Under new management

[dirkf]

Thanks to @rg3 who created this program the project has a new maintainer.

Also, many thanks to @dstftw and @remitamine for holding the fort over the last several years.

I hope that we'll be able to make a new release soon and subsequently keep the program more up-to-date than has been the case for the last few months.

The project has a fork https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp that offers a lot of extra functions but demands an up-to-date Python version. This project will continue to target Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, at least until no-one complains about 2.6 compatibility.

PRs are very welcome, although there is a significant back-log to be handled. Back-ports of yt-dlp features are also welcome.

Finally, I'd encourage anyone else who is interested in sharing maintenance duties to establish a track record and make themselves known. We want to keep this popular project alive with a community of future maintainers.

[Twangist]

Supporting defunct versions of Python seems like a great way to handicap the project and a total waste of time.

[boehs]

This repository should just become yt-dlp tbh

[VixieTSQ]

this is ridiculous. Python 2 is dead

[pukkandan]

This repository should just become yt-dlp tbh

By now, yt-dlp has accumulated various incompatibilities with youtube-dl and it is no longer a drop-in replacement for many users. So youtube-dl can't just "become yt-dlp". Since I do not intend to revert these changes, it is best that both projects co-exist.

If you like to use yt-dlp, use it. And if you prefer youtube-dl, use this. It is a waste of everyone's time to post issues/comments asking for either project to "become" the other

[ligix]

fyi python 2 reached EOL 2 years ago, before windows 7 did.

https://www.python.org/doc/sunset-python-2/

[boehs]

This repository should just become yt-dlp tbh

By now, yt-dlp has accumulated various incompatibilities with youtube-dl and it is no longer a drop-in replacement for many users. So youtube-dl can't just "become yt-dlp". Since I do not intend to revert these changes, it is best that both projects co-exist.

If you like to use yt-dlp, use it. And if you prefer youtube-dl, use this. It is a waste of everyone's time to post issues/comments asking for either project to "become" the other

fair enough! Consider mentioning dlp in the readme though?

[dirkf]

@Twangist and supporters, please direct your Python 3.7+ enthusiasm to the yt-dlp project, as @pukkandan says.

No-one would bother maintaining two versions of a program if there wasn't a good reason. There are still applications where older Python versions have to be supported: among the known cases are those where that's all the platform offers, and where yt-dl is being embedded in a larger chunk of Python 2 code that no-one is going to port.

This project has already established a compatibility library that largely allows you to code for Python 3 while remaining compatible with Python 2, by using the library's compat_xxx types and avoiding novel syntax elements (nonlocal, yield from, etc), for which there are known work-arounds. With this infrastructure, and provided that yt-dl and yt-dlp continue to support the same extractor API and library functions we can avoid wasted effort on either side.

The project Readme should definitely be updated, in due course, as @boehs suggests.