YouTube Censorship Made Me Write a Script

Updated 2024-10-27: Recent blocking attempts have made downloading videos more difficult. I recommend downloading videos outside of the USA. I also recommend looking at alternative clients for watching videos such as Invidious and GrayJay.


YouTube’s been forcing creators to censor their works more and more, and often times after a successful publish of said content. More history and valuable information is being lost every day because a corporation controls the largest source of video content freely available.

At the same time, I’ve been running commands using yt-dlp over and over again for my own purposes, aside from this censorship. The syntax is relatively easy to forget despite being very clearly defined, so I finally made a script to handle it for me.

It’s in Lua because that’s what I prefer to use, and available on GitHub. Because it is based on yt-dlp, it works for any website supported by yt-dlp. Here’s how to use it:

Usage:
  ./video-dl.lua [action] <url>
[action]: What is desired.
  video (default): Highest quality video (maximum 720p).
  backup, clone, copy: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description, highest quality video (maximum 720p).
  music, audio: Highest quality audio only.
  metadata, meta: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description.
<url>: Source. YouTube URL expected, but should work with anything yt-dlp works with.

Information wants to be free. Help it.

Paywalls Suck, We Forgot About Bookmarklets, Information Needs to be Free

I can’t afford most things. 12ft.io proclaims “Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder.” I proclaim copy-pasting links when I just hit one of those pesky paywalls is too much effort. Create a new bookmark with the following, and then you can click it any time you really need to read what’s being blocked:

javascript: window.open("https://12ft.io/" + encodeURI(location.href), "_self")

Just remember: If it has a paywall, it probably isn’t worth reading. I’m not kidding about that.


A quick reminder that using archival services like the Wayback Machine and archive.is can also remove paywalls. (I maintain a list of archival services on Archives & Sources.)