I recently did a complete rewrite of our browser driver codebase by deeply analyzing playwright, puppeteer, selenium, and the chromium source code, relying heavily on auto generated diagrams to decide which parts to read myself / dive deeper on. Yes they occasionally leave things out if the underlying codebase hides the complexity or has no docs, but they're great for thoroughly documented mature codebases.
> a defined translation from one abstraction layer to another
A solution like the aforementioned cannot reliably present a view with a raised level of abstraction, as that necessitates either making unsound assumptions, or being provided with hints (which can be wrong or expire). Just like with code (because they are code).
And so if this is indeed just a rote visualization like that, sticking to the same level of abstraction (thereby not encountering this issue), then they stipulate it is "almost certainly useless, just like they usually are".
I personally find this agreeable, but then I rarely find diagrams particularly illuminating in general, so...
Link to Seal
These particular yt-dlp diagrams were an experiment in getting meaningful sequence diagrams from a code repo using Claude. If you open the black tab on the left, you can see the source of the diagrams. Claude was able to generate most of this, albeit with a good amount of back-and-forth to get the details right, plus some manual tweaking in the end.
Do I need to be logged in with a Google account for it to work?
I always, since decades I want to say, ran into troubles whenever I download Youtube vids (no matter which tool I use, yt-dlp or other). It works, then doesn't anymore.
Are you simply, reliably, downloading Youtube vids? How? From a VM? From a container? From your main machine while being logged on?
P.S: congrats to the guys at Google, you sure made that hard
Of course. I always try with the latest versions of yt-dlp.
> For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.
Yeah at some point in the past I had it mostly working. But basically now, what should I do? Maybe host a VM with an actual browser (not headless: just the real thing) and log into a Google account and then what, use yt-dlp from the same IP?
Basically I don't get it: no clue what needs to be done for YouTube downloads to work reliably (and I'm not talking 18+ stuff: actually I had zero idea there were even vids considered 18+ on YouTube).
What I've been doing is sshing to my main pc running fedora that has a legit firefox with my google/youtube cookies, have a distrobox with archlinux on it, entering that machine and then running yt-dlp there. Since distrobox has mounts your host /home dir into the guest /home it can easily source cookies from your host pc.
The reason for Archlinux is that it seams to do a much better job than Fedora at keeping yt-dlp updated and with the necessary dependencies to successfully download videos. So this synergy between your main machine (where google cant't tell you are "illegitimate") + a guest machine with the "clandestine" software (in google's view lol) all stitched together by distrobox works well.
yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx --cookies-from-browser <your_browser_here>
Works 100% of time for me. Obviously I do not download 10k videos daily so I may just jump over time when it is broken...