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?

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

  • Noxious@fedia.io
    51·
    2 months ago

    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

    • warlaan@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      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.

      • Noxious@fedia.io
        2·
        2 months ago

        The IP address is shared between all people who connect to the same VPN server.