The developers of the yt-dlp project, which continues the development of the youtube-dl tool for downloading audio and video from online services, have announced that starting with today's release yt-dlp 2025.11.12, the installation of an external JavaScript engine is required for full content downloading from YouTube. The use of a JavaScript engine is explained by the introduction of checks in YouTube, for which the execution of code in JavaScript is necessary.
Support for working with YouTube without JavaScript has been declared deprecated in yt-dlp. It is noted that some videos may continue to be downloaded without using a JavaScript engine, but the number of supported formats is limited and it is expected that the situation will worsen over time. Failures that occur when downloading content from YouTube without using JavaScript will now be regarded by the yt-dlp developers not as errors, but as issues that cannot be fixed. In the future, it is expected that working with YouTube without JavaScript will become impossible.
The supported JavaScript runtimes are Deno (recommended), Node.js, QuickJS, QuickJS-ng, and Bun. Additionally, for the JavaScript runtime to work in yt-dlp, the yt-dlp-ejs component, which is included in the official builds, must be installed. It is sufficient to install the desired JavaScript runtime via the package manager of the distribution and then activate it with the option "—js-runtimes [deno|quickjs|bun|node]". The Deno engine is activated by default, so specifying it for "—js-runtimes" is unnecessary. When manually installing the JavaScript runtime, the path to the engine can be passed in the format "—js-runtimes deno:/path/to/deno".
Among the unrelated changes from YouTube in the new version, new content extractors for the services 1tv.ru/live, classics.nascar.com, mux.com, and ardaudiothek.de are highlighted. The extractor for ntv.ru has been redesigned. The functionality of extractors for twitch, play.tv, googledrive, bunnycdn, kika, nbc, and webarchive has been improved.
Kilde: opennet.ru
