I have been using freetube for a while now which is also facing this issue so it looks like a tug of war between the clients and YouTube which is getting others in the crossfire as well. But for some reason, when I add haruna as external player in freetube and launch a video it always works. Guessing other video players like vlc might also work which you can use with freetube and maybe other privacy focused clients.
I thought about making an *arr application for automating the downloading of your subscribed youtube channels and in quality you want. I want to call it yarrtube. Idk if anyone would be interested or not so only been a pipe dream.
The real problem is that it's a pain sometimes and the fact they suggest to restart every hour is even worse. Recently, I had a problem where it started to play some videos and then stopped the playback and from there it went in a reloading loop till you get something like
If you click Cancel and then simply search for the same video you can watch it without signing in. Total horseshit but still a good ‘fuck you’ move against YouTube.
I'm having the same issue on Freetube, it pops up and says it can't play the video because Youtube requires being signed in. Sometimes if I retry a couple of time it'll play, but usually keeps getting the same error. Freetube is great though, maybe they'll come up with a solution soon.
Unfortunately, neither fixes this. Grayjay seems to work, but its inconsistent in my experience, often repeatedly returning to the beginning of the video part-way through.
Grayjay is useless on Linux. Every video suddenly stops halfway and you need to reload. Same for every video. Talking about music videos, 5-6 min long.
As someone without a YT account, I have seen this with regards to age verification (on rather random videos, actually), but not with "you might be a bot" reason.
Turns out reCAPTCHAs aren't actually 'tracking the way you move your mouse' but just trying to match you to one of the billions of statistical models held in Google datacenters that represent the device fingerprints, personalities, locations, and preferences of every Internet user they track.
And when they fail to match you… then they presume you're not a real person.
This is usually because they're using a common VPN service. I've found that connecting to Ireland gets me past this prompt more often than not, but that likely won't last long.
I only speak for myself but the day they require it, bye. I'll miss the creators that I follow but the ones I directly patron through other ways, I'll watch elsewhere. I get that servers cost money but Google isn't losing money, they just want more.
Realistically we didn't need it before YouTube existed and I should be fine without it, but I think it'll be tough, I don't have an aerial for FTA tv anymore, nor a tv in my bedroom and I don't really want to sign up for a subscription streaming service. Plus a decent chunk of my employers use YouTube as end point for the videos I edit so that could be a bit of a hit too. There's always reading I guess, that might be doubly necessary if I end up poorer and can't afford much else.
At least from what I've seen, a lot more videos than in the past seem to have transcripts and captions, including automatically generated captions. I recently moved all my old YT videos (mostly German YoutubePoops from the early 2010s) over to peertube.wtf and they had automatic captions generated without input on my end, in English and German both.
That's no lie, hence supplement, not replace. But the community can only grow, if people start using it more, even just a little bit in addition to YT where it works for them.
Happens to me every now and then, I just switch vpn servers, then it works fine. It's inconsistent, the same server that was suspicious one day is fine the next. I'm guessing it depends on how many youtube videos are being streamed on that particular sever at that time