Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/net/yt-dlp

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

"John D. Baker" <jdbaker%consolidated.net@localhost> writes:

> Some video sites (such as YouTube) offer the video and audio portions
> of a media stream separately in multiple formats and sometimes the
> 'yt-dlp' default to choose the "best quality" of each don't fit into a
> single target file.
>
> In such case, 'ffmpeg' is needed to assemble the separate audio and video
> streams into a single Matroska (.mkv) file.  Back when I could access
> YouTube, I simply made a symlink in /usr/local/bin to point "ffmpeg" at
> whatever the latest versioned binary already installed on my system was.

My take is that if there's a non-trivial number of people that need
that (and a non-trivial number that don't, which has been said clearly),
it should be an option, and given that many do not need it, default off.
You having to install and symlink is exactly the kind of thing pkgsrc is
supposed to take care of.

> Can't speak the to the javascript engine recommendations, but I suspect
> that since YouTube is now private, it's needed for account authentication
> as well as mimicking the player function for yt-dlp to siphon off the
> audio/video streams.

I hear from a reliable source that users that are not logged in can
download publically-viewable videos.  But whatever; if a non-trivial
number of people need something, for whatever reason, it makes sense to
have an option, tending to default off unless we believe that
essentially all users want it, relative to the pain of having it for
those that don't need it.