this program does not need a new replacement - it would be very
difficult to argue that it provides any important functionality,
which would be missing from parabola otherwise

but for the sake of argument, lets assume that this is important
functionality to preserve - there are two web browsers in the
parabola repos which can search for and playback videos from
youtube; and there are multiple programs in the repos, such as
minitube and totem, which can do the same without using a web
browser - AFAIK, the only difference is that minitube and totem
use the proper API mechanism, in accordance with the TOS of the
host

I do agree with freemor, it’s too soon to look at a replacement, and it seems to be unnecessary at the moment.

Nevertheless, I’d like to respond to bill-auger last post about the importance of this software. I speak only for myself, but other Parabola users might be in the same situation.

I use a ‘fully-free’, or RYF-approved, computer with Libreboot and Parabola. However, the hardware is getting old (2008), especially the GPU, which was pretty bad at the time already. Hence, any graphic task, including watching videos, is demanding for the CPU, even though I use mainly CLI programs and rely on GUIs only when necessary. youtube-dl is a fantastic piece of software that allows to watch videos from different platforms (not only YouTube) without running non-free JavaScript and without requiring too much resources from the system. I personally use it with mpv to stream videos from the terminal, as it is the most efficient way to watch videos on such old hardware (even going through Invidious with Iceweasel is too much sometimes). It can also be piped through different programs and follows the KISS philosophy. I’m not aware of any other similar programs for that matter.

My point is, in the scenario where replacing youtube-dl in the repos becomes necessary (I hope it won’t come to that), the functionality and conviviality of youtube-dl aren’t that trivial, and proper discussions would have to take place.

@rfb I agree with you about the versitility of Youtube-dl. Living in the CLI myself it does come in handy. It should be noted tho that for a large precentage of sites it just locates the .m3u8 and hands it off to ffmpeg. If you:

  ps aufx | grep ffmpeg
<pre> 

While it is running you'll seee something like:

<pre>
ffmpeg -y -headers User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/74.0.3704.2 Safari/537.36? Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7? Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8? Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate? Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5? X-Forwarded-For: 6.57.76.1?  -i <URL of .m38u> -c copy -f mp4 file:<Output File Name>
</pre>

Persons that rely on youtube-dl and are worried it may disappear may wish to study the revelant ffmpeg commands for sites they frequent so that they can just write a function/alias/script that calls ffmpeg directly thus removing much of the "magic" of youtube-dl and reliance upon it.