yt-dlp

Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 5 years (2022–2026), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with yt-dlp, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 6 complaints

Signup prompt appears only after editing YAML, blocking the preview of their own graph2026-07-12
YouTube playback is horribly slow, and downloads fail with a message to disable ad block2025-11-12
Unquoted URLs fail on macOS and error message doesn't show how to use cookie flag2025-05-05
Alternative sites are sometimes out of date, so downloads fail2024-05-13
Python startup latency makes each video download unbearably slow2022-04-18
Waiting for the tool to start up before downloading pages is annoying and latency is unbearable2022-04-18