option --use-tor

[ilf]

Thanks for implementing SOCKS proxy support #402!
How about adding an option --use-tor as shortcut for --proxy "socks4a://127.0.0.1:9050/"?
dirmngr(8) of GnuPG also has this.

[vitorgalvao]

It’s true that not having --use-tor will not prevent people from using youtube-dl in this manner. However, having the option may be an encouragement and validation that this is OK to do, when in fact it is not.

Many people will (rightfully) frown at putting such a strain (many times hundreds or gigabytes of data for a single video) on the tor network.

[dstftw]

This shortcut does not make much sense since socks port is configurable and may be arbitrary. Moreover tor itself may not be installed.

[ilf]

@vitorgalvao: Why do you think it's not okay to watch/download YouTube via Tor? All the Tor developers I know don't only think that's perfectly okay, they even do it themselves and encourage others to do so. The times of Tor being slow and "maxed out" are long gone. See https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.html

@dstftw: It does make sense: It is an encouragement to use Tor easily. If you have not changed the defaults. If you changed our SOCKS-port in the Tor-config, you can still set the proxy-details manually with youtube-dl. But adding an easy flag might make more people use it. That's why (and how) other software like GnuPG and mpop/msmtp are doing it.