Only recently discovered yt-dlp, despite its popularity. However I was wondering if I were to use this, should it be used behind a VPN when downloading videos off public websites?
Not needed (unless the target site is blocked in your country); as the videos themselves are publicly viewable. yt-dlp behaves like a typical viewer to these sites.
Just so you have a heads up:
If you use yt-dlp like a regular user, you shouldn’t have a problem. If you use it to download like a thousand videos at once then YouTube may block you out or rate limit you or something.
If that happens, or that’s your use case, then you may need to use a VPN
Personally I run everything behind a VPN. Browsing the web without one kinda feels like a bad idea, like why should I expose my approximate home location to every website I go to and every server I connect to? Why should I let my ISP see which websites I’m visiting? And why should I trust my government to have access to all of that data?
I don’t know. A VPN simply replaces your IP with one from their network, but you still have one IP that identifies you, right? So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the VPN? I mean if Google just stores the IPs that were used to log into accounts they can simply look up who downloaded their videos, right?
Well, you can change your IP as often as you want. You can go to a completely different ISP in a different country in a matter of seconds.
So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of the VPN?
Yeah, I didn’t assume anyone in this community would log in to YouTube, but maybe I’m wrong
Unless you actively pay attention it’s very easy to be logged into some Google service without noticing. At least I wouldn’t be surprised if chrome background services kept me logged into my work Google Mail account and kept tracking my IP.
The biggest question is how meaningful the IP alone is. I don’t know if VPNs assign people individual IP-adresses or if there’s some kind of NAT in use where people share an IP with translated ports. If the information is “there’s this individual VPN-user and we need to connect them to a name” then you shouldn’t use (the same) VPN for everything, but if it’s just “there’s another request from the same VPN” then it’s fine.
Youtube nowadays has started requiring sign in to view the content. However the only affected IPs are of Invidious instances.
the only affected IPs are of Invidious instances
That’s not true, I just got a “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” message on the official fucking YouTube website using Firefox behind Mullvad VPN. It’s also very common to see this on Piped instances. The invidious team seems to have developed a fix though: https://github.com/iv-org/youtube-trusted-session-generator
You won’t get copyright letters, but YouTube might block you, so make sure your IP address isn’t permanently attached to you.
