yt-dlp was very recently broken for ~2 days for any Youtube videos that required cookies: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/16212

Here is what actually fixed it: https://github.com/yt-dlp/ejs/pull/53/changes

yt-dlp is relatively stable, but still occasionally breaks for long periods. I get the sense YouTube is becoming increasingly adversarial to yt-dlp as well.

I don't know the details, but it doesn't seem like yt-dlp is running the entire YouTube JS+DOM environment. Something like a real headless browser seems like it would break less often, but be much heavier weight. And Youtube might have all sorts of other mitigations against this approach.

> const url = (${generate(expression)})("https://youtube.com/watch?v=yt-dlp-wins", "s", sig);

I'm pretty sure yt-dlp is filled with these kinds of gold.

> yt-dlp is running the entire YouTube JS+DOM environment

IIRC they maintain a minimal execution environment that is able to run just the JS needed to pass a few checks but this breaks too often enough that they're planning to make Node.js or another JS interpreter a hard requirement (possibly already happened).

> I get the sense YouTube is becoming increasingly adversarial to yt-dlp as well.

I rarely use yt-dlp anymore.

Before I just updated. Now when I do that, it usually becomes complex and full of questions.

I think having a hook to an LLM endpoint to enable yt-dlp to attempt to self resolve until an official fix is available would be a useful enhancement.