Could not acquire the player response (age-restricted videos)

[DzenanJupic]

Edit

The issue was partially fixed. For now only age-restricted or otherwise unavailable videos should fail to download.
If you encounter this problem with a 'normal' video, please let us know about it.

Old issue:

Apparently, YouTube keeps removing the /get_video_info endpoint. pytube (#1060) has the same issue.

We have logs and backtraces of two failed actions:

• 1054701372
• 1051037822

I guess it gets more and more clear, that we have to find a way to make the youtube-api-v1 work since /get_video_info will probably not be around for much longer.

Could anyone recommend a tool for JS reverse engineering? This would help me to find out how youtube.com handles the video download.

[aviallon]

From what I know, youtube uses blob URLs.
You could try to see how https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl do it, because it works flawlessly.

[DzenanJupic]

@aviallon welcome to rustube. Your tip was great! I usually avoid youtube-dl, since the code base is just massive and messy. They actually just make one step less than we do, and this step broke.

For now, I fixed downloads of normal videos. Age-restricted videos don't work yet.
I won't have time to look into that right now and will work on that later.

Working quick fix: v0.3.5

[DzenanJupic]

If you mean age-restricted videos, then VXDsM-1McE0 and irauhITDrsE are two examples from our tests.
For other examples of private, ... videos, you can always checkout (or expand) tests/common.rs.

[DzenanJupic]

@89z Thank you, that looks really promising!

One question regarding the Bearer token: When I understood the code correctly the auth token is acquired in func (o OAuth) Exchange() (*Exchange, error), using the hardcoded clientID and the hardcoded clientSecret.

Then, in oauth_test.go it says Sign in to your Google Account. Is this login request unrelated, or would the OAuth solution require the user to log in to his account?

[DzenanJupic]

We actually had a workaround for age-restricted videos using the /get_video_info endpoint. (you can have a look at past commits and daily actions)

Unfortunately, YouTube is slowly but steadily drifting away from this endpoint and towards API v1. In a best-case scenario, we would find another way of accessing age-restricted videos without requiring the user to log in. Especially, since this adds a whole new layer of complexity.

Based on your answer I guess the answer to my previous question is: Yes, the user has to log in to download age-restricted videos using the OAuth solution.

[DzenanJupic]

I did not state, that it's possible right now. That's the reason this issue exists since a recent API-change four days ago broke our code.
But before that, we were able to download i.e. irauhITDrsE , which you stated to be level 3. (this action has a log to prove it)

Edit: I should add that this is not the first time this part of the code broke, so I still have hope there's a workaround.

[DzenanJupic]

Regarding authentication, I think OAuth is the best option because you just have to log in one time, then you can save the access_token locally for reuse.

That actually sounds better than I expected, I will definitely try to implement it.