On Thu 2022-03-17 11:17:13 -0400, Yoni Rabkin wrote: > I realized that I don't know a lot about ytdl/youtube-dl and went to > have a look. As a result, I came across a potential show-stopper for > inclusion in Emms in any form. > > I was concerned when I saw that ytdl/youtube-dl has a javascript > interpreter built-in.
If there were no mpv binding for emms, a proposal to add it would be rejected based on the same ground, because mpv by default supports playing all the urls supported by ytdl, through ytdl. So when emms plays a youtube video through mpv, it calls mpv, which calls youtube-dl / yt-dlp, which may execute js when streaming the video, free or nonfree. By contrast, I highly doubt the emms-info-ytdl would actually indirectly execute any js. It calls youtube-dl -j (getting the json, as opposed to streaming), which probably only retrieve the metadata using a json parser and stops there without executing any js code, something like the command in [1], which youtube-dl youtube extrator runs some equivalent python code to get video formats, among other things. [1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emms-help/2022-03/msg00025.html So in conclusion, emms-info-ytdl is probably harmless, and definitely less harmful than the emms mpv binding, if judged by the js execution. > > I found the following thread that reports that ytdl/youtube-dl downloads > and runs non-free javascript automatically as part of accessing the > sites it supports: > https://trisquel.info/en/forum/do-youtube-dlhtml5-video-everywhere-run-nonfree-js > > The thread is from back in 2017. Is this still the case? If so, is there > a libre version of ytdl? Best, Yuchen -- PGP Key: 47F9 D050 1E11 8879 9040 4941 2126 7E93 EF86 DFD0 <https://ypei.org/assets/ypei-pubkey.txt>
