rugk]

BTW it properly responds with:

451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

I like that! 😄